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“What Ain’t Called Melungeons is Called Hillbillies”: Southern Appalachia’s In-Between People
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- updated:
- status: high-priority, to be worked
- Melungeon-specific, populations
publication:
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259-278
abstract:
The essay investigates literary evocations of Appalachia's “in-between” people, the Melungeons. Melungeons are deployed by some as mystery (no one has conclusively traced their origins) and by others as solid fact (they are non-white) to shore up their own contingent sense of white privilege. The construction of Melungeon identity by outsiders has facilitated a process of “re-centring” whereby those poor white people so frequently scorned as “hillbillies” place themselves at the heart of a racialised mountain landscape.
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Other Resources
- The Melungeons of Newman’s Ridge: A Portfolio of Portraits
- Melungeon Voices S1 E2 – Beverly Scarlett
- From Anatolia to Appalachia: A Turkish-American Dialogue
- Origin Traditions of American Racial Isolates: A Case of Something Borrowed
- The Mixed-Blood Racial Strain of Carmel, Ohio, and Magoffin County, Kentucky
- A Peculiar People: The Melungeons