Revolting hillbillies: exploring cracks in the neoliberal order through the prism of Appalachian activism.Tools Griffiths, Eleanor (2025) Revolting hillbillies: exploring cracks in the neoliberal order through the prism of Appalachian activism. PhD thesis, University of Nottingham.
AbstractThis thesis studies Appalachian activism in the Trump era, arguing that it constitutes an instructive and encouraging counterpoint to contemporaneous mainstream, metropolitan anti-Trump dissent. The thesis considers the Appalachian region’s media-assigned role as “Trump Country” before complicating this narrative through detailed case studies of progressive and leftist organising in the region that was both more radical and class conscious than the anti-Trump liberalism that dominated major urban centres elsewhere in the United States. The twenty-first-century forms of Appalachian organising and activism studied here—the teachers’ strike of 2018 and the mobilisations for LGBTQ and women’s rights—are not marginal or anomalous but should be seen as clear continuations of a lineage of radicalism in the region. Drawing on archival material such as unpublished memoirs, oral histories and movement ephemera, I show how the region’s millennial activists are informed and bolstered by a distinctive local cultural and political heritage. This heritage includes strong anti-capitalist elements and an innate affinity with the language of unionism and labour, despite a steep decline in industrial action and organising beginning in the 1990s. It is this class-conscious legacy that differentiates Trump-era Appalachian activists from their liberal metropolitan counterparts, whose commitment to an elite-captured version of identity politics reached its apex in the mid to late 2010s. My case studies show that Appalachian activism managed to organise around facets of identity—queer liberation and feminism—whilst maintaining a leftist structural critique of capitalist social relations and conceiving of class “equiprimordially” as both an identity, in an Appalachian context, and as a relationship to power.
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