July 5, 2016
(Drawn from Reid & Taylor, “Appalachia as a Global Region” in JAS 8, 1 (2002), 9-32).
Appalachianists should steer clear of any cultural globalism that glosses or conceals ways in which corporate globalization often severely damages the global/local commons and place-based forms of life while aggravating various types of socioeconomic inequality. 10-11
[Considering the problem of increasing inequality, Appalachians have heard about prison jobs as an alleged remedy for both poverty and stripmine reclamation.]
. Global corporate media images of triumphant “diversity” hardly dispel the shadow world of an expanding prison industry (increasingly privatized) with its growing minority populations. 13
. If all Appalachian scholars and writers can do is wave the banner of “difference” on the postmodern frontier of global capitalist media, it will be a meager contribution to emerging global regional dialogues and debates (cf. Appadurai 2000, 18). 13
Too often in reaffirming the vital role of Appalachia in American cultural pluralism we have allowed this to slip into reinforcement of the dominant American political ideology which always blinks (and winks) at the increasingly glaring facts of corporate power. 18
A tendency to celebrate difference while acquiescing in its political insignificance is to capitulate to a corporate media game of “identity politics” and the corporate state’s prevailing form of regionalism. In other words, the professional Appalachianist defense of regional identity sometimes is domesticated by a “safe haven” version of regionalism that fails to distinguish cultural pluralism from pluralist ideological assumptions about power and class in America. 19
Since at least 1973, the American corporate state and its “republocratic party” (Lasswell) has been ambiguously linked to the transnational capitalist project Richard Falk dubbed “globalization from above.” 19
[If Appalachian Studies are to be developed in terms of a Critical Regionalism, as we have defined it, there will have to be…] “rethinking in terms of global regional studies, global regional publics, an expanded or more varied sense of the commons, and a keener awareness that while ecological citizenship begins at home it must also reach into the politics of global civil society (cf. Reid and Taylor 2000; Pasha and Blaney 1998).” 23
