Afro-Appalachians

Abstract

Chapter 2 focuses on race, examining the few films that make the black experience integral to the stories told, from early slavery through emancipation and on to African American labor forces and the resistance they faced in the early twentieth century. There are very few scholarly texts on depictions of African Americans in films set in Appalachia because the subjects of race relations and Southern Appalachia have only occasionally intersected to any significant degree in popular culture, literature, or film. While scholars have begun to correct this absence, Hollywood’s treatment of the Black experience in Appalachia has been only intermittent, with the vast majority of films set in the region full reflections of the “black invisibility” factor that evoked so much commentary earlier on. The presumed whiteness of highland society is so pervasive that only four feature films—The Journey of August King (1995), Sommersby (1993), Matewan (1987), and Wild River (1960) —even acknowledge race or a Black presence as integral to any part of the region or significant to its history. These films, two set in the nineteenth century and two in the twentieth century, make race relations substantive components of stories set within the region.