UC Riverside

Radical Folk: Finding the Revolutionary in Appalachian Performance is an ethnographic study that utilizes a dance studies lens to think critically about what it means to embody Appalachianness. It investigates the possibility of what Appalachian folk lifeways and artistic practices might offer as an analytic to view how life can exist otherwise under racial capitalism. While it acknowledges regional stereotypes, it dives deeper into how they are operating socio-politically through the body. Utilizing the methods of ethnography and autoethnography, this project honors conversations with Appalachian artists, storytellers, and folk practitioners as it places interview excerpts alongside the theoretical constructions within the academic fields of critical geography, Appalachian studies, queer theory, and critical whiteness studies. While interdisciplinary in nature, I assert that a dance studies approach focuses on the body, therefore shares a different way of looking at the region particularly its rural inhabitants.Beginning with a critical approach to how I define Appalachia, this work critiques traditional geographic practices in the region and instead asks how embodied practices elucidate a remapping of the region. Through this reframing I illuminate a space I call the wiggle room, a viscerally alive space that challenges mainstream beliefs that these rural spaces are dead and decaying. While moving through the wiggle room, I acknowledge racial tensions and complications within the region by analyzing what stereotypes of rural Appalachian embodiedness illuminates and what it hides. Through the practice of flatfooting and homemaking practices, I demonstrate the rich contributions of the Black and Indigenous communities to Appalachian folk practices and, in turn, Appalachian communities. Finally, utilizing the practice of earthworking, I show an embodied connection to queer time through the portal of what I call plant time. I suggest we can see a radical lifeway demonstrated in the embodiedness of earthworking itself. This imagines a radical anti-capitalist epistemology that nourishes the lives of non-human kin and human community alike.