Pure America

Оглавление

Elizabeth Catte. Pure America

Отрывок из книги

Praise for Elizabeth Catte’s

What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia:

.....

The area’s surrounding mountains, both the ones I see during my commute and the ones that greet me as more distant landscapes when I arrive back home, were prized by Virginia’s earliest psychiatrists, who believed natural beauty could soothe troubled minds. But twentieth-century eugenicists also saw them as sinister geographies crawling with people they thought of as “mongrels.” My commute runs right past a turnoff for Shenandoah National Park. Since 1935, the park has been one of the most robust drivers of regional tourism, but that success was achieved through the removal of 500 mountain families through a new form of eviction—eminent domain—that Virginia used to ease the process. The sweeping laws the state passed in 1928 to help the park’s development set in motion a chain reaction that brought more and more people to the mountains to determine what should happen to families too poor to leave the park on their own. For some, what would happen were institutions like Western State and the Lynchburg Colony.

I’ve tried to understand how all these locations that punctuate my commute—places of violence, racial supremacy, and displacement—connect to the layers of history in Western State’s past. In Staunton and at the renovated hospital, questions of profit and loss are always in the foreground. The city’s local economy is not only reliant on tourism connected to the surrounding mountains, but also on its ability to project a wholesome, historic image. Boosters argue we’ve earned the ability to move beyond the city’s darker chapters. But what does it mean when the local economy is still extracting profit from them?

.....