After Coal: Power, Development, and Post-Coal Politics in Appalachia

Abstract

In this dissertation, I examine the collapse of the coal industry in Central Appalachia and theeconomic crises of coal’s decline through conjunctural analysis, drawing on the lineage of Gramscian scholarship in geography. Bringing together feminist political economy, Black Geographies scholarship, critical development studies, and cultural studies, I examine the cultural politics and political economy of deindustrialization in Appalachia. In four distinct chapters, each written for discreet journal publications, I trace the ways that people in Appalachia have experienced coal’s century-long decline unevenly and differently along racialized, gendered, and socio-economic class lines. I show how deindustrialization in has been a process through which racialized and economic inequities are reproduced in Central Appalachia. In the first chapter, I engage debates about white supremacy and anti-Blackness in geography, examining the production of the Appalachian region as an instance of white supremacist developmentalism from the 1880s through the 1960s. In chapter two, I engage recent conversations in Black Geographies literature to examine the infrastructures of dispossession that enabled Black people in the coalfields to be the first and most disproportionately deindustrialized group of people in Central Appalachia, from the 1950s through the 2000s. In chapter three, I argue that the collapse of the coal industry has enabled the emergence of a new kind of rentierism in the coalfields, where landowners are finding new rents in carbon offsets and conservation schemes. In chapter four, I argue that contemporary far right populist politics in Central Appalachia are the result of the ideological crisis of neoliberalism. Engaging debates about post-neoliberalism, I diagnose a post-neoliberal conjuncture unfolding in Central Appalachia. I conclude with a