![]() She rightly notes that Kentucky’s history includes racial violence, frontier settlement, slavery, poverty, and feuds a border state since the Civil War, Kentucky does not seem to fit into other analytical paradigms. In Brown’s view, Kentucky is a state with a deep cultural dissociative identity disorder. In the end, Brown’s argument is persuasive, if her evidence may often leave some readers scratching their heads. Her research methods are both copious and controversial, relying on the postmemories and family stories of the children and grandchildren of people who made the escape in an extensive series of interviews that she conducted over several years. Brown recasts the famous post-Reconstruction Great Migration of black people from the Deep South to cities in the northeast and Midwest as an Escape, in the proper noun sense, from horrific violence, enduring oppression, and an implacable status quo meant to freeze them as serfs. Black Appalachians forged new versions of the black experience in America in their kitchens, porches, and schoolhouses too. But it was not just about the mining experience. ![]() Digging coal out of the mountains of Harlan County, Kentucky, through the first six decades of the twentieth century, was, in her view, part of a broader “dogged pursuit to reach their ideals of freedom and citizenship-those of life, liberty, equality, and the pursuit of happiness” (p. Brown argues that lived black experiences in the mountain South created and transformed racial subjectivity. In Gone Home: Race and Roots through Appalachia, Karida L. ![]()
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