Craft, Conscious, Culture: A Surviving Appalachia
Hannah Cannizzo
The American South, and particularly Appalachia, often falls victim to reductive stereotypes: hillbillies, religious fundamentalists, and rigid, unyielding traditionalists. And yet, Appalachian culture is nuanced, complex, and deeper than characterizations typically portray. The people of Appalachia represent a magnificent combination of intimacy, resiliency, and historical depth. Their lives are tapestries of a thousand stories shared during meals and over sweet tea, just honest-to-goodness hospitality. Those unfamiliar with them may dismiss them as simple "country rednecks," but their lives contain the same complex mixture of triumphs and struggles, happiness and heartbreak as anyone else's.
The decision to present this work as both a book series and a quilt is rooted in the nature of Appalachian storytelling and preservation. Books represent the repositories of history and knowledge in the form of archival research, oral histories, and found materials in a permanent form, stored away in libraries and archives. Likewise, quilts are the physical records of memories and places, stitched together from fragments of lived experience. These two mediums depict the material representation of my own research methodology— constructed from gathered fabrics at each of the four interview sites, a mapped record of investigation and thus an embodiment of connectedness which Appalachia so often displays. Both mediums reflect the layered, interwoven nature of Appalachian culture—text and textile operating in tandem to preserve, communicate, and connect.