Abstract
This chapter situates Alena Hairston’s The Logan Topographies (2007)—a book about Black coal mining communities that uses Logan, WV as a metonymy for wider cultural patterns—within a debate over the gendered distinction between labour and work identified by Hannah Arendt and expanded upon by M. NourbeSe Philip. Hairston’s book demonstrates the unjust pattern by which activities such as water-gathering, giving birth, and tending house, are cast as unproductive “labor” by patriarchal norms, in contrast to the way “work” is defined by material production; at the same time, men engage in brawling, liquor-drinking, and sexual promiscuity in ways that damage domestic space. More than simply documenting the unequal hierarchy within a Black community itself unjustly positioned within majority white American culture, Hairston offers one model for a transformation of the situation of women vis-à-vis labour and work: a creative reimagining of membership and citizenship in terms of “afference”; that is, a definition of love as reciprocity and dare. This chapter draws on Charles T. Lee’s notion of “ingenious citizenship” to suggest that The Logan Topographies is less a writing of place than a transformation of the ways place can be viewed, a movement from exclusive belonging to mutual responsibility.
Thanks to my creative writing and Black Studies students at SUNY Geneseo whose discussions of Hairston’s book in our classes have led me in new directions. This essay also owes a debt to Lexi Rudnitsky.
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Notes
- 1.
M. NourbeSe Philip, “Women and Theft,” in Frontiers: Selected Essays and Writings on Racism and Culture, 1984–1992 (Toronto: Mercury Press, 1992), 76.
- 2.
M. NourbeSe Philip, “Women and Theft,” 76.
- 3.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013 [1958]), 110 fn56.
- 4.
Arendt, The Human Condition, 121.
- 5.
M. NourbeSe Philip, “Women and Theft,” in Frontiers: Selected Essays and Writings on Racism and Culture, 1984–1992 (Toronto: Mercury Press), 75.
- 6.
Alena Hairston, The Logan Topographies (New York City: Persea Books, 2007), 27.
- 7.
The notion of a citizenship script is used by numerous theorists of citizenship, including Lee; for example, in her monograph Origin Stories in Political Thought, Joanne Harriet Wright reads Leviathan as Thomas Hobbes’ attempt to “provide a script of citizenship, encouraging citizens of England to behave as though they had entered into a social contract with one another” (55). Such scripts depend in part on governmental decree—the United States requires (new) citizens to swear an Oath of Allegiance, for instance—and in part on social and cultural patterns, which alter across time and geography, but which might include approved forms of work, expectations of volunteerism, and attitudes to health and education. Sherally Munshi’s unpublished dissertation exploring early twentieth century Indian immigration to the U.S., for instance, explores how, faced with governmental attempts to “denaturalize citizens” of Indian origin after the Supreme Court, in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923), determined that Indians were ‘racially ineligible’ for citizenship,” Indian immigrants such as Dinshah P. Ghadiali undertook projects that sought the “crafting of personhood or subjectivity through violent and mundane encounters with legal institutions, legal language, and legal form.”
- 8.
Logan, WV History and Nostalgia: Preserving Logan County history, https://loganwv.us/ (accessed 29 April 2017).
- 9.
Otis Rice and Stephen Brown, West Virginia: A History (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2010), 188.
- 10.
Milton Welch, “A Review of The Logan Topographies by Alena Hairston,” in The Believer, vol. 5, no. 8 (October 2007), 38. Existing discussion of The Logan Topographies amounts to a series of reviews, some largely academic journals such as Appalachian Heritage and Journal of Appalachian Studies, others in literary publications like Rain Taxi; these reviews largely emphasize the racial-ecological stakes of the poems. Warren Carson’s laudatory review praises the book as “one of the finest sustained treatments of race, place, and culture since Jean Toomer’s Cane” (2008, 104), while Chris Green suggests that alongside “the fragmentary style of postmodern lyricism” Hairston is able to “show [readers] the earth under their own feet” (2007, 256).
- 11.
The front matter includes the “author’s note” that “While The Logan Topographies is based on existing places and is modeled on the lives of real people, certain events, places, and figures in the text are fictional.”
- 12.
I use the term “paratext” specifically in the way Beth McCoy unpacks it within her article “Race and the (Para)Textual Condition”: that is, as consisting of “marginal spaces and places [that] have functioned centrally as a zone transacting ever-changing modes of white domination and of resistance to that domination” (156). The paratext within African-American spaces was often a zone of white, male control, and the use of dictionary definitions in the prefatory material of The Logan Topographies both acknowledge the dispossession of women and black citizens involved in that space while reclaiming control of it, weaving together definitions to create a new script, one which highlights ironies of power.
- 13.
Rice and Brown, West Virginia: A History, 188.
- 14.
Hazel Carby traces the way “a rural black folk without the necessary industrial skills, untutored in the ways of the city” were exploited in “the streets of New York, Chicago” and other urban spaces in twentieth century American, yet managed to transform the stakes of the way others degradingly mythologized them. Detroit, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh” (739). Carby notes now both individuals and institutions labelled “the behavior of these migrating women as a social and political problem” (740), and such ideas have shaped my own reading of Hairston’s book, featuring as it does mobile, rural Black women who turn to song.
- 15.
Rice and Brown, West Virginia: A History, 228.
- 16.
Vardamann notes “that event does not figure in the poems” (12)—which is literally true, although the book’s working through of violence not only gestures to the Battle of Blair Mountain, but the effect of not naming singular instances of events is to allow for a reading of their replication or reoccurrence—a central realization of the later Black Lives Matter movement—rather than to focus on one particular instance.
- 17.
Anne McClintock discusses this advertisement in Imperial Leather, pp. 32ff.
- 18.
The Logan Topographies uses as an epigraph for its second section, “Devil’s Tea Table,” two paragraphs from Ronald L. Lewis’s Black Coal Miners in America: Race, Class, and Community Conflict, 1780–1980, which focus on “slave miners.”
- 19.
Charles T. Lee, Ingenious Citizenship: Recrafting Democracy for Social Change (2016), 27–28. In addition to Lee’s notion of “ingenious citizenship,” my argument here develops from Melanie White’s 2008 essay “Can an Act of Citizenship be Creative?” (in Isin and Nielsen, eds. Acts of Citizenship); I discuss her ideas in more details in “The Bewilderment of Peter Gizzi’s ‘Plural Noises,’” in Anthony Caleshu, ed. In The Air (2017).
- 20.
Charles T. Lee, Ingenious Citizenship, 48.
- 21.
Through reading works by U.S. and Cuban poets (Wallace Stevens, José Lezama Lima, Robert Duncan, and Severo Sarduy) Eric Keenaghan argues, in Queering Cold War Poetics (2009), that poetic disclosure, particularly through lyric, was a means of developing a “queer ethic of vulnerability” that could reveal “the fullness of citizens’ otherwise censored interior lives” (27). For Keenaghan, poetry has a role in resisting state definitions of the citizen: he opposes this “queer ethic” to contemporary Homeland Security slogans such as “Our Free Society Is Inherently Vulnerable” (13), underlining instead the value of poetic expressions of vulnerability.
Works Cited
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Carby, Hazel. “Policing the Black Woman’s Body in an Urban Context.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 18, no. 4, Identities (Summer, 1992), 738–755.
Carson, Warren. “Review.” Appalachian Heritage, vol. 36, no. 3 (Summer 2008), 104.
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Gay, Ross. “Review.” Postnoills, August 2008. www.postnoills.com/main/?p=63. Accessed 21 April 2017. 2:13 pm.
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Logan, WV History and Nostalgia: Preserving Logan County history. https://loganwv.us/. Accessed 29 April 2017.
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Smith, Lytton, “The Bewilderment of Peter Gizzi’s ‘Plural Noises’.” In In the Air: Essays on the Poetry of Peter Gizzi, edited by Anthony Caleshu, 151–165. Wesleyan: Wesleyan University Press, 2017.
Vardamann, Wendy, “Poems including History—And More.” Women’s Review of Books, vol. 25, no. 2 (March/April 2008), 11–13.
Welch, Milton. “A Review of the Logan Topographies by Alena Hairston.” In The Believer, vol. 5, no. 8 (October 2007), 38.
White, Melanie. “Can an Act of Citizenship be Creative?” In Acts of Citizenship, edited by Engin Isin and Greg Nielsen, 44–56. London: Zed Books, 2008.
Wright, Joanne Harriet. Origin Stories in Political Thought: Discourses on Gender, Power, and Citizenship. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.
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Smith, L. (2019). “Because We Love Wrong”: Citizenship and Labour in Alena Hairston’s The Logan Topographies. In: Walton, J., Luker, E. (eds) Poetry and Work. Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26125-2_10
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