The Unquiet Earth (1992) details the ways a family and their community struggle with and ultimately decide how to confront invasive forces, including industries such as coal mining that exploit Appalachian land, institutions such as educational system that denigrate mountain culture, and company officials who devalue mountain culture and people on the basis of misconceptions. All of these forces aim, often unknowingly, to reduce mountain people’s ability to exercise agency. The novel lets the reader experience these things through the eyes of a few major characters, and the most notable of these characters use ideas, objects and personal history to direct their reactions to these forces. At the same time, these depictions and the characters’ fates also reflect trends in Appalachian scholarship – each of three main characters come to embody and act out of ideas that form three veins of Appalachian Studies scholarship. Through the actions, reactions, and associations each character makes (and thus their vein of scholarship), the novel depicts how each interacts with these invasive forces in such a way that creates a vicious cycle of oppression. By illustrating this dynamic through the conventions of fiction, The Unquiet Earth calls attention to this dilemma without re-inscribing it. By using Giardina’s examples and descriptions of Appalachian Studies scholarship and applying these to the The Unquiet Earth itself, one can see how the book’s characters, whether consciously working within or against the system of misrepresentations and powerful institutions, only seem to strengthen the systems that oppress them.
