Book Reviews

Shaun Slifer. So Much to Be Angry About. Morgantown, WV: West Virginia University Press, 2021. 256p. Paper, $32.99 (ISBN: 978-1-949199-94-9).

Shaun Slifer had never heard of the Appalachian Movement Press (AMP) when he was handed one of its publications while attending a wedding at the Appalachian South Folklife Center (ASFC) in Pipestem, West Virginia, in 2016. Neither had almost anyone else, as its history had gone largely undocumented. Slifer, the creative director of the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum in Matewan, West Virginia, was already aware of the rich and complex ways that cultural production, social movements, and historical collections can interact. He put that knowledge to use in recovering the history of a press that played a key role during a crucial decade of organizing for justice in Appalachia. So Much to Be Angry About: Appalachian Movement Press and Radical DIY Publishing, 1969–1979 is the informative result.

In the book’s introduction, Josh MacPhee, a designer, artist, and archivist, gives a brief overview of the history of movement printshops of the 1960s through the 1980s. He provides a useful description of the workings of A.B. Dick offset presses, the workhorses of many of the movement printshops. And he enumerates some of the technological, social, and political reasons these shops disappeared. MacPhee prepares the reader to understand how AMP figured in the movement print culture of its time.

Slifer’s approach is a combination of chronological and thematic, which is appropriate, given the fact that the subject matter and genre of publications changed depending on who was operating the press. Its activities reflected many of the changes that took place in social movements of the 1970s. Beginning with an emphasis on class issues with reprints of histories of workplace struggles and contemporary investigative journalism on corruption in Appalachia, the press’s work expanded to include publications on cooperative living, women’s issues, and environmental degradation.

But AMP was also grounded in the regional, rural context of Central Appalachia. Tracing its history yields a sample of some of the interesting things going on in southern West Virginia in the 1970s, including a regional counterculture whose home base was a restaurant in Williamson originally established as a federal job training project. In addition, the activists of the AMP shop had a close association with Old Left activist Don West, the co-founder of the Highlander Folk School and the ASFC, poet, minister, and veteran of some of the bitterest labor struggles in southern mines and mills during the 1930s.

Slifer notes that his mission to document the history of the Appalachian Movement Press “became the piecing together of a patchwork of clear memories and hazy recollections.” He is working at the intersection of two areas in which much basic scholarship remains to be done: the history of the movement printshop and that of Appalachia in the second half of the twentieth century. Much of his information is gleaned from his own interviews, performed decades after the events in question. This is hardly to condemn the book. To the contrary, Slifer has made a valuable contribution both in his own right and by providing the seeds for many possible future research projects.

Slifer is forthright about some of the shortcomings of the press. He notes that, with the exception of a period that saw the production of the first-of-its-kind MAW: The Magazine for Appalachian Women, its decision-making was dominated by white men. And while it was initially located in the Black part of Huntington, probably because rent was cheaper, Slifer’s interviewees recall no interaction with the surrounding neighborhood. Perhaps more characteristic of its Appalachian context, there was a pronounced and sometimes antagonistic insider-outsider dynamic among the people who ran it.

Contending with the nature of the relationship between the region and the rest of the United States was an integral part of AMP’s mission. One of the best parts of the book is Slifer’s sensitive, well-informed discussion of the idea of Appalachia as an internal colony, an argument that animated many of AMP’s collaborators and publications. In fact, Slifer’s work suggests that the press played a key part in the development and dissemination of the idea, and its role should be taken into account by scholars studying the history of the Appalachian identity movement. This concept, inspired by the anti-imperialist agenda prevalent in the New Left of the period, provided a powerful tool for analysis and explanation for a generation of Appalachian activism and scholarship. But it has both intellectual pitfalls and frequently unexamined racial implications, which Slifer explains in a thoughtful critique.

However, Slifer does not lose sight of the fact that the internal colony thesis was advanced as a part of a radical regional project of claiming the right to self-definition. As he quotes Don West, “a people’s understanding of its history is the way their self-image is created…and your self-image determines what you try to do.” The reproductions of four publications that make up the second half of the book illustrate the variety of approaches AMP took in attempting to reshape that historical understanding.

So Much to Be Angry About contains much that can benefit librarians. Those who are already working with materials that document social movements will be aware of their unique challenges. Activists can be uninterested, unable, or, due to the very real threat of state repression or retaliation from opponents, unwilling to create and keep records of their activities. The AMP seems to present the more familiar case in which the priorities of the people involved shifted and the history of the endeavor was left subject to the attrition of individual memories. This reinforces the value of the increasing body of work on the roles librarians and archivists can play in assisting communities in documenting social movements. Slifer’s findings also suggest avenues of inquiry librarians may wish to pursue as they acquire and document collections of movement press materials. So Much to Be Angry About provides an excellent reminder that, as interesting as the content of movement media often is, the social, technological, and economic circumstances of its creation deserve attention in their own right.—Richelle Brown, University of North Georgia