Negotiating a Perilous Empowerment

“Abrams Locklear honors the complexity of Appalachian identity by presenting a comprehensive and suitably multi-dimensional look at what it means to be a literate Appalachian woman….” — Studies in American Culture

“An important and revealing portrayal of Appalachian women that works to challenge stereotypes, (Negotiating a Perilous Empowerment) raises questions about the difficulties of negotiating multiple literacies.” — Journal of American Culture

“Informed by literacy theory, Locklear’s analysis is further enhanced by her interviews with DeRosier and Smith, which she includes in this volume. This is a thoughtful contribution to Ohio University Press’s ‘Series in Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in Appalachia.’’ — Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries

“Negotiating a Perilous Empowerment is the best study we have to date of the ways in which becoming literate is always a way of becoming a new kind of person. In the process, there is always gain and loss. As people change who they are, they come to see who they were differently. This dilemma is general, but is rendered moving, visible, and real in this striking book.”

“In Negotiating a Perilous Empowerment, Erica Abrams Locklear carefully explores what happens when a modern, monolithic, metropolitan literacy is imposed upon residents of the Appalachian South. With great insight, she shows that such literacy, offered as a gift to presumed illiterates, in fact threatens lettered ways of knowing and being that are well adapted to the region’s traditional social arrangements. Understanding in particular how women writers respond to this threat—which for them is also sometimes an opportunity—adds much to what we know about the complex legacies of literacy.” — University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

“From many perspectives, Erica Abrams Locklear explores the cultural, social, and psychological complexities of literacy with clarity and compassion: an absorbing and enlightening study.”