Producing zones of neediness in world politics: missionaries, educators, and a cultural political economy of colonialism in Appalachia

Against the “intellectual monoculture” that organizes American IPE, this paper draws on Inayatullah and Blaney’s conception of ethnological IPE and Escobar’s analysis of the production and management of poverty in the Third World in order to study Appalachia. The paper focuses on Christian missionaries and educators and their work among populations of poor whites at the Konnarock Training School for girls. It shows how diverse actors transformed a stable set of social differences into stark interpretations of neediness, institutionalized those interpretations, and enacted them onto the bodies of locals in specific ways that reflected global, colonial patterns of stark inequality (1830–1930). The paper is organized into an historical narrative with four main points of examination: the contact zone where class and religious differences emerge as politically significant interpretations of neediness; the institutionalization of those differences as neediness through the construction of a church, mission, and school; the educator’s discursive production of class and religious differences in a global context through their writings in a missionary magazine; and the educator’s discursive production of scientifically measured differences of race, particularly a degraded whiteness. Through a cultural political economy of colonialism, Appalachia was produced as a peripheral zone populated by a marginal people within the world’s economic core.