Paper short abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic and archival research, I explore how the UK state has constructed the Durham Coalfield as temporally dislocated from the mainstream. I use literatures of remote places, the rural ‘other’ and the white working class and draw parallels with Appalachia in the US imaginary.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I argue that the state structures its territory not just spatially but also temporally, with some regions identified with the future and others with the past. I use the example of the West Durham coalfield, where 'worked out' pits led to the characterisation of the whole area as 'derelict' and policies of wholesale population relocation in the 1930s and again in the 1960s/70s, when hundreds of families moved to 'super pits' further south and whole villages were demolished. More recently, national and local state discourses have alternated between reading the area as flexible and modern or old-fashioned and caught up in the past.

I explain this process through various forms of 'temporal othering' by which peripheral places have been perceived to exist on a different time-scale from the centre (Ardener, 1985, Fabian, 2002), villages and the rural have been seen as old-fashioned and fixed in place (Nadel-Klein, 1995), the white working class has been coded as 'backward' (Torgovnick, 1991, Haylett, 2001, Lawler, 2012) and the coal miner as parochial (Strangleman et al., 1999). I draw parallels with the place of Appalachia in the US imaginary (Shapiro, 1986, Batteau, 1990, Stewart, 1996, Wray and Newitz, 1997).