Danielle Dulken is an educator and writer from Western North Carolina.
Most recently, Danielle taught courses in the Department of American Studies and the Southern Oral History Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill while pursuing a doctorate degree.
Danielle researches race, reproduction, and U.S. empire in the Appalachian south.
Louisiana Avenue and Emma Road mark the crossroads of Emma, North Carolina, an unincorporated township in Buncombe county four miles west of downtown Asheville. As early as the 1880s, Emma was thoroughfare connecting landowners in Leicester to the city. Today, Emma is home to a growing Mexican and Mexican American population and resources like PODER Emma Community Ownership (ECOP), a collective aimed to protect mobile home parks and immigrant workers from the city’s rapid displacement crisis. When I visited in 2018, members of the nascent advocacy group Compañeros Inmigrantes de las Montañas en Acción (CIMA) were discussing a language library for immigrated Hñähñu (Otomi) peoples, an Indigenous tribe in so-called central Mexico. CIMA hoped to plan an Indigenous language event with the local Hñähñu (Otomi) and the ᏣᎳᎩᏱ ᏕᏣᏓᏂᎸᎩ (Tsalagiyi Detsadanilvgi; Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians). Photography by author, 2018.
While studying The Kingdom of the Happy Land, a nineteenth century Black utopia imaged in the mountains of western North Carolina, I attempted to locate ruins based on local newspaper descriptions and archival sources. My research led me to a narrow logging road cut into a small mountain ridge pictured above. Photograph by author, 2018.
For more on The Kingdom of the Happy Land, visit my writing.
The featured images were taken for my study on configurations of belonging in Appalachia according to Indigenous, Latinx, and Black feminist epistemologies.
research interest:
My work contests the so-called happenstance of white racial territorialization across the Mountain South. Through an analysis of 19th and 20th century place-making and reproductive practices, I argue that constructing white Appalachia helped naturalize U.S. empire during an era of imperialist expansion. We can observe this through innovations in biomedicine, federal policy, and most importantly, the writings of Indigenous, Latinx, and Black feminists who illuminate intimate ties to a dynamic region.
I draw from the archives of nurse-midwife Mary Breckinridge and the Frontier Nursing Service, Federal Indian Law including the Dawes Act (1887), the papers of health activists Loretta Ross and Katsi Cook (Kanienʼkehá꞉ka; Mohawk), and the writings of novelist Gayl Jones to explore how place is racialized but also imagined otherwise.