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Rural Imaginations for a Globalized World
Series: - Thamyris/Intersecting: Place, Sex and Race Online, Volume: 36
- Thamyris/Intersecting: Place, Sex and Race, Volume: 36
This volume explores what aspects of contemporary rural life as deeply globalized – and thus implicated in the ongoing, destructive unfolding of colonialism and capitalism – are highlighted and obscured in social, political, economic, and cultural imaginations. It asks how this shapes the ways in which rurality is politically mobilized, affectively encountered, and artistically mediated. Coming from the humanities, the social sciences, and the art world, the contributors bring into focus the persistence of romanticizing imaginations of the rural (such as, for example, the idyll) that position it as a wholesome escape from globalization and its excesses, including looming environmental collapse. In addition, they detail attempts at deromanticization designed to disassociate the rural from whiteness, rugged masculinity, heteronormativity, anthropocentrism, and agrilogistics.
Esther Peeren is Professor of Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. Her publications include the monograph
The Spectral Metaphor: Living Ghosts and the Agency of Invisibility (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and the edited volume
Planetary Hinterlands: Extraction, Abandonment and Care (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024).
Tjalling Valdés-Olmos is Assistant Professor of Media and Culture at the University of Amsterdam. His research and publications engage a range of topics at the intersection of decolonial and settler colonial studies, with a specific interest in cross-media, genre, affect, and history.
Tjalling Valdés-Olmos is Assistant Professor of Media and Culture at the University of Amsterdam. His research and publications engage a range of topics at the intersection of decolonial and settler colonial studies, with a specific interest in cross-media, genre, affect, and history.
List of Figures and Tables
Notes on Contributors
Rural Imaginations for a Globalized World: Introduction
Esther Peeren and Tjalling Valdés-Olmos
1 Telling Stories about Rural Assemblages
Michael Woods
2 Land and the Poetics of Postcolonial Pastoral
Peter Hitchcock
3 Monocultural Montage: towards a Conceptual Dictionary of the Rural
Rowan Jaines
4 Anti-Urbanism and “Real Life” at the Periphery
Pavel Pospěch, Ondřej Klíma and Barbora Hubatková
5 #RuralGazes: an Autoethnography of Our Ways of Seeing
Lee-Ann Sutherland, Thoroddur Bjarnason, Menelaos Gkartzios and Esther Peeren
6 Rural Undercurrents
Wapke Feenstra from Myvillages
7 Rural Historicity in Popular Speculative Futurities: Eco-Anxiety as Settler Anxiety
Tjalling Valdés-Olmos
8 From Golden Age to Neoliberal Wilderness: Representing the Gaucho in Borges’s “the South” and Bolaño’s “the Insufferable Gaucho”
Josh Weeks
9 Four Cottage Scenes: Reading across Globalized Idylls
Ben Stringer
10 Sponging and the Island of Kalymnos: Rural, Industrial, Global
Joyce Goggin
11 Scales of Sustainability: the Ethical Positioning of Productivist Farmers in Debates about the Environment
Peter van Dam and Esther Peeren
12 The Rurality of Region: Narrative and Counter-Narrative in Indian Literary History and Politics
Sumati Dwivedi
13 Reflections on a Woman’s Culm, Keeping the Home Fires Burning
Pauline O’Connell
14 #COTTAGECORE: Online Rural and Climate Imaginaries
Natalia Sanchez-Querubín, Carlo De Gaetano and Sabine Niederer
15 Feminized Idyllic Rurality? the Videos of Li Ziqi on Bilibili
Shao Shao
16 Rural Mythologies, Fresh Air, and the UK’s National Parks
Rosemary Shirley
17 “After you’ve Taken Everything, What will be Left?”: Rural-Urban Relationalities in Folk Horror from the Celtic Margins in the UK
Kate Woodward
18 A Place Like No Other: Exploring the Relationship between Amusement Parks and Queer Men in the Midwest
Marcel Strobel
19 Rural Authenticity and Homonationalism in Filmic Representations of Central-Eastern European Migrants in the Italian and British Countryside
Dominika Mikołajczyk
20 A Garden in the Cotton Fields: Fannie Lou Hamer and Cooperative Economics on the Freedom Farm
Maarten Zwiers
21 Twisting Ruralities: Ecological Imaginations around the Beijing Farmers’ Market
Chen Zhou
22 Cultivating Utopias: Dwelling and Fugitive Animal Husbandry in Ursula K. Le Guin
David Slot
23 Bless This Mess: Complex Rural Realities in an American Sitcom
David Karle and Charles Weak
24 Exploring the Transformative Powers of Art and Soil: The Farm/Art DTour’s Rural-Urban Flow
María Patricia Tinajero
25 “Does Your Soil Have a Smell?”: Experiences of Regenerative Farming across the Great Plains
Janna Bystrykh and Clemens Driessen
Index
Notes on Contributors
Rural Imaginations for a Globalized World: Introduction
Esther Peeren and Tjalling Valdés-Olmos
part 1: Grappling with the Globalized Rural across Disciplines
1 Telling Stories about Rural Assemblages
Michael Woods
2 Land and the Poetics of Postcolonial Pastoral
Peter Hitchcock
3 Monocultural Montage: towards a Conceptual Dictionary of the Rural
Rowan Jaines
4 Anti-Urbanism and “Real Life” at the Periphery
Pavel Pospěch, Ondřej Klíma and Barbora Hubatková
5 #RuralGazes: an Autoethnography of Our Ways of Seeing
Lee-Ann Sutherland, Thoroddur Bjarnason, Menelaos Gkartzios and Esther Peeren
6 Rural Undercurrents
Wapke Feenstra from Myvillages
PART 2: Rereading Globalized Ruralities
7 Rural Historicity in Popular Speculative Futurities: Eco-Anxiety as Settler Anxiety
Tjalling Valdés-Olmos
8 From Golden Age to Neoliberal Wilderness: Representing the Gaucho in Borges’s “the South” and Bolaño’s “the Insufferable Gaucho”
Josh Weeks
9 Four Cottage Scenes: Reading across Globalized Idylls
Ben Stringer
10 Sponging and the Island of Kalymnos: Rural, Industrial, Global
Joyce Goggin
11 Scales of Sustainability: the Ethical Positioning of Productivist Farmers in Debates about the Environment
Peter van Dam and Esther Peeren
12 The Rurality of Region: Narrative and Counter-Narrative in Indian Literary History and Politics
Sumati Dwivedi
13 Reflections on a Woman’s Culm, Keeping the Home Fires Burning
Pauline O’Connell
PART 3: (De)Romanticized Rurals
14 #COTTAGECORE: Online Rural and Climate Imaginaries
Natalia Sanchez-Querubín, Carlo De Gaetano and Sabine Niederer
15 Feminized Idyllic Rurality? the Videos of Li Ziqi on Bilibili
Shao Shao
16 Rural Mythologies, Fresh Air, and the UK’s National Parks
Rosemary Shirley
17 “After you’ve Taken Everything, What will be Left?”: Rural-Urban Relationalities in Folk Horror from the Celtic Margins in the UK
Kate Woodward
18 A Place Like No Other: Exploring the Relationship between Amusement Parks and Queer Men in the Midwest
Marcel Strobel
19 Rural Authenticity and Homonationalism in Filmic Representations of Central-Eastern European Migrants in the Italian and British Countryside
Dominika Mikołajczyk
PART 4: Reframing Farming
20 A Garden in the Cotton Fields: Fannie Lou Hamer and Cooperative Economics on the Freedom Farm
Maarten Zwiers
21 Twisting Ruralities: Ecological Imaginations around the Beijing Farmers’ Market
Chen Zhou
22 Cultivating Utopias: Dwelling and Fugitive Animal Husbandry in Ursula K. Le Guin
David Slot
23 Bless This Mess: Complex Rural Realities in an American Sitcom
David Karle and Charles Weak
24 Exploring the Transformative Powers of Art and Soil: The Farm/Art DTour’s Rural-Urban Flow
María Patricia Tinajero
25 “Does Your Soil Have a Smell?”: Experiences of Regenerative Farming across the Great Plains
Janna Bystrykh and Clemens Driessen
Index
This book is aimed at scholars working across the interdisciplinary field of rural studies, and at students (bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral level) in cultural studies, literary studies, media studies, art history, philosophy, geography, sociology, political science and anthropology with an interest in contemporary rurality and globalization.