Rural Imaginations for a Globalized World

Erscheinungsjahr 2025
ISBN: 978-90-04-73193-6
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 36, 465 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 235 mm

Reihe: Thamyris/Intersecting: Place, Sex and Race

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Weitere Mitwirkende

Peeren, Esther

Valdés-Olmos, Tjalling

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziologie Allgemein

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Figures and Tables

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 Pospech, Ondrej 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 Mikolajczyk

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

Über Autor(innen)

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.