1 Imagining Rural Globalization beyond the Global Village
Until recently, the main focus of academic and public debates about globalization was on the urban environments containing, since 2007, a majority of the world population.1 With world cities and urban sprawls firmly in the spotlight, rural areas were largely overlooked as significant sites of globalization, even though they were and still are home to billions of people, as well as accommodating substantial migration and tourism flows, and acting as centers for food production, resource extraction, energy provision, imprisonment, and waste disposal by governments and transnational corporations. Tellingly, the most conspicuous appearance of the rural in early globalization theory came not in the form of an engagement with its globalized realities, but of media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s assertion that “the new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village” (31). Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak views the global village as an abstraction reliant on the “presupposition that the advances in electronic technology have made it possible for ‘the West’ … to go back to the possibility of precapitalist spiritual riches without their attendant discomforts” (1998: 329–330). For her, the village in “global village” evokes a wholesome rural social formation lost to urbanized Westerners that may be retrieved, in new and improved form, through the global connectivity offered by new media technologies. Global connectivity instantly dissolves spatial distances and promises control over who to share certain parts of oneself with, thus avoiding the seclusion as well as the regulatory and surveillance practices that are often part of rural life (Woods 2011: 175). Whereas Raymond Williams emphasizes that “the village … shows in actual history a wide variation: as to size and character, and internally in its variation between dispersed and nuclear settlements, in Britain as clearly as elsewhere” (2011: 1), the global village metaphor invokes a selective, homogenizing
In The Neocolonialism of the Global Village, Ginger Nolan questions the “utopian connotation” of McLuhan’s image, grounded in a romanticization of rural illiteracy, by highlighting how it was “born of colonial thought” (9). The “global village,” she explains, is predicated on “techniques of colonial rule in Africa, specifically … Britain’s brutal villagization scheme in Kenya in the 1950s” (Nolan 2018a: 9). This scheme saw “dispossessed denizens” put into camps resembling concentrated villages in order to enfold them into “the incipient nation-form and into the global market, while simultaneously withholding the modes of semiotic power required to participate effectively in a public sphere” (Nolan 2018a: 9).2 Here, the actual villages that were McLuhan’s inspiration are revealed as far from peaceful organic communities. Rather, they were colonial instruments of “quasi-urbanization,” designed to break anti-colonial resistance in both the remote, difficult to control rural and the densely populated, better educated (and thus perceived as more likely to rebel) urban (Nolan 2018a: 9). This process of quasi-urbanization conferred a quasi-citizenship upon the villagized, and “might be seen … as symptomatic – and indeed even embryonic – of much more pervasive strategies through which the urban and rural are woven into a single territorial fabric” in today’s neocolonial world (Nolan 2018b: 465).3 Instead of revaluating the village against the city, therefore, McLuhan endorses a city-like village or village-like city that maximizes the capitalist-colonialist dispossession of its inhabitants.
To McLuhan’s global village, Spivak opposes the reality of the rural in an age of intensified globalization. One side of this reality is constituted by the “spectralization of the rural” – the “conversion of ‘the rural’ into a database for pharmaceutical dumping, chemical fertilizers, patenting of indigenous knowledge, big dam building and the like” that has turned the rural into “the forgotten front of globalization for which the urban is an instrument” (Spivak 2003: 92–93). The quotation marks Spivak places around “the rural” signal another instance
It is from this material rural ground that Spivak sees the other side of the reality of the globalized rural emerging: those “movements for ecological, environmental, and reproductive justice” in which “the rural-local directly confronts the global, and the ‘village’ is a concept- metaphor contaminated by the empirical” (1998: 343). Through these movements, the rural asserts itself as harboring “the epistemes or mind-sets foreclosed by the capitalist/socialist [urbanist] teleology, defective for capitalism” in the form of “more or less habitable ruins” that might enable “an effortful project of developing something de-formed and de-constituted, fragmented into disjointed joining, through a species of prayer to be haunted” (Spivak 2012: 201).
Two points are important here. First, although Spivak associates the epistemes and mind-sets upon which counter-globalization movements might be built with rural and indigenous practices, her reference to “more or less habitable ruins” emphasizes that these epistemes and mind-sets have not survived intact. In addition, they have not remained unaffected by capitalism/socialism, cannot be comfortably dwelled in by everyone, and should not be romanticized. The warning against romanticization is fleshed out in Death of a Discipline, where Spivak performs a prayer to be haunted by reading the Cuban revolutionary and writer José Martí’s “ruralist left-humanism” against the grain for a way to challenge globalization’s spectralization of the rural (92). In doing so, the greatest difficulty is resisting “the temptation to ‘ruralism’” (Spivak 2003: 92). Ruralism’s “primitivist romanticization of the rural” appears to counter capitalism and (neo)colonialism by placing the rural outside of (in space) and before (in time) these intertwined systems (Spivak 2003: 93). However, as Williams so forcefully shows in The Country & the City and
The country here is not simply the prenational as opposed to the national. It is also the hylè or mass of the national … that becomes continuous with the exchange with the Earth. The Earth is a paranational image that can substitute for international and can perhaps provide, today, a displaced site for the imagination of planetarity.
(Spivak 2003: 95, emphasis in original)
Planetarity is what the Earth in Martí points to for Spivak: “The globe is on our computers. It is the logo of the World Bank. No one lives there; and we think that we can aim to control globality. The planet is in the species of alterity, belonging to another system; and yet we inhabit it, indeed are it” (2012: 338). If the globe is a figure that capitalism wants to be taken as self-evident, the planetary, more readily imagined from the rural than from the urban, can interrupt and denaturalize it. Thus, while Spivak, in one of the epigraphs to this introduction, maintains that globalization messes with – exploits, violates – “the bones of the rural/indigenous,” she considers these same bones (or the fragments and dust remaining of them) capable of disrupting globalization.5
The second important point is that Spivak associates counter-globalization movements with a village that is distanced from the global village as it is commonly understood by its empirical contamination without ceasing to be to some degree an imaginative construct – a “concept-metaphor.” The global village is contrasted with more grounded rurals that nonetheless manifest as what Arjun Appadurai calls imagined worlds. For Appadurai, electronic mediascapes do not, like McLuhan’s global village, turn “the public sphere from a site of discourse into a site of media reception” where “to participate is to give
This volume foregrounds the globalized rural as always in part imagined – with its imagination shaped, to various degrees, by its materialities and vice versa, in a mutually constitutive relationship. Most of the contributors attended a conference held in Amsterdam in August 2022 in the context of the “Imagining the Rural in a Globalizing World” project funded by the European Research Council (2018–2024).7 Coming from the humanities, the social sciences, and the art world, these contributors explore the crucial role various social, political, economic, and cultural imaginations play in determining what aspects of contemporary rural life, as deeply globalized, do and do not become visible. In addition, they ask how this affects the way people, inside and outside the rural, make sense of the rural, shape it materially, mobilize it politically, and conceive of their own relation to it.
Across the globe, rural dissatisfaction and unrest are on the rise as a result of the spectralization processes highlighted by Spivak, but also land disputes, rural depopulation, reductions in rural services, and declines in rural industries, leading more and more rural communities to be conceived of as – and to
Spivak not only warns that a rural-derived planetarity should not indulge in the aforementioned romanticizing and homogenizing ruralism that often underpins nationalist-populist narratives on the right and left. She also insists that such a planetarity should not rely on “an unexamined environmentalism, referring to an undivided ‘natural’ space rather than a divided political space” (Spivak 2003: 72). Heeding this warning is particularly important given the continued dominance, across social and cultural realms, of genres like the idyll and pastoral, which play a vital role in determining what does and does not become visible of disparately globalized rurals. Emerging from Europe but now globalized in literature and other art forms, as well as in the imagined worlds of the social realm, these genres associate an undifferentiated rural with an escape from globalization’s pressures and pollution. They do so in space (with
2 Shifting Rural Attachments
That the rural idyll has been exposed many times over as a “cultural fantasy” has not stopped it from being turned into “a tangible reality” affecting the material shaping of the rural and the lives of both those it accommodates and “those whose circumstances do not allow them to fit within the received and constantly reproduced ideas of the idyll” (Short 144). This is where the importance of the affective dimension of rural imaginations comes into view. What causes so many people across the world, including some of those who do not have a place in the rural idyll, to continue to feel emotionally invested in the rural as a refuge from globalization? And might this investment explain why they so fervently resist alternative imaginations, especially those acknowledging the rural’s implication in (neo)colonialism and climate change? Such a line of questioning seems vital to us for understanding why certain rural materialities and actors, not least non-human ones, remain unseen and unheard. There is, moreover, a particular urgency to ask how the unseen and unheard can be made part of new, less exclusionary, more planetary rural imaginations that, instead of obfuscating rural globalization, highlight and counter it.
The affective dimension of rural imaginations is central to Williams’s The Country & the City, where he insists that “what is knowable is not only a function of objects, of what is there to be known. It is also a function of subjects, of observers – of what is desired and what needs to be known” (2011: 165, emphasis added).10 While changes in “what is there to be known” on the ground may
In literature and art itself, temporal and spatial determinations are inseparable from one another, and always colored by emotions and values. Abstract thought can, of course, think time and space as separate entities and conceive them as things apart from the emotions and values that attach to them. But living artistic perception … makes no such divisions and permits no such segmentation.
(243, emphasis in original)
“Living artistic perception” can be extended to “living social perception” as, ultimately, “every entry into the sphere of meaning,” even when abstract thought is at stake, “is accomplished only through the gates of the chronotope” (Bakhtin 258).12
Williams and Bakhtin recognize the difficulty of apprehending how feelings, emotions, and values shape social actualities in literature and in life, especially from within a chronotope or structure of feeling taken as unmediated reality. On the final page of The Country & the City, Williams marks the effort involved:
I moved from country to city, and now live and work in both. I learned, in many forms, the shapes of this history, its ideas and its images, …. This left, in my mind, every kind of question, and intricacy, and I had slowly
to retrace the experience, in myself and in the record, as a way of gaining the present and the future through a different understanding of the shaping and fascinating past. (2011: 306)
Williams’s unlearning of the structure of feeling within which the country is felt as naturally and universally peaceful, innocent, and virtuous but also backwards, ignorant, and limited, proceeds through a reconsideration of the pastoral as evolving from a genre that, in ancient times, was “not yet abstracted from the whole of a working country life” and that, in English literature, first appeared in an openly “theatrical and romantic” courtly form, into an “idealisation of actual English country life and its social and economic relations” (2011: 17, 20, 26). The latter allowed the broad appeal of the idea of “the simple plenty of the countryside: the metaphorical but also the actual retreat” to be strategically appropriated by the land-owning class as part of “a self-consciously rural mode of display” uncontaminated by the empirical, as Spivak might say (Williams 2011: 23, 282). This mode of display served to consolidate, legitimate, and naturalize capitalist and (neo)colonialist expansion on a national and global scale, rendering “a huge rural proletariat, in the distant lands” and in the English countryside not only invisible but itself affectively invested in the pastoral fantasy (Williams 2011: 282).13
Bakhtin marks out the chronotope of the idyll as a main driver of Western literary history, emphasizing how its many forms are all grounded in “the special relationship that time has to space in the idyll: an organic fastening-down, a grafting of life and its events to a place, to a familiar territory with all its nooks and crannies, its familiar mountains, valleys, fields, rivers and forests, and one’s own home” (225). The idyll’s “organic fastening-down” in distinctly rural environments is endorsed in the family novel and in “provincial forms” that make a “doomed attempt to preserve the dying remnants of little patriarchal (provincial) worlds” (Bakhtin 231). But this fastening-down is also critiqued, for example in the work of Goethe, where “it is [deemed] necessary to find a new relationship to nature, not to the little nature of one’s own corner of the world but to the big nature of the great world, to all the phenomena of the solar system, to the wealth excavated from the earth’s core, to a variety of geographical locations and continents” (Bakhtin 234). What remains illegible even in such a critical form of the idyll is what Williams emphasizes, namely that
Lauren Berlant associates the tendency to hold on to familiar genres without grounding in social reality with the affective state of “cruel optimism,” arising “when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing” (2011: 1). Optimism involves the revisiting of a “scene of fantasy” like the idealized rurals offered up by the pastoral and idyll in the expectation that “this time, nearness to this thing will help you or the world to become different in just the right way” (Berlant 2011: 2, emphasis in original). Such optimism turns cruel when “the very pleasures of being inside a relation have become sustaining regardless of the content of the relation” (Berlant 2011: 2). In the relation to the rural, cruel optimism manifested, for example, when, during the Covid-19 pandemic, many people saw the rural as a refuge, even though the virus also struck there, with more limited treatment options.
What makes cruel optimism so difficult to dispel is that taking away the cruelty by exposing why what is desired is actually harmful also means taking away the optimism. As Sara Ahmed clarifies, affect, as “a form of cultural politics or world making” that involves the development, within affective economies, of shared orientations towards something (like the rural), can harden into subjects being “invested in particular structures such that their demise is felt as a kind of living death” (12, emphasis in original). Many will go to extreme lengths to avoid experiencing this living death, not only accepting harm to themselves, but also being willing to harm those human and non-human others they feel are keeping their affective investment from paying off. In the context of idealized rurals, this takes the form of seeking to rid the rural of everything and everyone not deemed to belong in the “safe little world” they desire it to be (Peeren 64).
While it is vital to stress the degree to which established, normative affective structures may be resistant to change, it is equally vital to recognize that affect, precisely because it is never completely fixed, may be a resource under conditions of dispossession. Nolan finishes her book by noting that the “global village” is a “complex figure” offering a “depoliticized life” that is not quite Giorgio Agamben’s “bare life,” but “perfectly coterminous with sensual pleasures, with material nourishment, and with social-political investment in an (impoverished) public sphere” (2018a: 54). Kathleen Stewart, who sees people’s laborious attunement to hegemonic affective atmospheres as “produc[ing] hard-won attachments that can be hard to get out of once you’re in,” also evokes the possibility of a new affective terrain suddenly “snap[ping] into form
Ahmed, finally, emphasizes that the emotions stuck to particular subjects or objects in affective economies “can get unstuck” since emotions are not properties of a subject or object and “our investments move as we move” (16, 172). This can be a conscious process in “struggles against injustice” that
are about how we are moved by feelings into a different relation to the norms we wish to contest, or the wounds we wish to heal. Moving here is not about “moving on”, or about “using” emotions to move away, but moving and being moved as a form of labour or work, which opens up different kinds of attachments to others, in part through the recognition of this work as work.
(Ahmed 201, emphasis in original)
The chapters in this volume that engage the horrors and anxieties of the anti-idyll underscore the hard work required to move us into different relations with rurality from those encouraged by the idyll and pastoral. In the wake of David Bell’s seminal reading of 1970s and 80s US and UK horror films as speaking to and against the traditional idyll, it has been argued that “anti-idyllic invocations of racialized, sexualized, and classed rurality” – in horror and other genres – “[can] perform an affective management of the countryside as a space of degenerate, rather than nostalgic, backwardness” (Valdés-Olmos 29). Conversely, as certain chapters in this volume show, anti-idylls “can also negotiate a more complex dynamic between a validation of liberal and progressive urban life, and the notion that wealthier, more cosmopolitan and urbanized subjects are no longer in touch with the rustic (i.e. more traditionally normative) rural modes of living” (Valdés-Olmos 29). Thus, while anti-idyllic registers can work to shift one’s attachment to the rural, they also often fail to do the work of opening up radically different attachments, not least because they tend to reinforce the idea that only some bodies can comfortably inhabit the rural. One of the central aims of this book is thus to recognize and investigate how different rural imaginations remain ambivalent in the affective attachments they facilitate.
The contributions in Part 1 provide various perspectives on how the rural is being grappled with today, in its intertwined realities and imaginations,
3 Part 1: Grappling with the Globalized Rural across Disciplines
In 2006, The Handbook of Rural Studies appeared, celebrating the post-1970s “upsurge in rural theorization and conceptualization”; the editors’ main aim was to “enhance the interdisciplinary ‘stock’ of [rural research’s] creative theoretical and empirical endeavours,” and among these endeavors they singled out “engagements both with critical political economy and the ‘cultural turn’ in social sciences” (Cloke et al. XI). Yet, despite the roots of the cultural turn in the humanities and the Handbook’s division into sections on “cultural representation, nature, sustainability, new economies, power, new consumerism, identity and exclusion” – topics also of deep concern to humanities scholars – the interdisciplinary scope of the Handbook did not extend beyond “wider social science debates” (Cloke et al. XII). The more recent Routledge International Handbook of Rural Studies, from 2016, similarly defines rural studies as an “interdisciplinary endeavour,” while containing almost no work by humanities scholars (Shucksmith and Brown 1).
In the humanities, urban studies has been firmly embraced and enshrined under the broad label of “urban humanities” (Cascardi and Dear; Giamarino et al.; Cuff et al.) and narrower ones like “literary urban studies” (Finch). Rural studies, in contrast, has not established as widespread and visible a foothold, even though the term “rural humanities” already appears in a 1979 handbook on the humanities in Minnesota as part of the description of the American Farm Project, led by Bill Schaeffer at Southwest State University and co-funded by the National Farmers Union and the National Endowment for the Humanities (LeBarron 20). According to the NEH’s Humanities journal, the project aimed “to bring the humanities to a non-traditional, farm audience”
While “rural humanities” has not yet acceded to the status of a widely recognized example of the “hybrid humanities” (Cascardi and Dear 6), there has long been an interest in the rural within several humanities disciplines, notably history – where rural history is an established sub-field (Burchardt; Swierenga) – and (especially English) literary studies, with Williams’s The Country & the City recognized as a ground-breaking work. Calls for the establishment of new fields like “rural cultural studies” (Carter et al.) and, most recently, “rural media studies” (Hobbis et al.) have also sounded in response to the privileging of research on urban culture and media. Whether these calls will be successful remains to be seen. What we argue for in this volume is less a multiplication of rural-focused fields within established disciplines than a move towards more broadly interdisciplinary research about differentially globalized ruralities that brings into dialogue scholars from the humanities and social sciences, as well as artists and activists.
Our exploration of the rural as differentially globalized takes up rural geographer Michael Woods’s concepts of the “global countryside” as the “rural counterpoint to the global city” (2007: 491) and “planetary rural geographies” as the counterpoint to the influential thesis of planetary urbanization, which threatens to erase rural specificity (Wang et al.). Notably, when first outlining the “global countryside” in 2007, Woods associated it with ten characteristics, each supported by empirical research in rural areas across the world, while nevertheless maintaining that the global countryside was still only a “hypothetical space” (486). This may be seen to underscore the difficulty, even in
In Woods’s contribution to this volume, which opens Part 1, he argues that the cultural turn in rural studies may, in some instances, have sidelined rural materialities too radically. To redress the balance, he draws on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, as well as Manuel DeLanda, to conceive of the rural as an assemblage with shifting components to which changing meanings are given through coding, decoding, and recoding (or de- and reterritorialization). In this way, both the rural’s material and discursive or expressive dimensions – as well as the ongoing interaction between them – can be accounted for. Taking Trepassey in Newfoundland, Canada, as a case study, Woods shows how it evolved, under the influence of particular globalization processes, from a small subsistence fishing outport to an expanding community centered on an international fish processing plant, only to become, after depleted fish stocks caused the plant to close, a shrinking community having to reinvent itself. By looking at the town’s geographies and infrastructures, as well as at photographs, novels, songs, and poems reflecting (on) its history, present, and possible futures, Woods shows that even though Trepassey is in the process of being recoded as a tourist destination, expressively “the old fishing assemblage” remains present and continues to influence (without fully determining) the stories residents tell about themselves and their surroundings as belonging to the rural.
Where Woods turns to imaginative art forms to enhance his understanding of the rural as material and experienced, literary and film theorist Peter Hitchcock turns to rural materialities – specifically that of land – to better grasp the rural as imagined in postcolonial literature. The postcolonial pastoral is seen to challenge “the capitalist logic of land grabbing and extraction” not through a return to idealized pre-colonial or pre-capitalist worlds, but by
The third contribution in Part 1, by human environmental geographer Rowan Jaines, approaches the entanglement of the material and the imagined in the formation of rural landscapes by way of Walter Benjamin. Benjamin’s poetic take on the rural conceives of it as throwing up, in flashes, dialectical images revealing the material pasts – of land and labor exploitation – covered over by capitalism’s phantasie of controlling nature. Looking at the Fens in Eastern England, Jaines links the monocultural landscape produced by its drainage, enclosure, and technologization to its status as a “democracy desert” and bastion of state landownership. At the same time, she points out that, while “the phantasie of an abundantly productive arable landscape” requires the disavowal of the failures that keep it from full realization, these failures, like the agricultural laborers elided from the historical record, retain a spectral presence. Apprehending these presences becomes possible, Jaines argues, when the Fens are conceived as ekphrastic – a term taken from literary studies, where it refers to “the literary representation of visual art” in a manner capable of questioning representation itself and, on the basis of ekphrasis’ etymological meanings of “speaking out” or “telling in full,” countering the monological (Heffernan 297, 302). Paying attention to the Benjaminian “moments of danger” in which the Fen landscape tries to tell its story in full allows the phantasie of its “natural” and endless productivity to be exposed as fantastical. Crucially, for Jaines, such paying attention requires both a poetic sensibility and a firm grasp on a particular rural area’s past and present material and socio-economic relations.
Lee-Ann Sutherland, Thoroddur Bjarnason, Menelaos Gkartzios, and Esther Peeren shift the focus from how to study the rural as material and imagined to the material circumstances and imaginations of those doing the studying. During the Covid pandemic, they developed what they call the #RuralGazes methodology, designed to make visible how, in addition to being influenced by different theoretical and methodological approaches, scholars’ accounts of the rural (in terms of what is highlighted and what overlooked) are also affected by their personal, cultural, and academic positionalities. The concept of the gaze, referring to “a socially (over)determined way of seeing that is collective and normative,” explains how certain ways of seeing become dominant and determinate in particular contexts, including academic ones. Over time, gazes become naturalized, making it difficult to look otherwise or to see where the blind spots are, but strategies like looking in stages, focusing on details, and looking with others can deterritorialize the gaze. The authors adopt the strategy of looking with others in a collaborative autoethnography using photo elicitation. By analyzing their (affective) responses to rural-related photographs – first with hashtags (descriptive, personal, political, and academic) and then in an extended discussion – they show how their different positionalities lead them to variously affirm or challenge the societal and academic gazes seeking to direct how the rural is seen.
The final contribution to Part 1, an illustrated essay by Wapke Feenstra, continues to reflect on questions of positionality and the gaze, but does so from an artistic perspective. Since 2003, Feenstra, who grew up in the Dutch countryside, has worked as part of the Myvillages artist collective to counter the contemporary art world’s disregard for the rural. If it came into view at all, it tended
With respect to the goals of this volume, the “My” in Myvillages underlines the importance of asking from what perspective the rural is being approached, where that perspective is situated, and what other perspectives it occludes. “Villages,” in turn, stresses the pluriversality of the rural and the need, in academic research and art, for trans-local approaches capable of grasping how the rural is globalized in differential ways that nonetheless converge to create a material-imagined “global countryside.”
4 Part 2: Rereading Globalized Ruralities
The multi-scalar and temporal movements, expansions, and contractions of the globalized rurals that make up the “global countryside” are tackled in Part 2, in which various contributors reread rural imaginations in a way that attends to the intimate, collective, and always political ways in which these imaginations respond to the violent effects of the longue durée of globalization. This mode of rereading is particularly resonant with the one proposed by Williams in The Country & The City. According to Williams, although the rural-urban binary performs as a naturalized, a priori, onto-epistemological given, it is, in fact, an affective-discursive mattering that “has many meanings; in feeling and activity; in region and time” (2011: 4). Only by laying bare these multiple, changing meanings does it become possible to see what functions the rural (as material-imagined) has fulfilled in the history of global capitalism-colonialism, including in the form of the global village, with which we began this introduction. In Williams’s words:
if we do not see these processes [of change], or see them only incidentally, we fall back on modes of thought which seem able to create the
(2011: 289, emphases added)permanence without the history. We may find emotional or intellectual satisfaction in this, but we have then dealt with only half the problem, for in all such major interpretations it is the co-existence of persistence and change which is really striking and interesting, and which we have to account for without reducing either fact to a form of the other. Or, to put it more theoretically, we have to be able to explain, in related terms, both the persistence and historicity of concepts.
This part takes up The Country & The City’s theoretical-methodological emphasis on recognizing rural imaginations as holding together the long and slow time and extensive space of capitalism and colonialism with the more fickle, messy, changeable times and narrower spaces of specific locales in the past and present. The chapters reread the stories told about different rural geographies and communities, and assert that such stories make visible and invisible, felt and unfelt, the scales and times of globalization as it affects the rural. Put differently, this section asks how the differential imaginations of globalized rurals, and – to invoke Spivak once again – a planetary rereading of them, might help to unravel the dominant and persistent chronotopes of rurality. Such unraveling happens in part by considering the planetary rural as multi-scalar and polyrhythmic, and as comprising the non-human and the vertical, seeing and analyzing “connections not only across the Earth’s surface, but into the atmosphere and subterraneanly” or subaquatically (Wang et al. 2023: 2).
The contributors to this section think along with the non-human (dust, cyborgs, monsters, climates, plastic, sponges, crops) and the dehumanized (Indigenous subjects, Black subjects, indentured and indebted subjects, disabled subjects, feminized subjects, AI subjects). They also traverse and reorient the temporal scales of past-present-future, and understand the material and political impacts of rural imaginations across surfaces and between the atmosphere and the subterranean: from Nevadan lithium mines to idyllic space stations, from the deep reaches of the Aegean sea and the plastic seas of Southern Spain, from Regent’s Park to dystopian Californian grub farms, from the Dutch capital of productivist farming to rural Argentinean bar-stores, and from a gentrified Cornish town to the indigenized state of Jharkhand.
The chapters here – to different extents – assert that hegemonic stories of globalization and rurality perform as “foundational regimes of truth” (Wynter 119) that are wrapped up in longstanding colonial, heteropatriarchal, and capitalist epistemes of extraction, domination, mastery, and progress. But a planetary reading of the globalized rural, as Wang et al. also assert, allows the rural to appear variously as a space that both contributes to and suffers from environmental crisis; a space of conflict – rural-urban, intra-rural, and
The first two contributions to this section – by Tjalling Valdés-Olmos and Josh Weeks – emphasize the crucial role of wilderness and frontier imaginations to accentuate how the rural-urban binary needs to be understood within a Eurocentric colonial-capitalist teleology of spatialization. Valdés-Olmos, a cultural analyst and historian, turns his scope to the likes of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Christopher Nolan’s SF film Interstellar, and the hinterland geographies of the US West to investigate the affective labor – in particular, the sense of historicity – the western frontier rural, the farmstead, and the renegade frontiersman perform in tending to contemporary eco-anxieties associated with the limits of capitalist futurity and the realities of climate change. Analyzing Interstellar, he highlights the structural and historical occlusions produced by the film’s reiteration of the rural US West within the racialized and exceptionalist affective order of settler triumph and nostalgia that characterizes the cinematic archive of the western genre and the 1930s social realist photographic archive of the US Farm Security Administration (FSA). Further analyzing the narrative resolution of the film, Valdés-Olmos argues that its supposed assuaging of contemporary eco-anxieties through these generic invocations of the rural US West is rather the assuagement of a latent settler concern over the loss of property, hetero-reproductivity, and progress. He argues, thus, that there is an urgent need to better recognize and more radically interrupt the imaginative and affective sliding of settler anxiety into eco-anxiety that contemporary and genre-specific reiterations of US western rurality facilitate.
Weeks, a literary scholar, follows with a contribution that thinks about the (trans)formative function of the Argentinian gaucho (frontiersman and cowboy) in moments where the long history of globalization impedes the promises of a settler-neoliberal nation-state. He does this through a comparative reading of two short stories that scale the slowly shifting infrastructures of globalization across two distinct moments in Argentinian history: the rapid urbanization and rural migration that intersected with the popular rise of Peronism in the 1940s, and the decades of neoliberal and capitalist violence culminating in the global economic recession of the early 2000s. In Jorge Luis Borges’s “The South,” from 1953, the focus is on how the figure of the gaucho was alienated from its indigenous history and materiality in order to be used to strengthen an emergent nationalist history. While the story complicates
Architect Ben Stringer speaks to Valdés-Olmos’s and Weeks’s analyses of rural imaginations that make legible globalization’s rhythmic and scalar alignment with the ongoing history of capitalism and colonialism by exploring the co-constitutive relation between idyllic renderings of the rural and the global intensification of agricultural productive industrialism in “four fictional rural cottage scenes” that span past, present, and future. First, he articulates how the design of London’s Regent’s Park is informed by a spatial arrangement in which the “global is associated with the city and local with the country.” This cottage scene aesthetically and discursively segregates the nineteenth-century coalescence of rapid urbanization, the forced rural-to-urban migration of peasant communities, and the cumulative profits gained through colonial plantation economies with the emergence of English picturesque landscapes. In contrast, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein affirms the complex scalar interweave between local rural-urban and global metropolitan-peripheral relations by imagining the cottage as bringing together differentially fugitive subjects: Parisians on the run from the French Revolution and its abolition of feudalism, and Frankenstein’s monster, with his “inferred plantation provenance.” Ridley Scott’s SF film Bladerunner 2049 provides the third cottage scene, read by Stringer as an unsettling dystopian imagination – heavy with an anti-colonial potentiality embodied by fugitive, dehumanized subjects – that seems to also critique globalized productivist agricultural futures that rely on idyllic fantasies. Stringer ends with a return to the present, where the 2019 film Bait draws out how, in a Cornish fishing town, urban touristic gazes bump up against the lived experience of its increasingly marginalized native inhabitants. Stringer’s contribution, in light of Part 2’s focus, might be taken as providing
Resonating with the three previous chapters’ analyses of the infrastructural persistence and political vicissitudes that inform globalization’s effects in the age of modernity, Joyce Goggin – whose scholarship sits at the intersection of literature and finance – zooms in on how the rise and demise of the sponge-fishing industry on the Greek island of Kalymnos transformed its rural community, focusing particularly on this industry’s differentiated effects on men and women. The introduction of the scaphander diving suit in the second half of the nineteenth century allowed sponge fishing to become the main industry of the island, aligning it – and the depths of the Mediterranean – with the rhythms of globalized industrial and luxury markets in ways that had profoundly disabling effects on its economy, community, culture, and bodies. As the chapter turns to the present, Goggin takes stock of the damage: the depletion of Mediterranean sponge beds and new tourist economy have created a “new model of indebtedness,” not in the least toward the (subaquatic) environment.
Historian Peter van Dam and cultural analyst Esther Peeren stay with the environmental impact of globalized industrial agriculture, asking whether there is “a place for large-scale, high-yield farming in a sustainable future?” Their chapter investigates how productivist farmers in Hollands Kroon, known as the agricultural capital of the Netherlands, imagine themselves contending with and contributing to discourses, policies, and practices of agricultural sustainability across a variety of scales: local, national, European, and global. Van Dam and Peeren contend that paying close attention to how these farmers negotiate the different forms and scales of sustainability through a distinct ethical positioning (which also has an affective dimension) may provide ways to break the current stalemate in which such farmers feel forced to “act sustainably on the basis of a nature ethics they do not subscribe to.” As such, the chapter contributes to this part’s aim of rereading the differential ways in which particular rural subjects (in their own perception and that of others) are entangled with the infrastructural scales and temporalities of globalization.
Sumati Dwivedi also takes up issues of scale in her discussion of how Sisir Kumar Das’s three-volume A History of Indian Literature, in the context of a global literary system centered on national literatures, retrospectively discerns an Indian literature emerging centuries before the country’s independence. Within Indian literature, moreover, Das positions regional (aañchalik) literature as “a response to western influence” that takes the form of an assertion
The final contribution to Part 2, by artist and researcher Pauline O’Connell, continues to reflect on memorialization processes in a nation-state emerging from a colonial history. Shifting the terrain to Ireland, O’Connell presents her award-winning audiovisual work A Woman’s Culm, which offers a critical redressal of the manner in which rural women – especially those in the area of the Castlecomer Plateux – have been structurally and systematically made invisible in Irish endeavors to memorialize the Struggle for Independence. A Woman’s Culm intervenes in the dominant urban- and male-centered commemoration of the Struggle through a feminist-informed historical engagement with the way culm – a mix of coal dust, clay, and water that, when dried into balls, served as fuel – was forged and used by women in rural coal-mining communities. By playing on the culm ball’s resemblance to a bomb, O’Connell’s work reimagines the object as able to embody the explosive redistribution and reevaluation of “everyday rural histories and knowledge from bottom-up, inside-out, embodied perspectives” within national and global history. In the chapter, O’Connell reflects on the content and exhibition of A Woman’s Culm, as well as on the artist’s insider-outsider positionality vis-à-vis the local community. This allows her to highlight how her approach to retelling silenced histories has the potential to “resound in and beyond the local or national context” to draw attention, for example, to the contribution rural practices like mining
5 Part 3: (De)Romanticized Rurals
The contributions in Part 3 address the persisting sway that romanticizing and homogenizing genres of rurality (Valdés-Olmos), like the idyll and the pastoral, hold in contemporary globalized times, as discussed earlier in this introduction. They make clear how the spatiotemporal infrastructure – or “chronotope,” to bring back Bakhtin – of pastoral/idyllic imaginations continues to manage the fantasy of escaping (and even resolving) urban pressures and corruption by making illegible the enfolding of the rural in the longue durée of globalization. At the same time, they demonstrate how the deleterious effects of globalization on the rural are or can be made legible in, among others, AI-generated images, online influencer content, films, forms of fuel, and air fresheners. Through detailed analyses of how these objects materially and imaginatively embody rurality, it becomes clear how pastoral/idyllic genres of rurality can be deromanticized and their “cruelly optimistic” sustaining of the rural as a good-life fantasy disrupted (Berlant 2011). The chapters emphasize, to varying degrees, how the appearance of disturbing events and subjects in a variety of rural imaginations impede on the pastoral/idyllic designation of the rural as an affective spatiotemporal locus of normatively gendered, sexualized, classed, and racialized belonging that sustains a comforting sense of safety and/or escape. Such moments when the genre’s good-life promises, as Berlant would say, experience a “glitch” (2016: 393), even when they are minor, ambiguous or short-lived, are seen to put binary rural-urban epistemes and their affective economies under pressure. At the same time, far from assuming that, in such moments, pastoral and idyllic imaginations lose all promissory significance, the contributors remain attentive to how certain disturbances can be seduced back into dominant rural-focused genres, gazes, and structures of feeling.
New media scholars Natalia Sánchez-Querubín, Carlo De Gaetano, and Sabine Niederer analyze the functions of one of the most popular contemporary invocations of the idyll: Cottagecore. While being critical of Cottagecore’s “romanticization of Western countryside living” – which fits into a longstanding settler colonial genealogy of rural imaginations – they also affirm the online aesthetics’ potential for managing a sense of “hopefulness that contrasts with dominant feelings of precarity and renditions of apocalyptic climate futures.” Through a speculative methodology that combines “automated image analysis
Staying with the trouble of virtual ruralities, media scholar Shao Shao engages contemporary imaginations of rural space and subjectivity produced by Chinese online celebrities (wanghong). Focusing on one of the most prolific content creators, Li Ziqi, she closely analyzes Li’s videos as well as user engagements with her content on the video-sharing platform Bilibili to question what kind of rural spaces and femininities are presented and how they (re)negotiate normatively gendered “dualisms between city and country.” On the one hand, Li’s self-presentation remains “closely tied to the construction of idealized, monolithic rural femininities” that reduce rural women to traditional, domesticized “objects of nostalgic desire” in the face of the perceived pressures exerted by globalization on urban subjects. On the other hand, viewers’ engagement with Li’s videos through the danmu interface turns them into “a site where disturbances of the idyll that draw attention to what parts of rural reality the idyll denies or excludes may occur as well.” Shao’s contribution affirms that attention to medium-specificity and the affordances of (plat)form is crucial to understanding the differential effects romanticized rural imaginations may have on perceptions of the actual rural.
Rosemary Shirley builds on the critical discussions of Cottagecore’s and Li’s seductive – and therefore highly marketable – romanticized rurals by focusing on the function of consumer culture “in constructing relationships with rural places.” With a hefty dose of humor, she teases out the discrepancies between catching the smell of the UK Peak District national park from her backyard and from a package of Peak District-themed synthetic air freshener by Air Wick. By asserting the imbrication of power and ideology in the shaping of everyday human (and non-human) subjectivities through the concept of “breathing spaces” and Roland Barthes’s Mythologies, the reach and function “air” and “aroma” have in their construction of rural space and the pressing obfuscations such olfactory idylls enact are analyzed. Pinpointing the historical co-emergence of a (Victorian) “pneumatic sublime” and a “romantic sublime,” Shirley argues that contemporary rural air and synthetic translations of that air are embedded in a multisensorial aesthetic regime that extracts it as a rejuvenating, relieving, healing “wellness” commodity that tends to globalized
Kate Woodward shifts our attention to genres of rurality operating in the deromanticized register of the anti-idyll. Her chapter starts by questioning the public and academic categorizations of contemporary British folk horror cinema as “the ultimate ‘Brexit genre,’” arguing that this anti-idyllic categorization actually sustains a traditional binary understanding of rural-urban relations where the rural remains always already posited as a backwards, xenophobic, and dangerous zone for more liberal, open-minded, wealthy, cosmopolitan urbanites. In her analysis of Mark Jenkin’s Bait and Lee Haven Jones’s Gwledd (The Feast), Woodward moves beyond this binary-inflected understanding of the anti-idyll to argue that these films’ deromanticized depiction of Wales and Cornwall responds to “contemporary political realities” by showing how rural subjects are differentially implicated in the historical, cultural, and economic marginalization of these regions. Bait does so by pondering the violence urban tourism and gentrification do to rural Cornwall, making visible how the “fetishization and romanticization” of this Celtic region makes its locals feel like outsiders. Gwledd, in turn, points to the cruel promises of progress and wealth accumulation through extraction that some Welsh rural subjects become attached to. As such, it emphasizes that rural insiders can become onto-epistemologically urbanized, albeit not without punishment. Both films, then, deromanticize the rural while also deconstructing the rural-urban binary, something that most anti-idylls neglect to do.
Like Woodward, the authors of the next two contributions – Marcel Strobel and Dominika Mikołajczyk – are interested in questioning the normative understandings of rural and urban belonging that (de)romanticized rural imaginations facilitate, but they do so from a queer studies perspective. Strobel destabilizes the US Midwest – dominantly imagined and politicized as a rural heartland of “averageness” and white heteronormativity that is free from or hostile to queerness – through an analysis of the coming-of-age film Edge of Seventeen (1998), which revolves around the Cedar Point amusement park in Sandusky, Ohio, and several semi-structured interviews with former Cedar Point employees (including Edge of Seventeen screenwriter Todd Stephens). The amusement park is read as a “liminal” place – “marked by the turnstiles between the world outside the amusement park and the apparently extra-political realm inside it” – that affords subjects possibilities for (re)orientation
Mikołajczyk’s contribution shows the “sexualized politics” at stake in two contemporary films, Under the Tuscan Sun (Wells, 2003) and God’s Own Country (Lee, 2017), in which the Italian and British countryside are romantically imagined as “co-shaped by Central-Eastern European migrant workers.” Both films, she argues, show how these migrants are literally and figuratively put to work to sustain idyllic imaginations of rural authenticity enmeshed in Western European political discourses of rural nationalism, but they also in part affirm these idyllic imaginations through their portrayal of the migrant characters. In Under the Tuscan Sun, the nationalist and ethnic politics of hospitality and belonging ensure that the film’s Polish migrants have to undergo a “laborious integration” process to avoid disrupting the Italian rural idyll – a process that the film codes not as dispossessing assimilationism but as the epitome of romance. God’s Own Country, in Mikołajczyk’s critical reading, serves as an important counterpoint to Strobel’s chapter in making clear how queer Central-Eastern European migrants can be integrated into homonationalist discourses that normatively “re-romanticize” and “restore” the rural – and specifically the family farm – as a space that safeguards traditional, comforting forms of white, patriarchal sociality.
6 Part 4: Reframing Farming
The last part of this volume investigates how farming remains central to conceptions of rurality even as, in many places, “the overshadowing presence of agriculture in rural life has been eroded” (Woods 2011: 77). Woods’s Rural delineates how this is due, on the one hand, to the processes of intensification, concentration, and specialization that accompanied a post-WWII productivism globalized through the Green Revolution, and, on the other, to increased rural tourism and urban-to-rural migration turning the countryside into a consumption good. Through his notion of agrilogistics, Timothy Morton situates farming processes that contribute to the age of planetary destruction within a deeper history of Anthropocentric rurality that emerged in Mesopotamia around 12,500 years ago when people began storing grain. Much like the idyll and pastoral, agrilogistics is premised on enshrining stability and security. However, rather than separating the rural from globalization, Morton conceives of agrilogistics as placing the rural at the roots of globalization: “the
Moreover, the chapters here – much like those of the volume’s other parts – contend with the dominant globalized genres of rurality in which the image of the small-scale family farm and farming as equating authenticity dominates, whether what is imagined is a past or present rural. The family farm is not just overrepresented in cultural imaginations, but also in the imagined worlds of the social and political realm (Vogeler).17 Strategic appeals to deeply ingrained, positively valuated associations of (small-scale family) farming with authenticity – the farmer as hard-working, down-to-earth, and vocation- rather than profit-driven (Bosma and Peeren; Bosma) – and national food security – “no farmers, no food”18 – are being made across Europe as part of a wave of farmers’
In considerations of the crisis of agriculture, a pessimistic view can be discerned according to which change will be resisted as “global agro-food systems” remain dominated by “a very strong dynamic towards ‘sustaining the unsustainable’” (Buttel 214). There are, however, also more optimistic takes. After delineating the trends “reproducing the unsustainability of agriculture,” Frederick H. Buttel proceeds to outline several paths towards sustainable agriculture, including localism and foodshed strategies, environmental regulation, ecotaxation, and multifunctionality (218–224), while Jan Douwe van der Ploeg sees “extended regrounding” – “the reintroduction of nature into the agricultural process of production” – and the “revitalization of food webs” as promising alternatives to the perpetuation of the status quo (269). For Wang et al., the globalized rural of today is not just a space of crisis and conflict, but also one of hope, among others because of the emergence of “more holistic directions” for farming and the “remaking of rural bioeconomies” through, among others, the development of alternative proteins and “regenerative practices” (11–12). The final set of contributions veers towards this hopeful view by delineating practices within farming (past and present), as well as within “farm texts” in literature, television, contemporary art, and film, that envision its remaking as less extractive and destructive for humans, farm animals, other life forms, the soil, and the environment as a whole.
Americanist Maarten Zwiers presents the non-profit Freedom Farm Cooperation (FFC), founded in 1969 by civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer in the Mississippi Delta, as countering the racialized neoplantation agriculture that dominated the region and – with its focus on profit maximization and reliance on pesticides and herbicides – exhausted and poisoned the soil and Black farm laborers. Adhering to an ethics of “interracial humanitarianism” and a “philosophy of cooperative economics,” and, in terms of its farming practices,
In her study of the Beijing Farmers’ Market, based on fieldwork and digital ethnography, cultural analyst Chen Zhou shows how this market for ecological produce responds to contemporary worries among Chinese urbanites about food safety by offering them a rural imagination that revolves around the idea of an “authentic life.” This life has idyllic elements, but it does not fully fit into the “romantic reappraisal” of the rural that some scholars see emerging in present-day China. The ecological farmers supplying the Beijing Farmers’ Market espouse an ethics of care within which the farm appears as an assemblage (in Anna Tsing’s sense) characterized by an “entangled, more-than-human relationality.” Their farming practices are modeled on ideas about the relationship between humans and nature from classic Chinese philosophy, as well as on ancient agricultural manuals. At the same time as opposing the “authentic life” of ecological production to urban pollution, however, the ecological farmers position themselves against neighboring conventional farmers, whom they, in line with the stereotypical view of the Chinese rural as backwards, perceive as unenlightened and complicit with the factory farming system held responsible for several food safety scares. This, as well as the fact that most of the ecological farmers came (or returned) to the rural from the urban, illustrates how, as Zhou concludes, the produce sold at the Beijing Farmers’ Market brings into the urban an (imagination of the) rural that is “in fact already deeply inflected by the urban.”
Moving from real-life farming practices that challenge agrilogistics to the cultural imagination, David Slot turns to Ursula K. Le Guin’s science fiction Hainish Cycle, arguing that the ways farming and especially animal husbandry are portrayed in three short stories – “Solitude” (1994), “Unchosen Love” (1996) and “Mountain Ways” (1996) – propose various paths towards a mode
Staying with cultural imaginations of farming, albeit in a more realistic mode, David Karle and Charles Weak look, from an architectural perspective, at the US sitcom Bless This Mess (2019–2020), which portrays a couple of newlyweds moving from New York City to the fictional town of Bucksnort, Nebraska, to run a farm. This rural imagination, the authors argue, moves away from the dominant way in which rural areas and folk have been portrayed on US television – as uncivilized and therefore either to be ridiculed or feared. In Bless This Mess, the complex realities of contemporary rural and farming life are engaged. While the genre conventions of the sitcom ensure that this engagement remains lighthearted and skews optimistic (envisioning the relatively quick and smooth integration of the urban couple in the rural community), the challenges of small-scale farming in a context of globalized agribusiness are thematized, as are debates within farming about the environmental impact of tillage and pesticide use. Bucksnort, moreover, is presented through various gendered, classed, aged, and racialized perspectives, and as containing a range of architectures and infrastructures (the farmhouse, the general store, the main street, the barn, and the field), making clear that the contemporary US rural is not lived in a singular way. As such, Bless This Mess not only provides a more realistic portrayal of the US rural than most other rural-focused television series, but also questions accounts in the wake of the 2016 presidential election of rural areas as harboring a homogeneous mass of Trump supporters.
In her contribution, visual artist and researcher María Patricia Tinajero explores the potential of participatory art for building connections between rural and urban areas, and between artists and farmers, to promote more
A similar vision of agriculture to that promoted by the Farm/Art DTour – and the Beijing Farmers’ Market – is at stake in the closing contribution by Janna Bystrykh and Clemens Driessen, who discuss the way regenerative agriculture is gaining ground across the Great Plains of the US. The focus is on three interviews – with a filmmaker, a researcher-farmer, and an educator-farmer – that the authors conducted for their experimental film documentary Great Pla/ns (2023), which superimposes a soundtrack containing fragments from fifty-seven interviews about regenerative practices onto drone footage of the depleted and flourishing rural landscapes of the Great Plains. As it is to the Wormfarm Institute explored by Tinajero, reframing the soil as a “living complex ecology” that farmers work with rather than on is central to regenerative agriculture, which is being popularized by books and films, but also risks being commercialized and emptied of its ecological principles by corporate interests. While the authors see the fact that “regenerative” does not have a single, unified meaning as appropriate for a set of practices that emphasize adaptability, open-endedness, and situatedness, for agriculture and rural communities, locally and globally, to become truly regenerative, it is necessary to agree on certain shared principles. The chapter models the “open network of exchange of knowledges across different fields, forms, and geographies” needed to establish these shared principles and put them into practice. This volume, too, is committed to encouraging such an “open network of exchange of knowledges” about the rural and the role its social and cultural imaginations play in how it is shaped and might be reshaped in today’s globalized world among social scientists, humanities scholars, and artists – making this chapter a fitting last word.
This chapter emerged from the project “Imagining the Rural in a Globalizing World” (RURALIMAGINATIONS, 2018–2024), which received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 772436).
See https://statisticstimes.com/demographics/world-urban-population.php. In 2021, there were 3.42 billion people living in the rural, more than at any time before. Since then, the rural population has been declining.
Elsewhere, Nolan points out how villagization in 1950s Kenya was preceded by and modeled on the “new villages” (kampung baru’s) in 1940s Malaya designed to counter the Malayan Communist Party’s anti-colonial mobilization of rural people, as well as on the “New Deal agricultural settlement camps in the western United States and related agricultural planning schemes undertaken by the Tennessee Valley Authority” of the 1930s (2018b: 450–451).
This territorial fabric is approached through the concept of the hinterland in Gupta et al.’s Planetary Hinterlands: Extraction, Abandonment and Care.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines catachresis as “improper use of words; application of a term to a thing which it does not properly denote; abuse or perversion of a trope or metaphor.” Both the “global village” and “villagization” are catachrestic.
Ramesh Srinivasan’s Whose Global Village? Rethinking How Technology Shapes Our World critiques McLuhan’s global village from an information studies perspective, arguing that it “assumes homogeneity instead of respecting plurality” (6). In aiming “to reimagine the concept of the ‘global village’ so that technologies can support a range of practices, visions, priorities and belief systems of indigenous and non-Western cultures around the world,” he, like Spivak, identifies the rural/indigenous as able to renegotiate its forms and effects (Srinivasan 6).
If the “global village” has a material association it is Global Village Dubai, a vast entertainment complex opened in 1997 where visitors can see replicas of global landmarks, rural and urban, in Mini World. A Google search for “global village” yields Global Village Dubai’s website (https://www.globalvillage.ae/en/) as the first result and Wikipedia’s entry on McLuhan’s metaphor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_village) as the second.
Core project members: Esther Peeren (PI), Emily Ng (postdoc), Hanneke Stuit (postdoc), Anke Bosma (PhD), Lélia Tavakoli Farsooni (PhD), and Tjalling Valdés-Olmos (PhD). Affiliated project members: Shao Shao (PhD), Chen Zhou (PhD), and Lingli Ren (PhD). See: https://www.ruralimaginations.com/. Research assistants: Zaza de Ridder, Calvin Duggan, Ayumi Filippone, and Erick Fowler.
In the wake of 9/11, Venezuelan diplomat and international relations scholar Alfredo Toro Hardy recast Samuel P. Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” as a “clash of villages” that sees the “global village” challenged by the “small village” in all parts of the world (29). In Hardy’s view, the small village is legitimately agitated by the homogenizing tendencies of globalization, but misguided in adhering to fixed notions of cultural identity in response.
For Spivak, “fundamentalist nationalism arises in the loosened hyphen between nation and state as the latter is mortgaged further and further by the forces of financialization” (1998: 330). To counter this trend, she proposes “another way of conjuring with nationalism, in the name not of the globe, but of a global girdling” (1998: 330). This “global girdling” (referring to tree-barking by which the growth of a tree can be stopped) is tied to the interruption of globalization by rural/indigenous epistemes and mindsets.
The argument presented here about Williams and Bakhtin also appears, in condensed form, in Emily Ng and Esther Peeren’s forthcoming “Scenes of Extraction: Mediating Rurality, Wilderness, and Hinterland in Dutch and Chinese Film.”
Such persistence is facilitated by a “structure of feeling,” initially emergent, becoming “formalized, classified, and in many cases built into institutions and formations” (Williams 1977: 132).
Both Williams and Spivak contest the abstract conceptions of the rural characteristic of global capitalism-colonialism. For Williams, “The land, for its fertility or for its ore, is in both [farming and mining] abstractly seen. It is used in an enterprise which overrides, for the time being, all other consideration” (2011: 293). Spivak, quoting Paul de Man, advocates for interruptive activism from below that relies on an understanding of irony “as ‘the permanent parabasis of an allegory (of globalization) … the systemic undoing, in other words, of the abstract’” (2013: 214). Such abstraction, however, is, as Williams notes, not without affective appeal, even for those critical of global capitalism-colonialism: “We call the technical changes improvement and progress, welcome some of their effects and deplore others, and can feel either numbed or divided; a state of mind in which, again and again, the most abstract and illusory ideas of a natural rural way of life tempt or at least charm us” (2011: 293).
Underscoring the importance of pastoral aesthetics for the establishment of pastoral power in the Foucauldian sense, Nolan notes how “a neo-pastoralism helped render ‘natural’ the violent transformations wrought by agricultural reform” under the Swynnerton plan in 1950s Kenya (2018a: 38).
Plantations, McKittrick points out, live on “ideologically and materially” across contemporary urban and rural landscapes (3). Now and in the past, they “bridge countryside and the city, not belonging fully to either but allowing traffic between the two” (Wolford 1625).
Considering farming as an extractive practice does not entail its homogenization. Sarah Besky delineates some important differences between industrial agriculture and the plantation, mainly in terms of labor conditions. Woods similarly distinguishes agrarian capitalism from plantation capitalism, while presenting both as “variations on resource capitalism” (2011: 59).
Because definitions of the family farm are often inconsistent even within a single (trans)national context, let alone across the world, agricultural operations that in no way resemble what most people imagine a family farm to be can nonetheless lay claim to the positive affects stuck to it. Berkeley Hill discusses the inadequate way the family farm is defined in EU policy, while Jingzhong Ye explains how the Chinese state uses the term “family farm” (jiating nongchang) not for the smallest farming unit but for “a new type of operative entity in agriculture mainly based on family labours to pursue large-scaled, intensified and commodified agricultural production and operation” designed to displace the type of peasant farming elsewhere designated as family farming (330).
“No farmers, no food” has been adopted as the slogan for farmers’ protests across countries and is the title of a 2023 documentary directed by Roman Balmakov. Subtitled “Will You Eat the Bugs,” the documentary is described as “exposing the hidden agenda behind global ‘Green Policies,’ the untold stories of farmers forced out of business, the disruption this will have on our food supply, and why edible bugs are suddenly being pushed to the fore as a ‘Global Green Solution’” (https://www.nofarmersnofood.com/).
Works Cited
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