1 Migrant Workers in the Globalized Countryside
A common characteristic of European nationalist-populist discourses in the twenty-first century is the idea of “going back to the roots” in search of a “true” national culture and pride seen as having been lost due to rapid processes of globalization. Such “going back” often takes the shape of a nostalgia for life in the countryside. In contrast to the heterogeneous representation of the urban – portrayed, on the one hand, as liberal and inclusive, and, on the other, as hosting the turmoil of different identity categories coming together – the rural tends to be perceived as an idyllic place untouched by modernity and globalization, and as retaining the cultural practices, ideologies, and sense of community associated with a good life (Shucksmith 163–164). European nationalistic discourses appropriate this narrative of the rural as morally pure or upholding national heritage (Fuglestad et al. 1), and use it to politically construct the countryside as a space of whiteness and heteronormativity. The rigid opposition of the rural to the urban in idyll-based nationalistic imaginations ignores the possibility of a common ground between the two, rejecting their
Despite their prominent presence in the history of the European countryside, migrant laborers – and their agency in shaping the countryside – are considered out of place in nationalistic rural imaginations, grounded in the idyll, due to their roots lying elsewhere. This causes them to be rendered invisible or expellable. In this chapter, I look at two contemporary films, Under the Tuscan Sun (Wells, 2003) and God’s Own Country (Lee, 2017), in which the Western European countryside is imagined as co-shaped by Central-Eastern European migrant workers. However, while the imagination of the migrant workers attests to a consideration of the countryside as globalized, these migrant subjects also cannot fully dispel the rural as idyll, as the countryside continues to be configured as a space of therapeutic nostalgia and rustic authenticity. Thus, whereas the films present a complex array of sometimes contradicting imaginations of the globalized countryside, their re-imaginations of Western European rurality also to some extent uphold the countryside as an idyllic space where migrant subjects are forced to navigate racialized and gendered dynamics of (national) assimilation and exclusion.
God’s Own Country, by centering on a queer romance, adds the dimension of sexuality, invoking another characteristic of contemporary European nationalistic discourses: “homonationalism.” Jasbir Puar develops homonationalism as a conceptual framework for understanding how “acceptance” and “tolerance” of LGBTQIA+ people has evolved into an indicator by which the right to national sovereignty is assessed (2007: 4). Puar presents homonationalism as a facet of modernity marked by a historical shift within the relation of state, capitalism, and sexuality: some, usually white, homosexual bodies have been rendered worthy of protection by nation-states, whereas other “othered” bodies, often racialized ones, remain unprotected (2013: 337). Like idyll-based nationalism, homonationalism excludes migrant workers. While celebrating supposedly “transgressive” neoliberal queer subjects as part of the nation, it pathologizes and criminalizes deviant and unruly populations, including racialized migrant laborers (Puar 2007: 24).
This chapter explores the convergence of nationalist discourses based in the rural idyll with those relying on homonationalism by asking: What kinds of space and forms of agency are available to the Central-Eastern European migrant within the Western European imaginations of the countryside offered by Under the Tuscan Sun and God’s Own Country? Does the becoming visible of Eastern European migrants in these films sustain idyllic conceptions of the countryside or reshape them? And, finally, what sexualized politics are at
2 The Migrant Worker and Idyllic Rural Authenticity
The nostalgia attached to the rural in Western cultural representations romanticizes the countryside, constructing it as peaceful and therapeutic. The therapeutic value of the rural is contained within the framework of authenticity, which paints the countryside as a space that allows people to realize themselves as what, deep inside, they already are, and thus to (re)connect with an essential core that is considered invariable (Bosma and Peeren). Such an imagination of the countryside overlooks the rural as a working environment – a space, for many, of poverty, deprivation, oppression, and exploitation (Shucksmith 163). Although the portrayals of Central-Eastern European seasonal migrant workers in both Under the Tuscan Sun and God’s Own Country somewhat disrupt classical idyllic imaginations of the rural by underscoring that rural space has different meanings for different people, depending, among others, on what they do in it, the migrant workers are also assigned a vital role in safeguarding an idyllic rural authenticity.
In Under the Tuscan Sun, the traditional Western idyllic imagination of the countryside as offering a relaxing, authentic lifestyle is evoked through the perspective of the American protagonist, Frances, who views the Italian countryside as a therapeutic space – an escape from her stressful urban life and divorce. The therapeutic value assigned to the countryside by idyllic
Under the Tuscan Sun portrays the Polish men at work in several scenes showing the gradual refurbishment of the house bought by Frances. The film accelerates these scenes, which, on the one hand, allows more of their work activities to be included and emphasizes that the countryside for these migrant workers is not a realm of rest and relaxation but of ceaseless toil and movement. On the other hand, this stylistic choice obfuscates the actual time that goes into creating Frances’s fantasy of idyllic rural authenticity and reduces the Poles to marginal characters whose actions do not warrant the same sustained attention as hers. Nevertheless, a sequence depicting how Frances picked the Poles to do the renovations does counter the common depiction of migrant workers as interchangeable and as less skilled than local craftsmen but preferred for their cheapness. Short scenes portraying Frances’s conversations with the different candidates for the job make clear that although the Polish workers were competing with more “rustic” Italian farmers and even
Frances’s decision to turn down local farmers shows that her fantasy of living in the Tuscan countryside does not include a desire to replicate their way of life. At the same time, however, the more cosmopolitan and cultured interior designer does not embody the life she desires either, perhaps because his unapologetic sexism (displayed in the way he ogles Frances’s breasts) associates him with the rural idyll as a patriarchal realm. Her confident decision to hire the Polish workers could be read as affirming her need for Tuscany to be an idyllic getaway supporting her journey to authenticity or “self-realization”: hiring them ensures that she does not need to labor herself, but can have the house done up as she wants it, with her calling the shots rather than being dictated to by local customs or a designer who objectifies her. The fact that the Poles have worked on the house before, moreover, authenticates them as experienced and trustworthy purveyors of the rural idyll she was attracted by in the first place, an authentication that enables Frances to envision a future in which she belongs in the Italian rural, despite not having roots there.
Crucially, Frances’s embrace of the rural as a globalized space comprising diverse migrant demographics, of which she can become a part, can only take place under the condition that the migrant workers adhere to her conception of idyllic authenticity, which may reject overt sexism but still includes an endorsement of a rural masculinity linked to “heavy and dirty physical labour” (Bosma and Peeren 120), as visualized in a scene where the migrants refurbish Frances’s home. That Frances is able to attain “self-realization” in the rural is not only exemplified by how she comes to learn and understand the values of rural community life but also by her active shaping of her rural idyll. In contrast, the Polish migrants do not have the agency to materially change the Italian countryside in accordance with their desires; they can only remake it through labor that is directed by others. Therefore, although the notion of idyllic rural authenticity proves to some extent malleable for Frances, the migrant workers remain bound by their position in the global economy. They provide the labor necessary to sustain her rural imagination, which, by remaining in the idyllic mode, obfuscates the exploitative dimensions of this dynamic. The idyllic rural authenticity pursued by Frances is central to the film’s imagination of the Tuscan countryside, and although the Polish migrants’ presence and work are not completely invisibilized, the narrative framing makes it seem as if Frances is doing them a favor – a favor they repay by working to her specifications and affirming her idyllically-imagined rural retreat as available not just to locals but also to some specific newcomers like herself.
The scene continues with the friend encouraging Johnny, whom she knows is gay, to meet her male fellow student, whom she says is funny “like you used to be,” to which Johnny responds: “Before I had to join the real world.” The “real world” in his understanding is the tough reality of farm life as an adult, which, although it enables him to be close to the land and animals, is also a source of worry and misery, and possibly an impediment to building a romantic homosexual relationship. In the dialogue between Johnny and his friend, class discrepancies are brought to the fore as part of the rural. Similar to Frances, the friend, who, unlike Johnny, could afford to leave her rural home, can now afford to treat the countryside as a place one comes back to in pursuit of rest and relaxation. For Johnny, however, the countryside seems to encumber his happiness.
It is not just through this scene that God’s Own Country imagines the British countryside in a manner that seems to refute the rural idyll: Johnny’s work is portrayed as unrelenting and exhausting; his family is cold and querulous; and his father, by assuming the authority of the rural patriarch, orders him around and refuses to listen to Johnny’s perspective when they discuss how to run the farm. The film also challenges idyllic rural imaginations of the family farm by portraying farm animals being treated as pure commodities; for the Saxby’s, engaging with the animals is about making a profit and lacks any particular emotional attachment. At the beginning of God’s Own Country, a sequence of shots with high-contrast lighting portrays Johnny and his father disposing of a stillborn lamb (Figures 19.1 and 19.2). The dark background highlights the
Screenshots from God’s Own Country
However, the film also holds on to the promise of an idyllic restoration. A sense of countryside sentimentality, of a close-knit community of families who genuinely and lovingly care for their land and cattle, is regained by the arrival of Gheorghe, a Romanian seasonal worker who shows love and care for the Saxby family and their animals alike. Juxtaposed with the matter-of-fact
Screenshots from God’s Own Country
Nevertheless, as idyllic imaginations of the rural are often related to the past, using a migrant body to perform its recuperation in the present resonates with and risks affirming the dominant Western (European) imagination of Romania, Gheorghe’s country of origin, as underdeveloped compared to the UK. As part of the former Eastern Europe, Romania falls under the purview of the discourse on “backwardness” established after the end of communism, according to which the former Eastern Europe needs to “catch up” to Western standards of liberal democracy (Mies 56). In the film, the two imaginations – that of the rural idyll as a lost idealized past and that of Eastern Europe as “backward” – merge and are reaffirmed in the representation of the Romanian migrant as more authentically rural, as instinctively closer to the land and animals, than the Yorkshire farmers. Moreover, Gheorghe’s representation as nurturing, both in his treatment of farm animals and of Johnny when they become lovers, constructs him as a feminized Other who also stands in for Johnny’s absent mother (Johnny lives with his father and grandmother; his mother is said to have left them).
Similarly to the Polish characters in Under the Tuscan Sun who work to sustain Frances’s imagination of a Tuscan rural authenticity, Gheorghe’s representation as a caring, friendly, and mothering Other – an idealized good migrant – allows him to repair the rural idyll for the Saxby family. Hence, rather than renegotiating the terms of Western imaginaries of the rural, the representation of the Central-Eastern European migrant characters in the two films shows them laboring to continue an idyllic legacy of authenticity in the Italian and British countryside. This representation, however, acquires a much more complex dimension in the films when the migrants forge romantic relationships with local characters. In the following part, I explore the representation of the assimilation of these migrant characters into the Western European countryside and how this romance-driven process reinforces idyllic imaginaries of rural spaces.
3 The Sexualized Dynamics of Rural Assimilation
Under the Tuscan Sun and God’s Own Country integrate the migrant laborers into the local community through a process of assimilation driven by their involvement in romantic relationships. I read the two films’ portrayal of this process through Jacques Derrida’s inquiry into the ontology of hospitality. Derrida
In Under the Tuscan Sun, the homogeneity of the Tuscan rural is interrupted by Frances’s arrival as part of a romantic tour aimed at gay couples, the “Gay & Away tour.” Even though Frances is not gay, her friends, who had initially bought the tickets but were not able to go at the last minute, assure her that the tour will be a relaxing environment to recover from her divorce trauma. As they traverse the Italian countryside, Frances and the others on the tour form a group that does not visually fit with the homogenous aesthetic of Tuscany that the film conveys. The ethnically and sexually diverse tourists wear baseball hats, vibrant shirts, and shorts, where the local people exhibit a more conservative and traditional dress style. Frances, nonetheless, is more of a fit with the locals, as she is clothed rather modestly and in a neutral color scheme. There is also a disparity between the way that Frances relates to the rural environment and the way the other tourists do; whereas for them the Italian countryside is solely a holiday destination, a place meant for the consumption of “romantic” Tuscan sceneries, for Frances it is a place where she could potentially settle down. This portrayal of the American urbanites’ entry into the Italian countryside sets up the film’s representation of migrants to the rural as received with hospitality only if they do not differ too much from the established norms of the local community. Notably, Frances, as the only white heterosexual on the tour, is the sole participant to remain in Tuscany. By suggesting that for the others on the tour the Italian rural can only be a romantic (and romanticized) holiday destination, the film regurgitates the dominant imagination of queer subjects being both unwelcome and unable to live in rural spaces more permanently (Herring 10).
This is most clearly demonstrated by Paweł, the youngest Polish worker, who maintains a serious relationship with a local Italian girl, which marks him as a migrant willing to assimilate and settle in the community. Nevertheless, his desire to be accepted is unmet, as her family members reject him as an unsuitable partner because of his ethnicity. Paweł’s rejection resonates with Derrida’s concept of “conditional hospitality,” where, instead of responding to the ethical injunction to receive a foreigner with absolute hospitality, not asking for anything, not even the foreigner’s name, the host offers a welcome with defined conditions (Derrida and Dufourmantelle 25). The film portrays Paweł’s arduous attempts to earn the family’s, and the community’s, respect: unlike Frances, he is not accepted on his terms, but has to mold himself into what is considered an acceptable, properly behaved guest. Most notably, Paweł must participate in a flag-throwing contest, solely performed by men, to prove his familiarity with and absorbance of the local culture, and his ability to outrun the Italian competitors (Figure 19.5).
Screenshots from Under the Tuscan Sun
The contest makes clear how the Italian nation is imagined as rooted within its rural, patriarchal space. In the flag-throwing scene, Paweł’s Polish ethnicity is disguised by his wearing of a traditional Italian costume, so that the migrant’s appearance is no longer visually different from that of the local participants (Figure 19.6). After Paweł manages to outrun the other contestants, he is finally granted the “right to hospitality.” This right, which is contingent upon his adopting an Italian cultural identity and hiding his Polishness, allows Paweł to marry the Italian girl he is in love with and assimilate into her family. There is a strong suggestion that the community’s hospitality would have
Interestingly, in both films, the laborious integration of the Central-Eastern European migrants into the Western European rural communities is represented through the metaphor of building walls. In Under the Tuscan Sun, short scenes throughout the film show the Polish migrant characters building a wall on Frances’s property the purpose of which is never specified. In the scene in which Frances says goodbye to the Polish migrants, after they have finished their work for her, the Poles reveal an engraving on the wall reading “Polonia.” This signals the migrants’ bringing their homeland into the Italian countryside, marking it as a site of multinational relationality and globalization. However, the necessity for the workers to make the engraving also points to the fact
Whereas in Under the Tuscan Sun Frances constructs an idyllic refuge for herself, which includes having a wall built to her specifications by the Polish workers, in God’s Own Country, the traditional stone wall on the property of the farm is repaired by Gheorghe and Johnny’s joint labor. Metaphorically, this act of wall-mending expresses the restoration of the fading rural idyll represented by the Saxby family. Before Gheorghe begins to repair the cracks in the stone wall, he is represented as an outsider. Accommodated in a small caravan beside the farmhouse, the film highlights his status as a seasonal migrant worker, to whom the “right to hospitality” does not have to be extended as he is only there temporarily, and only to work. Nevertheless, the narrative changes when Gheorghe and Johnny start working together on the wall and begin to form an intimate relationship, enabled by their joint labor at a distance from the farmhouse, unmonitored by Johnny’s father. As the stone wall – and with it the rural idyll – is reconstructed, the metaphorical wall that Johnny has built around his emotions and sexuality is torn down, with the implication being that he can now “find himself” in MacKrell and Pemberton’s sense, returning to being an authentic rural subject and becoming an authentic queer subject too.
Importantly, in terms of his queer subjectivity, the film does not represent Gheorghe as a “backward” migrant, following the common Western European portrayal of Central-Eastern European otherness; rather, he is depicted as the “progressive” figure in the film because he exhibits a healthy relationship to his emotions and sexual desires. Gheorghe sets an example for Johnny, who is portrayed as emotionally inhibited, unable to form intimate attachments that go beyond casual sexual encounters. In their conversations during the wall-mending, they jokingly and affectionately refer to each other as “freak” and “faggot,” invoking but also rejecting the homophobic rural environments they were both raised in. Gheorghe, much like he did in relation to the farm animals, models for Johnny how to give and receive care instead of closing himself off to emotional and sexual attachment. Similarly to the wall in Under the Tuscan Sun, the wall in God’s Own Country metaphorically expresses, on the one hand, Gheorghe’s ability to materially affect the English countryside, whilst, on the other, highlighting the sexual politics of belonging that this imagination of the rural relates to the recognition of the migrant as a national subject.
As Gheorghe and Johnny’s relationship advances and they become less discreet, Johnny’s grandmother finds a used condom in Johnny’s bedroom and
Gheorghe has more agency than the Polish migrant workers in Under the Tuscan Sun and is a much more central character, but in his role as repairer of the rural idyll – and of Johnny’s family – he ends up reaffirming traditional rural values and effacing the tensions within the contemporary rural and the unsustainability of the rural idyll laid bare in the first part of the film. While Gheorghe and Johnny’s queer relationship disrupts the heteronormative space of the rural idyll, it ultimately – also through Gheorghe’s function as a stand-in for Johnny’s mother – affirms the monogamous (white) couple as the center of the rural idyll and, by extension, the British nation. The only friction that remains is the racism Gheorghe encounters, which suggests that his right to hospitality in the rural remains contentious on account of his Eastern Europeanness.
Puar’s framework of “homonationalism” makes it possible to recognize the representation of homosexual romance as a product to create a brand for queerness in rural spaces which enforces racial, sexual, and national norms (2007: 2, 31). In God’s Own Country, Gheorghe restores the rural idyll for the Saxby family with a particular (homo)normativity based on heteronormative and reproductive models of relationality. The right to hospitality, signaling his recognition as a subject at home in the British countryside, is extended to Gheorghe not as a racialized migrant worker but on the basis of his participation in sustaining the norms established by rural homonationalism.
The development of Johnny and Gheorge’s relationship in the film can be criticized for establishing a “Western queer utopia” related to a fantasy of the West as a uniquely tolerant, liberal, and accepting place (Feldmann 104). Such a critique becomes even more trenchant when considering the placement of this fantasy within the migrant body. The often state-endorsed homophobia that governs most Central-Eastern European countries drives the construction of an imagination of a counter-world in the West, where being queer is accepted, if not celebrated. This imagination parallels the imagination of the
Even though God’s Own Country, in its early parts, challenges the rural idyll by highlighting the tough conditions, discrimination, and violence that can be found in the British countryside, the film’s ending proposes a rather uncritical return to the idyll that portrays all characters as successfully finding their place in a countryside re-romanticized by the queer relationship blossoming within it. This countryside is not structurally but only marginally changed by Gheorghe’s integration into it, with this change ascribed to his queerness more than to his migrant status. In Under the Tuscan Sun, the rural idyll is similarly reaffirmed as not in need of change by the integration, through romantic relationships with locals, of Frances, and, after a more extensive and demanding assimilation process, Paweł.
4 Conclusion
The close readings of Under the Tuscan Sun and God’s Own Country bring to the fore the different stakes at play in (de)romanticizing and re-romanticizing rural imaginations that, instead of rendering migrant workers in the rural invisible, include them as part of a globalized countryside. Studying the representation of migrant labor through the lens of the rural idyll and the queer perspective that homonationalism evokes reveals the different power dynamics in Western European national politics of rural assimilation and authenticity and how they condition the extension of the right to hospitality.
In the context of Central-Eastern European migrant experiences within the Western countryside, the films showcase that the recognition of the migrant as a rural subject is contingent upon their integration into a traditional and normative imagination of Western European countryside life. In the two films, this imagination is enforced by subjects who are able to benefit from their considerable
In Under the Tuscan Sun, the right to hospitality is unequally distributed among the migrant characters; whilst Frances – the American protagonist – can move through and integrate into the rural smoothly, the Polish workers’ potential to belong to this Italian rural is dependent on the quality of their labor, their skill at Italian flag-throwing contests, and, ideally, marriage to a local woman. This suggests that the conditions for the extension of the right to hospitality of this imagined Italian countryside are dependent on how well its outsiders fit within the racial dynamics of this space, what kind of capital they possess, and whether they are willing to perform a nationalized notion of idyllic authenticity. In God’s Own Country, the queer romance adds another layer to the sustaining of an idyllic rural imagination, that of rural homonationalism. Instead of signaling a queer critical revision of the countryside, Gheorghe restores a normative rural idyll through the film’s imagination of him as a feminized character who stands in for Johnny’s missing mother. Paired with Johnny’s configuration as a more masculine subject, this facilitates the farm’s restoration as a space that sustains white, heteropatriarchal sociality.
What is integrated into the contemporary representation of the Western European countryside in the two films is not the migrant as such, but a disciplined version of them that secures the re-romanticized cultural fabric of the rural idyll, which, in the end, is only marginally challenged by its reconfiguration within the context of globalization. This representation of the migrant cannot be treated as a challenge to the conceptualization of a rural rooted in idyllic authenticity. Rather, it works to preserve this conceptualization in a new form that acknowledges the globalizing present while maintaining a politics of assimilation that is conditional upon the migrants’ ability to mask their cultural identity and labor to preserve the more normative and populist rural good-life fantasies of authenticity.