Rural Imaginations for a Globalized World - (Hardcover)

About the Book

This volume explores what aspects of contemporary globalized rural life are highlighted and obscured in social, political, economic and cultural imaginations, and how this shapes the ways in which rurality is politically mobilized, affectively encountered, and artistically mediated.

Book Synopsis

This volume explores what aspects of contemporary rural life as deeply globalized - and thus implicated in the ongoing, destructive unfolding of colonialism and capitalism - are highlighted and obscured in social, political, economic, and cultural imaginations. It asks how this shapes the ways in which rurality is politically mobilized, affectively encountered, and artistically mediated. Coming from the humanities, the social sciences, and the art world, the contributors bring into focus the persistence of romanticizing imaginations of the rural (such as, for example, the idyll) that position it as a wholesome escape from globalization and its excesses, including looming environmental collapse. In addition, they detail attempts at deromanticization designed to disassociate the rural from whiteness, rugged masculinity, heteronormativity, anthropocentrism, and agrilogistics.

About the Author

Esther Peeren is Professor of Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. Her publications include the monograph The Spectral Metaphor: Living Ghosts and the Agency of Invisibility (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and the edited volume Planetary Hinterlands: Extraction, Abandonment and Care (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024).

Tjalling Valdés-Olmos is Assistant Professor of Media and Culture at the University of Amsterdam. His research and publications engage a range of topics at the intersection of decolonial and settler colonial studies, with a specific interest in cross-media, genre, affect, and history.