Rural Imaginations for a Globalized World

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.

• List of Figures and TablesNotes on ContributorsRural Imaginations for a Globalized World: IntroductionEsther Peeren and Tjalling Valdés-Olmospart 1: Grappling with the Globalized Rural across Disciplines1 Telling Stories about Rural AssemblagesMichael Woods2 Land and the Poetics of Postcolonial PastoralPeter Hitchcock3 Monocultural Montage: towards a Conceptual Dictionary of the RuralRowan Jaines4 Anti-Urbanism and “Real Life” at the PeripheryPavel Pospěch, Ondřej Klíma and Barbora Hubatková5 #RuralGazes: an Autoethnography of Our Ways of SeeingLee-Ann Sutherland, Thoroddur Bjarnason, Menelaos Gkartzios and Esther Peeren6 Rural UndercurrentsWapke Feenstra from MyvillagesPART 2: Rereading Globalized Ruralities7 Rural Historicity in Popular Speculative Futurities: Eco-Anxiety as Settler AnxietyTjalling Valdés-Olmos8 From Golden Age to Neoliberal Wilderness: Representing the Gaucho in Borges’s “the South” and Bolaño’s “the Insufferable Gaucho”Josh Weeks9 Four Cottage Scenes: Reading across Globalized IdyllsBen Stringer10 Sponging and the Island of Kalymnos: Rural, Industrial, GlobalJoyce Goggin11 Scales of Sustainability: the Ethical Positioning of Productivist Farmers in Debates about the EnvironmentPeter van Dam and Esther Peeren12 The Rurality of Region: Narrative and Counter-Narrative in Indian Literary History and PoliticsSumati Dwivedi13 Reflections on a Woman’s Culm, Keeping the Home Fires BurningPauline O’ConnellPART 3: (De)Romanticized Rurals14 #COTTAGECORE: Online Rural and Climate ImaginariesNatalia Sanchez-Querubín, Carlo De Gaetano and Sabine Niederer15 Feminized Idyllic Rurality? the Videos of Li Ziqi on BilibiliShao Shao16 Rural Mythologies, Fresh Air, and the UK’s National ParksRosemary Shirley17 “After you’ve Taken Everything, What will be Left?”: Rural-Urban Relationalities in Folk Horror from the Celtic Margins in the UKKate Woodward18 A Place Like No Other: Exploring the Relationship between Amusement Parks and Queer Men in the MidwestMarcel Strobel19 Rural Authenticity and Homonationalism in Filmic Representations of Central-Eastern European Migrants in the Italian and British CountrysideDominika MikołajczykPART 4: Reframing Farming20 A Garden in the Cotton Fields: Fannie Lou Hamer and Cooperative Economics on the Freedom FarmMaarten Zwiers21 Twisting Ruralities: Ecological Imaginations around the Beijing Farmers’ MarketChen Zhou22 Cultivating Utopias: Dwelling and Fugitive Animal Husbandry in Ursula K. Le GuinDavid Slot23 Bless This Mess: Complex Rural Realities in an American SitcomDavid Karle and Charles Weak24 Exploring the Transformative Powers of Art and Soil: The Farm/Art DTour’s Rural-Urban FlowMaría Patricia Tinajero25 “Does Your Soil Have a Smell?”: Experiences of Regenerative Farming across the Great PlainsJanna Bystrykh and Clemens DriessenIndex