Rural Imaginations for a Globalized World / Esther Peeren, Tjalling Valdés-Olmos.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

List of Figures and Tables -- Notes on Contributors -- Rural Imaginations for a Globalized World: Introduction -- Esther Peeren and Tjalling Valdés-Olmos -- part 1: Grappling with the Globalized Rural across Disciplines -- 1 Telling Stories about Rural Assemblages -- Michael Woods -- 2 Land and the Poetics of Postcolonial Pastoral -- Peter Hitchcock -- 3 Monocultural Montage: towards a Conceptual Dictionary of the Rural -- Rowan Jaines -- 4 Anti-Urbanism and "Real Life" at the Periphery -- Pavel Pospěch, Ondřej Klíma and Barbora Hubatková -- 5 #RuralGazes: an Autoethnography of Our Ways of Seeing -- Lee-Ann Sutherland, Thoroddur Bjarnason, Menelaos Gkartzios and Esther Peeren -- 6 Rural Undercurrents -- Wapke Feenstra from Myvillages -- PART 2: Rereading Globalized Ruralities -- 7 Rural Historicity in Popular Speculative Futurities: Eco-Anxiety as Settler Anxiety -- Tjalling Valdés-Olmos -- 8 From Golden Age to Neoliberal Wilderness: Representing the Gaucho in Borges's "the South" and Bolaño's "the Insufferable Gaucho" -- Josh Weeks -- 9 Four Cottage Scenes: Reading across Globalized Idylls -- Ben Stringer -- 10 Sponging and the Island of Kalymnos: Rural, Industrial, Global -- Joyce Goggin -- 11 Scales of Sustainability: the Ethical Positioning of Productivist Farmers in Debates about the Environment -- Peter van Dam and Esther Peeren -- 12 The Rurality of Region: Narrative and Counter-Narrative in Indian Literary History and Politics -- Sumati Dwivedi -- 13 Reflections on a Woman's Culm, Keeping the Home Fires Burning -- Pauline O'Connell -- PART 3: (De)Romanticized Rurals -- 14 #COTTAGECORE: Online Rural and Climate Imaginaries -- Natalia Sanchez-Querubín, Carlo De Gaetano and Sabine Niederer -- 15 Feminized Idyllic Rurality? the Videos of Li Ziqi on Bilibili -- Shao Shao -- 16 Rural Mythologies, Fresh Air, and the UK's National Parks -- Rosemary Shirley -- 17 "After you've Taken Everything, What will be Left?": Rural-Urban Relationalities in Folk Horror from the Celtic Margins in the UK -- Kate Woodward -- 18 A Place Like No Other: Exploring the Relationship between Amusement Parks and Queer Men in the Midwest -- Marcel Strobel -- 19 Rural Authenticity and Homonationalism in Filmic Representations of Central-Eastern European Migrants in the Italian and British Countryside -- Dominika Mikołajczyk -- PART 4: Reframing Farming -- 20 A Garden in the Cotton Fields: Fannie Lou Hamer and Cooperative Economics on the Freedom Farm -- Maarten Zwiers -- 21 Twisting Ruralities: Ecological Imaginations around the Beijing Farmers' Market -- Chen Zhou -- 22 Cultivating Utopias: Dwelling and Fugitive Animal Husbandry in Ursula K. Le Guin -- David Slot -- 23 Bless This Mess : Complex Rural Realities in an American Sitcom -- David Karle and Charles Weak -- 24 Exploring the Transformative Powers of Art and Soil: The Farm/Art DTour's Rural-Urban Flow -- María Patricia Tinajero -- 25 "Does Your Soil Have a Smell?": Experiences of Regenerative Farming across the Great Plains -- Janna Bystrykh and Clemens Driessen -- Index.

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