From radio podcasts and public lectures to academic workshops and publications, the RURALIMAGINATIONS team engaged in a range of activities to disseminate its findings.

Globalization – as a process of modernization – is primarily associated with urbanization; its impact on rural areas tends to be neglected, leading Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to refer to the rural as the “forgotten front of globalization.” This 2-day workshop at Peking University seeks to challenge this forgetting – also often conceptualized as a “making invisible” – by asking: How can the rural become visible to scholars of culture and society as a dynamic, heterogeneous site of globalization and modernization across which these processes unfold in different ways, resulting in advantages and disadvantages, connection and disconnection, good and bad feelings (e.g. nostalgia and resentment at being “left behind”), environmental concerns and opportunities for regeneration?

The workshop is part of a research project titled “Imagining the Rural in a Globalized World,” based at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands and funded by the European Research Council. The project examines how the globalized/modernized rural is imagined in contemporary film, television and literature in the UK, the US, the Netherlands, China, and South Africa. At the workshop, we concentrate on imaginations of rural modernization in China but also seek to compare China to other contexts. In addition, the project’s focus on film, television and literature is extended to other cultural forms, including visual art and social media, and to social conceptions of the rural as, in Arjun Appadurai’s terms, an imagined world “constituted by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups spread around the globe.” Our aim is to explore, across the social and cultural realms, what aspects of contemporary globalized/modernized rural life – human and non-human – do and do not become visible locally, nationally, and globally, and how this affects the ways in which the rural is materially shaped, affectively experienced, and artistically mediated.

See the Workshop program here and read a report on the workshop on Peking University’s website (in Mandarin) by GUO Lang, who assisted in organizing the workshop, here.

Excursion to Xinzhuang Village & Xiayuan Village, Changping, Beijing

On 16 May 2024, ZHOU Chen organized an excursion for the participants in the Social and Cultural Imaginations of Rural Modernization Workshop to Xinzhuang Village and Xiayuan Village. Xinzhuang Village is one of the locations where ZHOU Chen is conducting fieldwork for her PhD on the rural imaginations circulating around the Beijing Farmers’ Market. During the excursion, we visited organic farms, village shops, a waste recycling facility and artist studios run by urban-to-rural migrants.

The rural – especially in idyllic and pastoral genres (themselves now globalized) – is often conceived as providing a refuge from globalization and its driving forces, capitalism and (neo)colonialism. This causes the rural’s intimate involvement in globalization processes to be overlooked, making it, in Gayatri Spivak’s words, the “forgotten front of globalization” (2003). Alternatively, the rural is seen as on the verge of losing its distinctiveness as it is swallowed up by planetary urbanization (Brenner 2014), putting in question the need to study it as rural. How can we imagine ruralities – pluralized, historicized, and thought across their materialities, epistemologies, and affectivities – otherwise? And, conversely, how can we imagine globalization as not only about urbanization but also about ruralization (Krause 2013) and “planetary rural geographies” (Wang et al. 2023)?  

Following Raymond Williams’ seminal genealogy and critique of the dominant binary through which rurality was thought in England and the British Empire in The Country & the City (1973), we look to concepts like the heartland, the hinterland, the borderland, the commodity frontier, the plantation, the provincial, the peripheral, and the regional to reimagine ruralities as coextensive with not just the urban but also the suburban and the wilderness, while harboring distinct qualities, quandaries, and potentialities. We are also interested in how rural land and soil, as well as the (human and non-human) animal and vegetal life inhabiting the rural have been thought by thinkers more usually associated with urbanism, like Karl Marx – whose Debates on Wood Theft and the Right of the Poor was republished in Daniel Bensaïd’s The Dispossessed (2021) – and Henri Lefebvre – whose work on the rural was bundled by Stuart Elden and Adam David Morton in On the Rural: Economy, Sociology, Geography (2022), and from posthumanist, postcolonial, and decolonial perspectives.   

See the workshop program here.  

Image: Terra Libera: Who Owns the Countryside? / Terra Libera: Van wie is het (platte)land? Exhibition @ Rijksmuseum Twenthe, 2023-2024. Photograph by Esther Peeren.

WiSER Seminar Rural Imaginations - Wits University, Johannesburg

Tjalling Valdés Olmos’ presentation, “Unsettling US Rurality: Indigenous Comedy, Affect, and Decolonizing Genres of Spatialization in Reservation Dogs,” considered US rurality as a settler genre of spatialized relationality and explores how contemporary and popular Indigenous American imaginaries assert a different relational engagement with non-urbanized space, and those that inhabit it, in non-proprietary terms.

Workshop participants: Esther Peeren, Hanneke Stuit, Tjalling Valdés Olmos, Birgit Kaiser, Kathrin Thiele, Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor, Sam McAuliffe, Jacques Lezra, Vicky Kirby, Siebrandt van Keulen, Timothy O’Leary and Shannon Winnubst.

The position papers presented at the workshop will be published on the Terra Critica website.

Keynote Speakers: Maxwell Ayamba, Corinne Fowler (online), Peter Hitchcock, Rosemary Shirley, Jennifer Wenzel, Sun Wanning (online) & Michael Woods.

The program and audio recordings of the keynotes can be found on this website under August 2022 Conference.

In this workshop (held in Dutch) Dr. Ir. Peter Veer, researcher, cultural entrepreneur and filmmaker, presented his dissertation Bewogen landschap: een cultuurhistorische studie over de filmpraktijken van het ministerie van Landbouw 1945-1985 (completed at the University of Amsterdam in 2020) and showed some of the propaganda films made by the Ministry of Agriculture between 1945 and 1985 analyzed in the dissertation.

The workshop also featured a presentation by Paul Fischer, history student at the University of Amsterdam, about his research project Het ‘kleine boeren vraagstuk’ in de jaren 1950-1975: een familiegeschiedenis uit Daarle”.

Both presentations focused on the changes that took place in the post-war perception of farmers and agriculture, among scientists, politicians and farmers themselves, and the relations of influence and tension between the different perceptions in circulation locally, nationally and internationally.  

Online studio on the documentary Americaville,
directed by Adam Smith James, with Tjalling Valdés Olmos

The Self-Image and Public Image of Dutch Farmers and the Politics of the Rural

On 4 December 2020, the RURALIMAGINATIONS team and guests discussed two unpublished texts:

#Proudofthefarmer: Authenticity, Populism and Rural Masculinity in the 2019 Dutch Farmers’ Protests
Anke Bosma & Esther Peeren
This chapter, due to appear in the edited volume Politics and Policy of Rural Authenticity (Routledge, 2021), analyzes the role played by a particular notion of authenticity in the discursive framing of the Dutch farmers’ protests of late 2019 and early 2020 by the protesters and various politicians, as well as in the remarkably sympathetic initial public response. The protests were sparked when a Member of Parliament suggested a halving of livestock numbers would be appropriate given the agricultural sector’s substantial contribution to nitrogen emissions. The farmers’ resistance to this proposed measure was couched in a more general argument related to the re-invention of the rural-urban divide, about farmers being indispensable yet misunderstood and beleaguered. It will be our contention that the authenticity claimed by and ascribed to the protesting farmers drew legitimacy from the intimate association of authenticity with the rural identified and critiqued by the Frankfurt School philosopher Theodor Adorno in his 1973 The Jargon of Authenticity. The fact that the rural, and farmers in particular, have long been taken as exemplifying authenticity and thus as inherently authentic has made the “authentic farmer” a pleonasm. This ingrained idea, as the authors aim to show, was not only what drove the early support for the farmers’ protests by a large majority of the Dutch public, but also what facilitated an alignment between the protests and a populist nationalist politics.

Scales of Sustainability: Redefining the Position of Productivist Farmers in Debates about the Environment
Peter van Dam & Esther Peeren
The article-in-progress analyzes the results of a study of agrarians in the municipality of Hollands Kroon. It discusses how the surveyed and interviewed farmers – most of whom are involved in large-scale, intensive agriculture – conceive of sustainability, and how they position themselves in relation to issues of sustainability pertaining to their own businesses but also to global food security and climate change.

Remaking the Chinese Village through Cinema and Pork Markets

On 17 November 2020, Emily Ng organized an online webinar featuring talks by Chenshu Zhou (University of Pennsylvania) and Mindi Schneider (Wageningen University). Both talks were recorded and can be streamed by clicking on the title.

Cinema Off Screen: The Projectionist’s Labor in Chinese Rural Film Exhibition
Chenshu Zhou, University of Pennsylvania
Chenshu Zhou is incoming assistant professor of cinema studies in the Department of History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. Her book Cinema Off Screen: Moviegoing in Socialist China is forthcoming with the University of California Press in 2021. In this talk, Chenshu Zhou focuses on the physical labor of rural film projectionists in the early years of the People’s Republic of China (1949-1966). Unlike film exhibition in urban centers, conditions of rurality during this period determined that rural film projectionists played a unique interfacing role in film exhibition. As couriers, projectionists literally connected film reels to audiences in remote areas, urging us to recognize the role of human labor in the cinematic apparatus. Meanwhile, the projectionist’s body, now an object of audiences’ gaze, was actively deployed by the cultural establishments as a locus of meaning and propaganda, mediating a socialist ethos of labor that celebrated hard work, sacrifice, and the malleability of the human body.

Site, Source, and Sink: Rendering the Chinese Countryside in the Age of Pork
Mindi Schneider, Wageningen University
Mindi Schneider is Assistant Professor of Sociology of Development and Change at Wageningen University. She is Senior Editor of the journal Commodity Frontiers. Pork production and consumption skyrocketed in China following Reform and Opening in the late 1970s, catapulting pork to the top of global meat markets. Throughout the reform era (post-1978), as the pork industry has steadily intensified in China, so too have the problems associated with it: industrial pork production has transformed bodies of land, water, and people in both rural and urban spaces. This talk focuses on state and capital renderings of the Chinese countryside during this “age of pork,” explored through Marx’s concept of metabolic rift and the related notion of epistemic rift.

Boerenzij meets RURALIMAGINATIONS

RURALIMAGINATIONS Expert Meeting Aberystwyth