Publications
2024
Afterword: Running with the Metaphor of Social Invisibility
Esther Peeren
Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 72.1 (2024): 81-92.
In this afterword, I reflect on the contributions gathered in this special issue on contemporary literature and social invisibility, which make clear that social invisibility is multivalent, as visibility, invisibility, and the oscillation between them have different meanings and effects in different social and literary contexts. To the points made about social invisibility in the contributions, I add three more. First, after considering social disappearance as a possible alternative to social invisibility, I conclude that the lack of clear boundaries between these two highly elastic metaphors should not be seen as a problem, but as fruitful: running with both metaphors allows us to arrive at a better understanding of the lives led by particular precaritized groups, and to compare these lives across historical and cultural contexts, as well as across approaches and methods. Second, while social invisibility and social disappearance have predominantly been used to figure disempowerment, it should be acknowledged that escaping notice can also empower. A brief reading of Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis illustrates the power self-chosen invisibility may impart to the privileged. Third, I argue that humanities approaches to fictionality and narrative and visual form, as found across different types of art and media, provide ways of thinking through social invisibility that add something valuable to empirical and ethnographic approaches in the social sciences. The main reason for this is that narrative and visual form can defamiliarize our perception of the social world, enabling us to notice again or notice differently what has become unremarkable.
Read the article here.
2023
Pastoral Entrapment and the Idyllic-carceral Continuum
Hanneke Stuit
The Journal of Architecture (2023)
Agrilogistics, a frame of mind and a set of behaviours that consider the environment as existing outside of humans and as inherently pliable to utilitarian and economic purposes, has determined human engagement with the countryside for centuries without second guessing the logics of its approach. Why are such agrilogistics maintained despite proving toxic to humans and other lifeforms? This essay argues that the genre of the pastoral, although based on ambivalence towards the dispossession and exclusion that structures it, forms a linchpin in sustaining agrilogistics’ feedback loops between the imaginary, the material, and the social, thereby determining who does and does not gain access to the rural idyll’s promise of ‘the good life’. Such incorporated pastoral attitudes, I argue, are caught between idyllic habits of signification and the carceral effects and experiences that these idyllic habits effect on others. The essay offers the concept of pastoral entrapment to capture the ubiquity of carceral structures in the rural while indicating the persistence with which we remain tethered to idyllic renditions that actively cover such structures up. After bringing into view the historical imbrications between the countryside as we know it today and the confinement of people, livestock, and ecosystems in general, the essay proceeds to suggest that the rise of domestic colonisation in the Netherlands in the nineteenth century was heavily invested in rural idylls and could be approached as an agrilogistic enterprise that, despite its charitable overtones, encouraged harmful feedback loops between the exploitation of colonised populations (both impoverished and racialised), the depletion of the environment, and a drive for profit. Finally, such an agrilogistic mindset can only be undone by recognising how we remain tethered to pastoral models of thought and what such pastoral entrapment really means for those at the receiving end of it.
Read it here: https://doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2023.2283205
Review
"If Engels could once open an investigation of capitalism from the deck of the ship coming into harbor, this stunning collection makes clear that such an investigation today would have to begin from the hinterland. From swamps and drowned villages to windfarms and deindustrialized wastelands, these essays place the hinterland at the center of capitalism's new logistical form and chart a powerful global map for imaging, understanding, and resisting the subjection of hinterland networks to capitalism's multiple violences. No one will be able to ignore the political, historical, and planetary significance of the hinterland after reading this book."
--- Charmaine Chua, Department of Global Studies, University of California Santa Barbara
Contributions by members of the Rural Imaginations research team
1) Esther Peeren, Hanneke Stuit, Sarah Nuttall & Pamila Gupta, “Introduction: Conceptualizing Hinterlands” (p. 3-30)
2) Emily Ng, “Belly of the World: Toxicity, Innocence, and Indigestibility in Plastic China” (p. 33-50)
3) Tjalling Valdés Olmos, “Ambivalence and Resistance in Contemporary Imaginations of US Capitalist Hinterlands” (p. 163-177)
4) Esther Peeren, “The Hinterland at Sea” (p. 225-237)
Download the book, which is fully Open Access, here.
Planetary Hinterlands: Extraction, Abandonment and Care
Pamila Gupta, Sarah Nuttall, Esther Peeren and Hanneke Stuit (Eds.)
This open access book considers the concept of the hinterland as a crucial tool for understanding the global and planetary present as a time defined by the lasting legacies of colonialism, increasing labor precarity under late capitalist regimes, and looming climate disasters. Traditionally seen to serve a (colonial) port or market town, the hinterland here becomes a lens to attend to the times and spaces shaped and experienced across the received categories of the urban, rural, wilderness or nature. In straddling these categories, the concept of the hinterland foregrounds the human and more-than-human lively processes and forms of care that go on even in sites defined by capitalist extraction and political abandonment. Bringing together scholars from the humanities and social sciences, the book rethinks hinterland materialities, affectivities, and ecologies across places and cultural imaginations, Global North and South, urban and rural, and land and water.
Beyond the Pastoral Paradise: Orienting Black and Muslim People in British Rural Space
Lélia Tavakoli Farsooni
Journal of British Cinema and Television 20.4 (2023): 436–459
While there is an increasing number of Black and Muslim stories in urban settings, cultural imaginations of the British rural as linked to whiteness are pervasive. Despite there being a long-established presence of Black and Muslim people in British rural areas, their bodies are excluded or made to disappear to make the rural and, by extension, the nation (supposedly) safe. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s notion of white habit worlds, this article explores the specific ways in which popular imaginations of rural spaces in the UK orient Black and Muslim bodies in relation to rurality. I will argue that whiteness as the racialisation of the pastoral form is closely imbricated with the Christian pastoral notion of Eden by close reading season five of the TV crime drama Shetland, the feature film Four Lions (2010) and the documentary Arcadia (2017). Download the Open Access article here.
Kaas van eigen bodem?
Anke Bosma & Esther Peeren
In: Kaas = NL, ed. Leonie Cornips, Marieke Hendriksen & Geertje Mak, 241-250. Noordboek, 2023.
This chapter (in Dutch) appears in a book aimed at the general public about the various ways cheese is entangled with Dutch identity. The book is edited by Leonie Cornips, Marieke Hendriksen and Geertje Mak and comes out of the NL-LAB, a multi-disciplinary research team within the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences that looks at Dutch culture and identity, past and present. Read more about the book here.
The Ghost and the Censor: Loss in Parallax
Emily Ng
Critical Times 2023
The history of modern China has been filled with loss in many senses. From certain angles of vision, loss, remembrance, and forgetting orbit around figures of political repression in the People’s Republic (PRC), particularly that of censorship. These approaches posit a link between the Chinese state, national public amnesia, and international transparency that may occlude other configurations of knowing, speaking, and mourning—those of public secrecy, for instance, including stagings of the unspeakable through aesthetic and literary forms. This essay explores such configurations through Mo Yan’s Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out (2008). Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. Read it here.
2022
Het Platteland - De Idylle Voorbij
Emily Ng, Hanneke Stuit, Tjalling Valdés Olmos, Esther Peeren, Simon Mulder, Annebelle Bosch, Lélia Tavakoli Farsooni, Anke Bosma and Calvin Duggan
Armada: Tijdschrift voor Wereldliteratuur 21.75 (2022)
This special issue (in Dutch) of Armada: Tijdschrift voor Wereldliteratuur explores how the rural is represented in literature and film from the Netherlands, France, the United Kingdom, South Africa, Japan, China and the United States. It asks to what extent these representations succeed in moving beyond the idyll and in countering the misleading and aggrieved discourse of the "revenge of the rural."
Edited and with an introduction by Esther Peeren, Anke Bosma, Hanneke Stuit and Tjalling Valdés Olmos. With contributions by Emily Ng, Hanneke Stuit, Tjalling Valdés Olmos, Esther Peeren, Simon Mulder, Annebelle Bosch, Lélia Tavakoli Farsooni, Anke Bosma and Calvin Duggan.
Read the entire issue here.
Plaasfeminism in Ronelda S. Kamfer’s Kompoun
Hanneke Stuit
Tydskrif Vir Letterkunde Vol. 59 No. 1 (2021)
In this article, Hanneke Stuit explores how Ronelda S. Kamfer’s novel Kompoun (2021) deconstructs and diversifies the white patriarchal space of the plaas (farm) by reinscribing it with a highly situated ‘plaasfeminism’ emerging from the female characters in the novel. This critical reinscription through the lives of the McKinney women from the Overberg is necessary, but certainly not triumphant. For Nadia, the protagonist, the idyll of the plaas consists of her admiration of and longing for her maternal forebears and thus provides a source of strength and personhood, but the plaas is also quite literally the scene of a crime from which her family fails to protect her. Kompoun complicates mainstream notions of feminist resistance by charting the internal contradictions of female subjectivity and highlighting the vulnerable position of the McKinney children, who grow up in a community where both adult men and women pose a threat of emotional and physical abandonment and abuse. Yet, in times of need, Nadia manages to mobilise her personal image of the plaas’ beauty as motherly and the women who live there as tough as coping strategies that suspend her imprisonment in the harmful dynamics around her.
Read it all here: https://doi.org/10.17159/tl.v59i1.13232
An Archive of Possible Futures: Rural Idylls and the Recrafting of Colonial History
Hanneke Stuit
In: Magic Visions: Portraying and Inventing South Africa with Lantern Slides. Zuid-Afrika Huis, 2022.
In her contribution to Magic Visions, entitled “An archive of possible futures: rural idylls and the recrafting of colonial history”, Hanneke Stuit follows Ann Stoler in attending to the archive not as simply a vision of the past, but as a container for possible futures. Keeping with the archive at the centre of the publication, Stuit reflects on the slides found within the attic of the Zuid-Afrikahuis in Amsterdam. In this, she explores their portrayal of a South African rural idyll, asking “whether these idylls, besides their conservative connotations, can also be used as a tool to think both present and future with equity.”
You can read more about the publication and download it for free here.
2021
Ritual Futures: Spirit Mediumship as Chronotopic Labor
Emily Ng
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 57.3 (2021): 288-294.
This essay reflects on the still‐present difficulty in approaching contemporary rural mediumship as coeval with their urban psychotherapeutic counterparts. Drawing on ethnographic work in rural Henan province in central China, I describe how both rurality and spirit mediumship have been rendered anachronistic through national imaginaries, anti‐superstition campaigns, and psychiatric discourses. Download and read the essay here.
Affect, Blankness, Theatrics: Rurality and Faciality in Three Chinese Instances
Emily Ng
Asian Cinema 32.2 (2021)
The face and the close-up have been central to film theory since its early days. If modern visual theories of the face arose in Europe amid urbanization and imperial encounter, in the People's Republic of China (PRC), the political aesthetics of faciality became central to Maoist mass mobilizations of the countryside, in part through collective village film screenings. Bringing together themes of faciality, rurality and anxieties of global encounter, this article considers how the rural has been staged through genres of the face in Chinese cinema and television. Through close readings of the Maoist era The Youth of Our Village, Jia Zhangke’s Still Life and Zhao Benshan Media’s series Rural Love Story, I consider three distinct deployments of the face in depictions of rural and environmental transformation. Thinking with while also departing from Deleuze’s formulations in Cinema 1 and Cinema 2, the article traces an emotively intense face reminiscent of the affection-image, a blank face that operates in part as a time-image and a performative face of what might be called a theatrics-image. Across its readings as a site of affective immediacy, despotic inscription, moral character and social-political manoeuvring, the face offers a multivalent site for political, aesthetic and affective mediation, on- and off-screen.
Read it here: https://doi.org/10.1386/ac_00039_1
Invisible Lives of the Rural Idyll: Midsomer Murders and Cynan Jones’ The Long Dry
Esther Peeren
This article explores how certain rural lives are rendered invisible by the enduring dominance of the genre of the rural idyll, which is particularly strong in British culture. Drawing on my previous work about ‘living ghosts’, on Jacques Derrida and on Akira Lippit, I contend that, when dealing with the invisibilized lives of the rural, it is crucial to ask in what sense these lives are invisible and what each form of invisibility makes (im)possible. Two case studies are discussed: the popular television crime drama Midsomer Murders (1997-present), set in rural England, and the 2006 novel The Long Dry by Cynan Jones, set on a Welsh farm. With regard to Midsomer Murders, I show how it affirms the rural idyll’s construction of the English countryside as a space of whiteness. With regard to The Long Dry, I argue that it exposes the rural idyll, in Lauren Berlant’s terms, as a waning genre whose good-life fantasy is no longer viable, while also opening up the possibility of a posthuman idyll adequate to the contemporary globalized rural.
Read it here: https://doi.org/10.4000/ebc.10993
#Proudofthefarmer: Authenticity, Populism and Rural Masculinity in the 2019 Dutch Farmers’ Protests
Anke Bosma & Esther Peeren
In: Politics and Policies of Rural Authenticity. Routledge, 2021.
In this chapter, we analyze 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. It is 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.
Read it here: 9780367550448_C008 OA.indd (oapen.org)
2020
The Ruins of the Rural Idyll: Reconfiguring the Image of the Farm in Homeland and Five Fingers for Marseilles
Hanneke Stuit
Social Dynamics 46.3 (2020)
The symbolic importance of the image of the farm in South African cultural imaginaries can hardly be overestimated, even today. Historically placed at the nexus of the dualism between commercial agricultural areas and the communal areas of the Bantustans, farms are still deeply marked by the processes of colonisation and dispossession that made them possible. The material and symbolic infrastructures associated with the farm continue to sort access to the rural as idyllic and turn the farm into what Stoler has termed “imperial debris.” In this article, I will analyse how Karin Brynard’s novel Homeland and Michael Matthews’ film Five Fingers for Marseilles stage images of ruined farms that nudge audiences away from the “love and ownership of the farm” as one of the privileged scenes of South African rurality. How do these two texts use the farm to draw attention to the disastrous tracks rural idylls, in their (neo)liberal, capitalistic and (neo)colonial guises, have left in the contemporary moment? What kind of rural futures, livelihoods and landscapes can be gauged from the farm in ruin?
Read it here: https://doi.org/10.1080/02533952.2020.1858542
Making Up the British Countryside: A Posthuman Critique of Country Life’s Narratives of Rural Resilience and Conservation
Calvin Duggan & Esther Peeren
Journal of Rural Studies 80 (2020): 350-359
Through a close reading of a 2018 special issue of the popular British magazine Country Life guest edited by Prince Charles, this paper highlights the tension between its stated inclusive view of the rural and the exclusionary paternalistic-conservative politics pursued under this veneer. Combining a narratological method with a posthuman perspective grounded in the recent work of Donna Haraway and Karen Barad, which undoes binary oppositions such as nature-culture and rural-urban by radically reconfiguring notions of agency, difference, and responsibility, we ask: who and what makes up ‘country life’ in the stories presented in the special issue, who and what gets to tell these stories, and which human and non-human actors are marginalised or left out by how the stories are told? Our analysis, which focuses on the special issue’s engagement with notions of rural resilience and conservation, advances debates in rural studies about how to challenge non-inclusive narratives of the rural by: 1) highlighting the continued urgency of critiquing such narratives, especially when they appear in popular outlets like Country Life; 2) drawing attention to the way these narratives may be implicitly rather than explicitly exclusionary, which indicates a need to pay close attention to exactly how their politics of the rural is constructed; and 3) proposing that more intensive engagement with Barad and Haraway can advance the work of rural studies scholars who have long sought to think the rural as more-than-human.
Read it here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2020.10.011
Spectral Revolution: Notes on a Maoist Cosmology
Emily Ng
Made in China (2020)
This essay, published in Made in China, describes the cosmological role of Mao in ritual and spirit mediumship in rural China. It considers the occulted forces hosted by the Chairman’s image and words, across movements of display, concealment, and circulation. Here, the Party-state has a cosmic double, and Maoist anti-religious policies are not what they seem.
Read it here: https://madeinchinajournal.com/2020/10/19/spectral-revolution-maoist-cosmology/
The Mind and the Devil: Porosity and Discernment in Two Chinese Charismatic-Style Churches
Emily Ng
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 26.1 (2020)
This essay explores otherworldly encounters and notions of mind across two charismatic‐style churches in China. In Zhao Village Church in rural Henan province, Christian congregants more often approached the mind as porous to the Devil’s corruption. In Living Church in Shanghai, congregants were more influenced by bounded, psychological notions of the mind as an entity; although the mind was also held to be permeable to spiritual personae, its interior workings stood as the central hindrance to discernment, rather than the externality of the Devil. And while those in Shanghai stressed a gradual, retroactive verification of potential spiritual signs, those in Henan strove for a rhythm of immediate response. Meanwhile, Shanghai congregants described fewer sensory and embodied encounters with divine voice, pain, and healing than congregants in Henan. Such divergent theories of mind, virtuous rhythms, and distributions within the Christian spiritual sensorium might be understood in part through styles of engagement accentuated at these churches, and in part through the uneven unfolding of religious abolition and revival in China, including the heightened urban presence of psychotherapeutic genres and the rural presence of spirit mediumship in recent decades. These variations in personhood and otherworldly encounter, including deeply porous ones, were thus co‐present in an atheist secular milieu, after what have been seen as some of the most thorough secularization campaigns conducted by a modern state.
Read it here: https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-9655.13243
Dutch Domestic Colonization: From Rural Idyll to Prison Museum
Hanneke Stuit, Esther Peeren, Emily Ng, Tjalling Valdes Olmos and Anke Bosma
Collateral 23 (2020)
This cluster is a disturbing dissection of the so-called Colonies of Benevolence (Koloniën van Weldadigheid), agrarian pauper colonies in the rural Dutch province of Drenthe. What might seem “a failed but well-intended philanthropic project of poverty control” turns out to be “a node in the Dutch imperial project”. Against decontextualized, idyllic and nationalistic notions of the rural and the touristic exploitation of the Pauper Colonies, the contributors expose an inconvenient history of colonial and carceral oppression.
Read the cluster here: http://www.collateral-journal.com/index.php?cluster=23
Contributions:
Hanneke Stuit, Dutch Domestic Colonization: From Rural Idyll to Prison Museum
Anke Bosma & Tjalling Valdés Olmos, The Coloniality of Benevolence
Emily Ng, Agrarian Labor as Technology of the Subject: The Dutch Colonies of Benevolence and the Maoist Sent-Down Movement
Hanneke Stuit, The Carceral Idyll: Rural Retreats and Dreams of Order in the Colonies of Benevolence
Esther Peeren, Enter through the Gift Shop: The Rural Pauper Colony of Veenhuizen as a Tourist Attraction
2019
Romance in the Cowshed: Challenging and Reaffirming the Rural Idyll in the Dutch Reality TV Show Farmer Wants a Wife
Esther Peeren & Irina Souch
Journal of Rural Studies 67 (2019): 37-45
This paper examines the representation of rural life in the immensely popular Dutch version of the reality TV show Farmer Wants a Wife (2004-present). It asks whether this representation manages to move beyond the persistent association of rural life with the idyll, which, as many rural scholars have noted, prevents important aspects of contemporary rural life from being seen and understood. A comparative visual and narrative analysis of the first series (2004–2005) and the eighth series (2014–2015) of Farmer Wants a Wife reveals how it initially challenges but ultimately reaffirms this association. The first series emphasises the profound dissonance between the idyllic expectations of the rural on the part of those seeking to find love with the farmers and the decidedly non-idyllic realities of twenty-first-century farming. By the eighth series, the show has largely abandoned its commitment to documenting the realities of Dutch rural life, instead privileging the love stories, for which idyllic portrayals of the rural function as an unquestioned backdrop. The ambivalent, changing way in which the rural idyll is mobilised in Farmer Wants a Wife is conceptualised through the genre theories of Mikhail Bakhtin and Lauren Berlant, which yield new insights into why the association between rural life and the rural idyll is so persistent and how it might be loosened.
Read it here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074301671730815X
A relevant scene from the TV show can be watched here.
Exploiting the Distance between Conflicting Norms: Female Rural-to-Urban Migrant Workers in Shanghai Negotiating Stigma around Singlehood and Marriage
Penn Tsz Ting Ip & Esther Peeren
European Journal of Cultural Studies 22.5-6 (2019): 665-683
On the basis of fieldwork conducted in Shanghai, this article explores how Chinese rural-to-urban migrant women cope with the stigmatization they face as a result of conflicting gender norms regarding singlehood and marriage in their home communities and in Shanghai. We focus on how migrant women legitimate their relationship status as single, married or having a boyfriend in relation to these norms. Our findings reveal that migrant women, while not rejecting existing norms outright, actively pre-empt or counteract the stigmatization of their singlehood or of the fact that they live apart from their husband using coping strategies that exploit their position in between the urban context and their rural hometowns in intricate ways.
Read it here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1367549419847108
2018
The Affective Economies and Political Force of Rural Wilderness
Esther Peeren
Landscape Research 44.7 (2018): 834-845
Although conventionally distinguished from the wilderness, the rural is nevertheless frequently perceived as a site of wildness, both in the sense of the uncultured/uncivilised and in the sense of the natural/authentic. Arguing that the politics of rurality have an important affective dimension that cannot be dismissed as illusionary or neatly separated from supposedly rational assessments, this article explores the affective economies that, in Sara Ahmed’s terms, cause particular feelings and values to become ‘stuck’ to the notion of rural wildness, influencing how it can be mobilised politically. Case studies of how rural wildness is harnessed as a political force in the self-presentation of the Countryside Alliance, a prominent British rural advocacy group, and in the successful 2013 Dutch documentary film The New Wilderness [De nieuwe wildernis] about a rewilding project in the Oostvaardersplassen reveal that, in both instances, the affective economies at play explicitly or implicitly support a conservative politics.
Read it here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01426397.2018.1427706