Rural Imaginations Project Launch - June 5, 2019 Rural Imaginations - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Rural Imaginations

Project Launch - June 5, 2019

Rural Imaginations

Departure Points

• Rural globalization blind spot & its consequences
• Importance of cultural imagination (film, television,

literature) in creating and addressing this blind spot.

• Potential to contribute to rural studies from

humanities perspective.

• Need for comparative approach.

Rural Imaginations

Research Questions

• T
• what extent do prominent rural imaginations in the UK, US, Netherlands, China and South Africa

render globalization’s effects on the rural (in)visible?

• What role do traditional rural genres (often themselves globalized) and the feelings/desires they

attach to the rural play in this making (in)visible?

• How can new aesthetic repertoires highlighting the rural as a dynamic site of globalization and

addressing rural-urban divides be developed?

Rural Imaginations

Theoretical Framework

• 1. Chronotope

Mikhail Bakhtin: “…intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically [socially] expressed in literature [life]” (84). Chronotope defines genre and circumscribes what can (sensibly) occur in a fictional/social world and what kinds of characters/subjects have a place in it. —> Reveals how rural imaginations configure rural time-space, what is seen to belong in it, and how it relates to other time- spaces such as the urban, the global, and the wilderness.

Rural Imaginations

Theoretical Framework

• 2. Spectrality
• Analytical tool to grasp phenomena existing in-between

presence and absence, visibility and invisibility, materiality and immateriality.

• Renders accessible what is manifestly there but overlooked in

the present & what lingers or reappears from the past. —> Draws attention to what rural imaginations render invisible —> Allows us to assess to what extent they are haunted by traditional rural genres such as the idyll or the pastoral

Rural Imaginations

Theoretical Framework

• 3. Affect

Refers to what is sensed at the visceral level, including through emotions/ feelings/desires that are social and structured, yet also always evolving.

• Raymond Williams – structure of feeling
• Lauren Berlant – affective atmospheres / historical sensorium
• Sara Ahmed – affective economies

—> Exposes what emotions/feelings/desires are attached to the rural and the consequences for its political mobilization —> Explains why/how people remain attached to outdated imaginations of the rural —> Suggests potential for change

Rural Imaginations

Challenges

• Creating real dialogue with rural studies work in the social sciences
• Corpus selection: what is “popular/prominent” enough?
• Legitimating close readings of limited corpus over “overview” approach or typology

approach

• Maintaining consistency across subprojects while avoiding uniformity
• Comparing different contexts
• Dealing with different national & regional meanings of “rural”

Rural Imaginations

Pilot Presentations

• Lélia T

avakoli-Farsooni – PhD, UK subproject: Poldark (TV series, 2015 - present, BBC)

• Anke Bosma – PhD, Netherlands subproject: Jij bent van

mij [Y

• u are mine] (Novel, 2018, Peter Middendorp)
• Tjalling Valdés Olmos – PhD, US subproject: Queen Sugar

(TV series, 2016 - present, Oprah Winfrey Network)

• Emily Ng – Postdoc, China subproject: Still Life

(film, 2006, Jia Zhangke)

• Hanneke Stuit – Postdoc, South Africa subproject:

Five Fingers for Marseilles (film, 2017, Michael Matthews)