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 o 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 Explains why/how people remain attached to outdated imaginations of the rural —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 ou 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)