Jennifer Wenzel - 24 Aug 2022

Jennifer Wenzel, PhD, is a professor of postcolonial theory and environmental and environmental humanities, jointly appointed in the Department of English and Comparative Literature and the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. Her books include Bulletproof: Afterlives of Anticolonial Prophecy in South Africa and Beyond (Chicago and KwaZulu-Natal, 2009) and Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment (co-edited with Imre Szeman and Patricia Yaeger; Fordham, 2017). Her recent monograph, The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature (Fordham, 2020), was awarded the 2020 Book Prize by the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP) and is shortlisted for the 2022 Ecocriticism Book Prize awarded by the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment.

“Hinterland, Underground”

This talk aims to add a vertical dimension to the horizontal relations at work in hinterlands. From a metropolitan perspective, hinterlands are “back there,” “over yonder”: beyond the horizon. As Raymond Williams taught us long ago, such distinctions are complicated by the uneven economic and ecological metabolisms between country and city. But in what ways are these metabolisms constituted by the subsoil: by dynamic subterranean flows and stocks of matter and energy whose effects profoundly shape what might seem like stable ground? How are fossil fuels deposits lying beneath rural landscapes incorporated into geographic imaginaries of settler-colonial frontiers and agricultural heartlands? How does soil itself yoke surface to subsurface, hinterland to national and planetary politics? What social and political forces are at work in the hinterland underground?

Rosemary Shirley - 24 Aug 2022

Rosemary Shirley, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester. Her research centres on cultural representations of rural places and she has published widely on this subject including her monograph Rural Modernity, Everyday Life and Visual Culture (Routledge). She co-curated the critical landscape exhibition Creating the Countryside at Compton Verney, and co-edited the related publication Creating the Countryside: The Rural Idyll Past and Present (Paul Holberton). In 2021 she co-curated Everywhere: Life in a Littered World an exhibition exploring artistic responses to litter and pollution at The Arts Institute, University of Plymouth. She was a research partner in The Rural: Contemporary Art and Spaces of Connection led by Whitechapel Gallery and her writing was included in the Documents in Contemporary Art edition: Rural (Whitechapel/MIT Press). She is currently writing a book about contemporary art and rural places, and a collection of creative and critical essays that takes the Midlands region of the UK as lens through which to explore contemporary rurality.

“Beyond Landscape: Contemporary Art and Rural Places”

There is tendency in art history and criticism to place artworks with rural themes within the genres of landscape, land art or environmental art. This narrow framing into what are (in the case of landscape and land art) predominantly aesthetic categories, excludes artworks and projects that engage with the specific conditions, complexities and energies of rural places and their multiple communities. In this paper I will share my current book project Contemporary Art and Rural Places, which aims to delineate a critical space for contemporary art and curatorial practices that imagine, record, activate and represent real and potential ruralities.

Maxwell A. Ayamba - 25 Aug 2022

Maxwell A. Ayamba is a PhD research student in Black Studies at the Department of American & Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham/M4C-AHRC. He is an environmental journalist, former Associate Lecturer/Research Associate at Sheffield Hallam University. Maxwell is founder/co-ordinator of the Sheffield Environmental Movement, and co-founder, the 100 Black Men Walk for Health Group (2004) which inspired production of the national play, “Black Men Walking” by Eclipse and Royal Theatre Production Company in 2018/19. Maxwell was the first Black person on the Board of the Ramblers Association. He was also Portfolio Advisory Board Member of the Imperial College’ Open Air Laboratories (OPAL) Explore Nature project and has published research papers, chapters in books, articles in the media and has also delivered national and international talks in relation to Black & Ethnic Minority communities and the environment in the UK. Maxwell was the recipient of the National Lottery Heritage Award for 2021 and named as one of the 70 most remarkable people in the history of the Peak District National Park in 2021.

“Contested Landscape: ‘Race’ and the English Countryside Space”

The discourse on how the concept of ‘race’ affects access to the English Countryside has become increasingly prominent and contested topic in academia and political debates in the UK. This paper addresses the sociological dimensions of ‘race’, racism and whiteness of the English countryside question, as a discourse to understand the impact this has on racialised groups accessing national parks. I argue this in relation to how the English countryside have always been intrinsically associated with English identity, perceived through an ethnocentric lens, merging national identity with white identity reinforcing the concepts of ‘race’ racism and whiteness. From an ontological and epistemological perspective, I posit as a racialised scholar, there’s need to understand this discourse analysis. I contend this is pivotal, helping to deconstruct, decolonise and dismantle the white racial frame associated with the English countryside. I draw on Critical Race Theory as an intellectual framework to critique these anti-black structures.

Wanning Sun - 26 Aug 2022

Wanning Sun, PhD, is a Professor of Media and Communication Studies at University of Technology Sydney. A fellow of Australian Academy of the Humanities since 2016, she is best known in the field of China Studies for her ethnography of rural-to-urban migration in China. Her work can be found in Maid in China: Media, Morality and the Cultural Politics of Boundaries (2009), Subaltern China: Rural Migrants, Media and Cultural Practices (2014), and her edited volume Love Stories in China: The Politics of Intimacy in the Twenty-First Century (2020).

“Rural Bodies, Urban Imagination”

China’s rural-urban divide has been studied as primarily a socioeconomic issue. Rural-to-urban migration is often seen as an attempt by rural people, especially young people, to get out of the village and become ‘city persons’. But it is still not clear how these aspiring rural migrants in the Chinese cities are imagined in popular narratives and discourses of governmentality. This presentation speaks to this question, and aims to identify some ways in which systemic inequality informs the cultural politics of the mobile body.

Peter Hitchcock - 26 Aug 2022

Peter Hitchcock is a Professor of English at Baruch College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He writes on cultural theory, postcoloniality, critical finance, and global literature. His books include Labor in Culture (2017), The Long Space (2010), Imaginary States (2003) and Oscillate Wildly (1999). He has also co-edited three essay collections, Biotheory (2020), The Debt Age (2018), and The New Public Intellectual (2016).

“Land and the Poetics of Postcolonial Pastoral”

Decoloniality is at once a struggle over land, as stolen, as grabbed, as commodified, as desecrated, as contaminated, as historically “settled,” as politically neoliberal, and as the very substance of contemporary regimes of ownership and accumulation. Land here takes the form of a materialist injunction over the vexed intersectionality of the country and the city, but specifically in the ways the longue durée of the “agrarian question” mediates the cultural expressivity of land in contemporary political economy. While there have been explorations of the postcolonial pastoral in this regard, often the meaning of land itself remains non-contradictory and normative, as if the logic of disceptation exists only at the level of description rather than in the immanent conditions of aesthetic change as such. The latter will be the conceptual focus of this piece, not to romanticize peasant anti-capitalism as artistic practice, but to read the pastoral as a concrete imaginary where land is a space of possibility even when, or precisely because, it is figured within a rhetoric of possession. A few examples will clarify the nature of nature in the cultural representation of land and the spaces of hope in its contestation.

Michael Woods - 26 Aug 2022

Michael Woods, PhD, is Professor of Human Geography at Aberystwyth University in Wales, UK, and Co-Director of the Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research and Data (WISERD). He studies changing rural communities, rural policy and politics, rural development, and the ‘global countryside’, including notably through the ERC Advanced Grant project GLOBAL-RURAL (2014-19). He is author of books including Rural Geography (Sage) and Rural (Routledge) and is a former editor of the Journal of Rural Studies.

“Telling Stories About Rural Assemblages”

Researchers have long told stories about the rural, except that we’ve called them studies, papers, essays. Our academic stories have been our attempt to rationalize the elusiveness of the rural – that the ‘rural’ is something that is real and materially manifested, but is at the same time imagined and socially constructed. For much of the twentieth century, researchers tried to impose a scientific straitjacket on the rural, searching for the definitional essence of ‘rural’ communities, societies or spaces. The cultural turn swept away such positivism and its conceptual dead-ends, emphasizing the construction of the rural through lay and media discourses. Yet, for some the cultural turn went too far in ditching the materiality of the rural, leading to a resurgent ‘new materialism’ informed by relational, hybrid and assemblage thinking.

From this starting point, this paper explores assemblage thinking as a way of bridging the material and the discursive. Approaching the three levels of the countryside-as-an-assemblage, rural-places-as-assemblages, and assemblages-in-the-rural, it briefly describes the principles of assemblage thinking derived from Deleuze & Guattari and DeLanda, before focusing on two key aspects: that assemblages are giving identity through ‘coding’; and that the components of an assemblage have both material and expressive roles. These aspects, it is argued are central to understanding rurality as a category or experience, but also highlight the indeterminacy and multiplicity of the rural. Whilst material aspects of the rural can be explored through conventional social science methods, capturing expressive dimensions is more challenging and blurs the social sciences and humanities, engaging with a plurality of voices and sources.

The second half of the paper illustrates this approach by examining a case study of the transformation of rural communities in Newfoundland, Canada, as the traditional staple industry of fishing has been curtailed. It discusses how the transformation has involved a de-coding and re-coding of rural communities and a re-appreciation of the expressive qualities of components in rural assemblages that has been articulated through multiple media, drawing on examples from academic studies, statistics, literature, art, music and vernacular poetry. The stories that these texts tell, it is suggested, are both expressive components in rural assemblages themselves, and provide insights into the renegotiation of relations and identities in rural communities.