This volume explores what aspects of contemporary rural life as deeply globalized – and thus implicated in the ongoing, destructive unfolding of colonialism and capitalism – are highlighted and obscured in social, political, economic, and cultural imaginations. It asks how this shapes the ways in which rurality is politically mobilized, affectively encountered, and artistically mediated. Coming from the humanities, the social sciences, and the art world, the contributors bring into focus the persistence of romanticizing imaginations of the rural (such as, for example, the idyll) that position it as a wholesome escape from globalization and its excesses, including looming environmental collapse. In addition, they detail attempts at deromanticization designed to disassociate the rural from whiteness, rugged masculinity, heteronormativity, anthropocentrism, and agrilogistics.
