Skip to main content

Beyond Backwardness: Revisiting Rural Spaces as Sites of Resistance, Renewal, and Radical Potential

Type: Virtual

Virtual Session

Description

Due to varied complex historical processes such as industrialization, urbanization, and colonization, the rural has often been articulated in literature and other cultural products as an underdeveloped space tied to the past that can only progress through civilizing acts of modernization; Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s Facundo or Civilization and Barbarism (Argentina, 1845), Camilo José Cela’s The Family of Pascual Duarte (Spain, 1942), and J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy (United States, 2016) are just a few examples of works in which rural spaces are portrayed as backwards and hopeless. 

Under a sociocultural framework that takes the only options for inhabitant salvation to be modernization or abandonment of rural spaces, such regions are left vulnerable to devastating resource extraction and ideological weaponization by political and economic opportunists. 

Recent years have seen contestatory narratives regarding this negative portrayal of rural spaces as doomed, unenterprising, and provincial wastelands abound. In the realm of literature, for example, more recent novels such as Sara Mesa’s Un amor (Spain, 2020) reflect a younger generation’s return to the countryside as key for developing the sort of self-understanding that enables an effective defense against capitalism and misogyny. Samanta Schweblin’s Distancia de rescate (Argentina, 2014) complicates the notion of the rural as a static refuge for urban families by emphasizing how modernizing practices have tainted the land, and, in the United States, vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance’s condescending repudiation of the so-called “hillbilly” region in his 2016 memoir has estranged him from many rural voters. 

As (neo)rural cultural production propagates across contexts in response to capitalism-fueled climate change and its political consequences—such as (eco)fascism—this panel seeks to spark conversation about rural spaces as nuanced sites of knowledge, revolution, and potential hope. It is open to any region and time period.

Organized by Brittany Frodge, Kelly Ferguson, and David Delgado-López.

Schedule

Friday, May 30, 2025
10:30 AM CDT - 12:15 PM CDT
Room: Virtual Conference

Papers

Nature and rurality in contemporary Iberian narrative fiction
Angela Fernandes — Universidade de Lisboa (ULISBOA)
Haunted Trees: Spectrality, Gender and Basque Identity in Asier Altuna’s Amama (2015)
Nagore Sedano Naveira — University of Puget Sound
No hay Escapa(toria): Renegotiating the Rural in Sara Mesa’s Un amor
Brittany Frodge — Ohio State University
Friday, May 30, 2025
12:30 PM CDT - 2:15 PM CDT
Room: Virtual Conference

Papers

Reclaiming Castilian Heritage: La Perdiz Roja's Cultural Revival in the Face of Rural Depopulation
David Delgado — Carleton College
Rurality in Exile in Juan Ramón Jiménez’s La isla de la simpatía (1981)
Robert Myak — University of Kentucky
Nostalgia for Freedom: Rebellious Rural Landscapes in the Poetry of Juan Antonio Corretjer
Victor Figueroa — Wayne State University
Saturday, May 31, 2025
10:30 AM CDT - 12:15 PM CDT
Room: Virtual Conference

Papers

What the Old Man Knew. Patriarchy, Rootedness, and Modernization in Barranca abajo
Emilio Irigoyen — Universidad de la República (Uruguay)
Unruly Rural Landscapes vs. Barbaric Modernity in Jayro Bustamante's Ixcanul (2015), Temblores (2019), and La Llorona (2019)
Kelly Ferguson — Miami University
Brazilian Gauchism: Ideology, Detachment, and the Shaping of Southern Brazilian Identity
Paulo Soares — Stony Brook University (The State University of New York)
Saturday, May 31, 2025
12:30 PM CDT - 2:15 PM CDT
Room: Virtual Conference

Papers

Wild Lands, Tamed Gardens: Resisting Colonial Ontologies
Asher Courtemanche — Cornell University
Rural Chinese Kitsch: Journey to the West and the Critique of Techno-Orientalist Modernity
Wujun Ke — New York University Shanghai
Spatial and Spiritual Liminality in Paradise: Morrison’s Musings of an Abolitionist Future
Lauren Sim — University of St. Thomas
Sunday, June 1, 2025
10:30 AM CDT - 12:15 PM CDT
Room: Virtual Conference

Papers

Resisting “Backwardness”: From Fun Home to Appalachian Activism
Katie Hogan — University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Frontier Fantasies: Trans Ecologies in the Nineteenth-Century Dime Novel Western
Emily Coccia — Carleton College
Between the Domestic and the Public: Family Narratives and Gender Politics in Tell It to Women
Lin Wu — University of Wisconsin-Madison
Sunday, June 1, 2025
12:30 PM CDT - 2:15 PM CDT
Room: Virtual Conference

Papers

Poetics, Placeholder Infrastructure and Rural Placemaking
Sarah MacDonell — McGill University
George William Russell’s "Rural Community" and Irish Modernity
Cody Jarman — University of Pikeville