Genres of Rurality

With globalization primarily perceived as an urban phenomenon, this book asks what kind of understandings of the 21st-century US rural—and by proxy the urban and other non-urbanized spaces—emerge through popular reiterations of established rural genres like the idyll, the anti-idyll, the pastoral, and the frontier. Against the backdrop of a globalized present marked by a supposed increasing rural-urban divide, this book asks what kind of understandings of the 21st-century globalized US rural emerge through popular reiterations of established rural genres across television series and films like Yellowstone, Queen Sugar, Queer Eye, Nomadland, Interstellar, and Reservation Dogs. Genres of Rurality answers that question by analyzing the contemporary function of longstanding genres of rurality (such as the idyll, the pastoral, and the frontier), while also exploring what happens—politically and culturally—when such genres are challenged and transformed. Genres of Rurality is an interdisciplinary (pop) cultural critique that is ultimately interested in the kinds of collective and divergent attachments, fantasies of belonging and moments of discontent, affective investments and disinvestments, and political stakes that contemporary imaginations of US rurality manage, and for whom. Genres of Rurality focuses on the crucial role played by pop cultural imaginations in determining what aspects of contemporary rural life, as historically and differentially affected by globalization, do and do not become visible and felt, which, in turn, influences how the rural is mobilized politically.