This volume explores what aspects of contemporary globalized rural life are highlighted and obscured in social, political, economic and cultural imaginations, and how this shapes the ways in which rurality is politically mobilized, affectively encountered, and artistically mediated.

List of Figures and Tables Notes on Contributors Rural Imaginations for a Globalized World: Introduction  Esther Peeren and Tjalling Valdés-Olmos part 1: Grappling with the Globalized Rural across Disciplines 1 Telling Stories about Rural Assemblages  Michael Woods 2 Land and the Poetics of Postcolonial Pastoral  Peter Hitchcock 3 Monocultural Montage: towards a Conceptual Dictionary of the Rural  Rowan Jaines 4 Anti-Urbanism and “Real Life” at the Periphery  Pavel Pospěch, Ondřej Klíma and Barbora Hubatková 5 #RuralGazes: an Autoethnography of Our Ways of Seeing  Lee-Ann Sutherland, Thoroddur Bjarnason, Menelaos Gkartzios and Esther Peeren 6 Rural Undercurrents  Wapke Feenstra from Myvillages PART 2: Rereading Globalized Ruralities 7 Rural Historicity in Popular Speculative Futurities: Eco-Anxiety as Settler Anxiety  Tjalling Valdés-Olmos 8 From Golden Age to Neoliberal Wilderness: Representing the Gaucho in Borges’s “the South” and Bolaño’s “the Insufferable Gaucho”  Josh Weeks 9 Four Cottage Scenes: Reading across Globalized Idylls  Ben Stringer 10 Sponging and the Island of Kalymnos: Rural, Industrial, Global  Joyce Goggin 11 Scales of Sustainability: the Ethical Positioning of Productivist Farmers in Debates about the Environment  Peter van Dam and Esther Peeren 12 The Rurality of Region: Narrative and Counter-Narrative in Indian Literary History and Politics  Sumati Dwivedi 13 Reflections on a Woman’s Culm, Keeping the Home Fires Burning  Pauline O’Connell PART 3: (De)Romanticized Rurals 14 #COTTAGECORE: Online Rural and Climate Imaginaries  Natalia Sanchez-Querubín, Carlo De Gaetano and Sabine Niederer 15 Feminized Idyllic Rurality? the Videos of Li Ziqi on Bilibili  Shao Shao 16 Rural Mythologies, Fresh Air, and the UK’s National Parks  Rosemary Shirley 17 “After you’ve Taken Everything, What will be Left?”: Rural-Urban Relationalities in Folk Horror from the Celtic Margins in the UK  Kate Woodward 18 A Place Like No Other: Exploring the Relationship between Amusement Parks and Queer Men in the Midwest  Marcel Strobel 19 Rural Authenticity and Homonationalism in Filmic Representations of Central-Eastern European Migrants in the Italian and British Countryside  Dominika Mikołajczyk PART 4: Reframing Farming 20 A Garden in the Cotton Fields: Fannie Lou Hamer and Cooperative Economics on the Freedom Farm  Maarten Zwiers 21 Twisting Ruralities: Ecological Imaginations around the Beijing Farmers’ Market  Chen Zhou 22 Cultivating Utopias: Dwelling and Fugitive Animal Husbandry in Ursula K. Le Guin  David Slot 23 Bless This Mess: Complex Rural Realities in an American Sitcom  David Karle and Charles Weak 24 Exploring the Transformative Powers of Art and Soil: The Farm/Art DTour’s Rural-Urban Flow  María Patricia Tinajero 25 “Does Your Soil Have a Smell?”: Experiences of Regenerative Farming across the Great Plains  Janna Bystrykh and Clemens Driessen Index