“I don’t think that’s romantic at all!” Imagining the Dutch rural in an age of globalization

The rural is deeply impacted by globalization, yet this impact is often not visible in popular culture. This dissertation examines how globalization becomes apparent or is obscured in contemporary literature, film, and television depicting the Dutch rural. I demonstrate how the imagined opposition between country and city is mapped onto, and feeds into, the cultural construction of the Netherlands as divided into center and periphery, or Randstad and Randland, and explore the implications this dichotomy has, for example, with regard to which areas are seen to be financially, politically, and culturally “of interest,” and where the legacies of the Dutch colonial past are imagined to be located. By analyzing objects which center pressing current issues associated with the rural such as counter-urbanization, refugee housing, agricultural reform, rural marginalization, and organized crime, I aim to unsettle the dominant imagination of the Dutch rural as idyllic, as a space of whiteness, and as disconnected from the global economy. Simultaneously, I highlight the political stakes of continuing to imagine the Dutch rural in idyllic ways. The objects I analyze include the novels Jij bent van mij (You are mine, Peter Middendorp 2018) and De heilige Rita (The blessed Rita, Tommy Wieringa 2019); the films Weg van jou (Away from you/Crazy about you, Jelle de Jonge 2017) and New Kids Turbo (Haars and Van der Kuil 2010); the television series Onze boerderij (Our Farm, 2018-current), Undercover (2019-2022), and Grenslanders (Borderlanders, 2019); and the documentary Plattelandspioniers (2019).