Rural Imaginations for a Globalized World: Introduction

This introductory chapter begins by recalling how the most conspicuous appearance of the rural in early globalization theory came not in the form of an engagement with its globalized realities but, rather, by way of Marshall McLuhan’s metaphor of the global village. While endorsing critiques of this metaphor by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Ginger Nolan that establish more material grounds for the globalized rural, we insist it also has imagined dimensions that co-shape its material realities. Subsequently, we outline how the contributions to this volume explore the role played by social, political, economic, and cultural imaginations in determining what aspects of contemporary rural life – as deeply globalized and thus imbricated in the ongoing, often violent un- and enfoldings of colonialism and capitalism – are highlighted or obscured. This reveals the critical labor necessary to challenge the continued dominance of romanticizing imaginations that look at the rural through idyllic or pastoral lenses, and the affective management such imaginations help to perform.