Comparative Rural Criticism

What can rural worlds tell us about modernity? Comparative Rural Criticism re-centers the rural not simply as an object of study, but as a critical vantage point from which to rethink modernity itself. Even as scholarship has increasingly challenged linear and city-centered models of social change, the rural has often remained secondary as a site from which modernity is theorized. Our cluster examines how rurality can reshape our understanding of modernity. Drawing on literature, film, ecocriticism, gender studies, and political economy, we bring together comparative approaches across regions and historical contexts.

Rural perspectives bring into view the contradictions within projects of modernization: the rural can appear at once as what modernity seeks to transform or leave behind and as a space continually produced by modern forces themselves. Attending to these tensions exposes the displacement, violence, and human and ecological costs that can accompany urbanization, nation-building, and narratives of progress. The cluster therefore asks not simply what happens to the rural under modernity, but what the rural allows us to see differently about modernity.

Image: Rurality & Modernity, designed by April Tong from three of her original watercolor paintings