Beyond Backwardness: Revisiting Rural Spaces as Sites of Resistance, Renewal, and Radical Potential (ACLA 2025)

Organizer: Brittany Frodge

Co-Organizer: Kelly Ferguson

Due to varied complex historical processes such as industrialization, urbanization, and colonization, the rural has often been articulated in literature and other cultural products as an underdeveloped space tied to the past that can only progress through civilizing acts of modernization; Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s Facundo or Civilization and Barbarism (Argentina, 1845), Camilo José Cela’s The Family of Pascual Duarte (Spain, 1942), and J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy (United States, 2016) are just a few examples of works in which rural spaces are portrayed as backwards and hopeless. 

Under a sociocultural framework that takes the only options for inhabitant salvation to be modernization or abandonment of rural spaces, such regions are left vulnerable to devastating resource extraction and ideological weaponization by political and economic opportunists. 

Recent years have seen contestatory narratives regarding this negative portrayal of rural spaces as doomed, unenterprising, and provincial wastelands abound. In the realm of literature, for example, more recent novels such as Sara Mesa’s Un amor (Spain, 2020) reflect a younger generation’s return to the countryside as key for developing the sort of self-understanding that enables an effective defense against capitalism and misogyny. Samanta Schweblin’s Distancia de rescate (Argentina, 2014) complicates the notion of the rural as a static refuge for urban families by emphasizing how modernizing practices have tainted the land, and, in the United States, vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance’s condescending repudiation of the so-called “hillbilly” region in his 2016 memoir has estranged him from many rural voters. 

As (neo)rural cultural production propagates across contexts in response to capitalism-fueled climate change and its political consequences—such as (eco)fascism—this panel seeks to spark conversation about rural spaces as nuanced sites of knowledge, revolution, and potential hope. It is open to any region and time period.


Organized by Brittany Frodge, Kelly Ferguson, and David Delgado-López.