Unpacking the Cultural Colonization of Place in the U.S. Rural Context

• In Event: (Re)Placing Rural Education: Unpacking Place at the Intersections of Rural and Indigenous Education

Abstract

In The Country and the City (1973), the Marxist literary critic Raymond Williams interrogated 150 years of the English literary canon to reveal historically inaccurate images of and ideas about rural life embedded in the collective consciousness through a form of cultural colonization. The role of place as it manifests in a rural context (rural-as-place) is central to that work. Importantly, the inaccurate images and ideas are understood not as random misrepresentations, but rather as systematic revisions intentionally creating a sentimentalized and sanitized version of rural-as-place that fostered/enabled exploitation by outside capital interests and masked real issues deserving of attention. The primary framework for Williams’s interrogation was a three-part set of structures: economic structures, social structures, and structures of feeling. His treatment of economic and social structures is derived from a fairly straightforward reading of Marx’s historical materialism. Structures of feeling appears to be original to Williams, and represents the manufactured cultural constructs whose evolution articulates a cultural history that is independent of the actual history (but parallels it as an active form of revision of key time frames and transitions). Informed by Williams’s work, this paper utilizes the tools of literary criticism and content analysis to interrogate how rural-as-place has been represented (and misrepresented) in selected works of American Literature that feature prominently in school curricula in the US. More specifically, the paper represents the beginning of an attempt to unpack the artificially-constructed (via structures of feeling embedded in literature) cultural history of rural places in the United States, a history that distorts and obfuscates the diverse histories and ongoing experiences of non-Indigenous rural people (whose stories have been layered on top of the ongoing stories of Indigenous people), and how they are inherently interconnected to the cultural diversity of Indigenous peoples, including their histories, languages, sovereignties, and related concerns and commitments.

Author

• Jerry Johnson, East Carolina University