Session Abstract

This panel explores the changing political and cultural landscapes of twentieth century rural America. We argue that the "place" of the countryside in national life has evolved over the past century and continues to play a crucial, if under-examined role in broader political debates. Our panel examines the very nature of the countryside’s relationship to the modern American nation-state by tracing the economic, political, and cultural infrastructures connecting downtowns, exurbs, and hinterlands: from connections paved literally in hotly contested asphalt, to political campaigns calculated to cement the New Right’s down-on-the-farm appeal, to grotesque cultural representations that sculpt stony sexual differences between the metropolis and its rural Others. All of these links, we argue, are fundamental to understanding the cultural and political landscapes of modern America. Over the century, the geography of America, both imagined and real, was structured not only by agricultural and industrial transformation and concomitant political and economic upheaval, but also by dynamic cultural debates among rural, suburban, and urban people alike about what the “country” was and who belonged there.

            The related themes of “lives” and “stories” unfold in each paper’s examination of changing representations of rural people. The authors seek to understand how the lives of rural Americans shaped political debates and in turn how shifts in the “story” of the countryside changed their lives. Each paper focuses on a single venue in which representations were made and contested. Moving beyond vague concepts of “folk,” these papers explore the precise political contexts that shaped rural lives and organized the imagined geography of American politics. In all three papers, rural America is a stage where political dramas are performed, applauded, and critiqued.

Tammy Ingram explains how wealthy city slickers driving fancy new automobiles clashed with market-bound farmers—literally and figuratively—along the Dixie Highway, an elaborate interstate highway network that linked rural and urban communities but also highlighted divisions between them. Jim Giesen’s rural scene is a football stadium, where a rock concert in 1985 drew 80,000 farmers and farm supporters. The political debate spawned by the first Farm Aid concert helped shape not only policy but further representations of rural people, farmers and non-farmers alike. Gabe Rosenberg’s drama is one of dysfunctional rural families created to entertain urban and suburban horror film audiences, but which in turn shaped long-term ideas about what exactly constituted a “normal” family in postwar America.

          This panel unites cultural and political studies of the countryside by showing how the representations and realities of rural life have shaped national political debates.  Scholars have chronicled rural political movements like populism, progressivism, and evangelical conservatism, as well as on the litany of economic crises that have disproportionately affected rural people. We add to those studies by showing how such movements develop in conversation with rural social realities and fantastical imaginings of an idealized countryside. All three papers address the political and cultural dimensions of rural life even while defining and redefining the ever-shifting boundaries of what and who is counted in the “country nation.”