The affective economies and political force of rural wildness

Abstract

Although conventionally distinguished from the wilderness, the rural is nevertheless frequently perceived as a site of wildness, both in the sense of the uncultured/uncivilised and in the sense of the natural/authentic. Arguing that the politics of rurality have an important affective dimension that cannot be dismissed as illusionary or neatly separated from supposedly rational assessments, this article explores the affective economies that, in Sara Ahmed’s terms, cause particular feelings and values to become ‘stuck’ to the notion of rural wildness, influencing how it can be mobilised politically. Case studies of how rural wildness is harnessed as a political force in the self-presentation of the Countryside Alliance, a prominent British rural advocacy group, and in the successful 2013 Dutch documentary film The New Wilderness [De nieuwe wildernis] about a rewilding project in the Oostvaardersplassen reveal that, in both instances, the affective economies at play explicitly or implicitly support a conservative politics.

Keywords:

• Rural
• countryside
• emotion
• affective economies
• structure of feeling
• distribution of the sensible
• cruel optimism
• wilderness
• rewilding
• idyll

Notes

1. This text no longer features on the current website, but can be viewed through the Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20140103051130/http://www.countryside-alliance.org/CA/article/about-the-countryside-alliance.

2. http://www.countryside-alliance.org. See Hetherington (2012) for a critique of the Countryside Alliance’s alignment with landowner interests.

3. http://www.countryside-alliance.org/about-us/.

4. http://www.wildeurope.org/index.php/restoration/national-strategies/rewilding-holland.

5. All quotations from The New Wilderness and the making-of documentary were translated from Dutch by the author.