Performing rurality and urbanity: Language performations, materials and land-use politics

Abstract

This paper examines an environmental controversy over land use in the Taiwanese countryside where paddy fields have been colonised by informal, ‘illegal’ factories, some by the world's leading manufacturing companies. To deal with this, the Government made efforts to develop a novel, spatial planning policy but this provoked more disputes. For Anglophone scholars, the disputes indicate that different representations of spatialities are often in conflict with one another, shaping contemporary spatial development. However, by emphasising the notion of untranslatability, theoretical interventions have sought to problematise English concepts such as ‘rural’ and ‘urban’. Building on the work of language politics, critics have proposed the use of ‘original’ terms in describing spatial identities. Such a decolonialisation gesture is a timely intervention, challenging the hegemony of Anglophone rural research. However, this paper contends that research into language politics can be enriched by attending to the volatile nature of language and the importance of material objects. Drawing on Austin and Callon's work on the performation of language, this paper suggests that the meaning of a specific spatial concept is not a pre-existing reality, but rather, an ongoing socio-technical achievement. I suggest that rural politics can be understood as a continuous performation struggle or the competition between socio-technical assemblages. With reference to a case study surrounding the controversy over farmland use in Taiwan, my analysis calls for polyvocal, pragmatic approaches to comparative, rural-urban research. With an emphasis on the shifting notions of rural-urban relationships and rurality, this paper problematises the long-lasting, rural-urban dichotomy.