Race and place-making in the rural Global North

Abstract

Rural places in the Global North are transforming. Geographies of capital accumulation and distribution, environmental catastrophe, the global restructuring of food production, and state-based resettlement policies for people from migrant and humanitarian refugee backgrounds have reconfigured the social and economic landscapes of the rural Global North. Through these transformations, race figures in ways that are both profound and often elided within contemporary theorising of rural places. In this Introduction to the Special Issue, Race and Place-making in the Rural Global North, we attend explicitly to the intersecting logics and practices of race and place-making in an attempt to build upon and extend previous important existing interventions within rural studies. Influential approaches to rural diversity, we argue—including ‘rural cosmopolitanism’—too often fail to disrupt the taken-for-grantedness of rural places as already-made-as-white, and do not sufficiently account for the colonial and imperial foundations of rural places in the Global North. Seeking to centre attention to race and coloniality in more explicit ways, we offer a conceptualisation of contemporary rural place-making in terms of three key modalities: practice, relation, and aesthetic. Through these, we argue for a double move in rural studies' engagement with race and rural diversity. This involves, firstly, a critical move towards interrogating whiteness as a force of power and inequality in rural places; and secondly a move away from whiteness in order to centre Indigenous, Black and Brown rural lifeworlds in their own terms.