Journal of Rural Studies 27 (2011) 343–345

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Journal of Rural Studies

journal homepage: www.elsevier .com/locate / j rurstud

Book reviews

Another Country: Queer Anti-urbanism, Scott Herring, NewYork University Press, New York (2010). 237 pp. $22.00 (paper),ISBN: 978-0-8147-3719-4

As this journal has elaborated for nearly two decadesdpromp-ted by Philo’s (1994) seminal review essaydsocial and culturalscholars of the rural often neglect the experiences of ‘others’. Thisabsence has been particularly acute in the study of rural gays andlesbians. Scott Herring’s Another Country provides indispensible(re)direction to the burgeoning study of (rural) queer space andsubjectivities; the anti-metro normative queer anti-urbanism andthe multidisciplinary humanistic analyses he employs have poten-tial to shape not only rural queer studies, but the direction of ruralstudies in general.

The primary undertaking of the book, and its most importantcontribution, is a theoretical critique of Halberstamian metronor-mativitywhichHerring coins ‘queer anti-urbanism’. Ametronorma-tive queer theoretic ‘imagines themetropolis as the only sustainableplace for queers. towhich rural-identified queersmust assimiliate’(p. 14). In his introduction Herring extends this concept to accountfor compulsory (urban-oriented) queer expectations along sixdimensions: narratological, racial, socioeconomic, temporal, episte-mological, and aesthetic. These metronormative imaginaries fail toilluminate rural-specific queer practices, the close coupling ofhomonormativity and urbanity, and the crucial anti-urban acts ofresistance carried out by queers in the countryside that dominatethe book’s five chapters. Using an archive comprised of autobiogra-phies fromWilla Cather, Charles Demuth, and James Weldon John-son; the gay and lesbian periodicals Country Women and RFD(‘Rural Fairy Digest’); Michael Mead’s photographic exhibitions ofsouthern ‘rednecks’; a collection of commentaries on fashion; anda graphic memoir by Alison Bechdel, Herring attempts to locate“precisely how non-metronormative queers across the decadesnegotiate these interwoven compulsions” (p. 17) of a multidimen-sional metronormativity. These destabilizing, antagonistic, politi-cized negotiations are the essence of queer anti-urbanism.

Another notable innovation of this work is its injection ofhumanities texts and methodologies into a literature thatdat leaston the pages of JRSdis dominated (in terms of disciplinary affilia-tion) by social scientists. Herring draws on discursive analyticmethods from literary theory, art and design, fashion andaesthetics, photography and media studies, and American studiesto highlight culturally transgressive queer anti-urbanisms. Ulti-mately the accounts of ‘ruralized counter-stylistics’ found in thetexts challenge historical and contemporary hegemonicdandtherefore, hetero-, homo- and metro-normativedassumptions ofqueer absence in the countryside, universally hostile and homo-phobic rural communities, escapist rural-to-urban queer move-ments, and aspatial queer stylistics, practices, identities andsubjectivities document.

Rural scholars across (sub)disciplines will also benefit fromHerring’s thoughtful acknowledgement of the ‘epistemological

traps and intellectual fallacies’ that potentially limit criticalresearch. The sum of all our work will be refined if it avoids, asAnother Country aims to do, hyperbolically vulgar ruralities, confla-tions of place and region, homogeneous peripheries, static concep-tualizations of space, neglect of the transnational and global South,and silenced lay discourses.

Despite the transformative qualities of Herring’s theorization, itelicits several quibbles. It seems to me that the ‘paper cut’ politicalproject posited in Another Country ascribes agency to rural queersthat might not have existed. In paper cut politics, the sum of seem-ingly inconsequential resistances to metronormativity collectivelydisrupts paradigms. Perhaps the outcomes of queer anti-urbanism are more important than actors’ objectives; nonetheless,the possibility that the writers, artists, and cultural critics whogenerated the archival texts never intended to be resistive is prob-lematically unacknowledged. The archive also lacks contemporaryillustrations of anti-urbanism. An historical account of nonmetro-politan queer stylistics is efficacious in its own right, but giventhe potential for new socially-networked technologies to transform(small scale) paper cuts into (viral) bloody massacres, I’m leftwanting a description of anti-urban contemporaries. Fortunatelyfor those of us inspired by the possibilities conceived in AnotherCountry, we can look to Herring to challenge us with that andmore in future volumes.

Christopher J. StapelUniversity of Kentucky, Lexington,

KY 40508, United StatesE-mail address: c.stapel@uky.edu

doi:10.1016/j.jrurstud.2011.05.001

Rural Education for the Twenty-First Century: Identity, Placeand Community in a Globalizing World, K.A. Schafft, A. Young-blood Jackson, (Eds.), The Pennsylvania, State University Press,Pennsylvania, ISBN: 978-0-271-03683-0, 2010 (328 pp)

This edited collection of essays offers an insight into the complexchallenges for the future of rural education and rural communitiesin a changing globalised world. The chapters are grouped into threesections around the themes of identity, place and community to illus-trate how rural schooling is played out in practice predominantly inthe U.S. but also in Canada, Sub-Saharan Africa and Australia.

In the introduction co-editors Schafft and Youngblood Jacksonargue that contemporary educational research has had a tendencyto stop at the school boundary but in order to understand theeffects that globalisation is having on education it is important toconsider the interrelationship between school and communitywithin a global-local context. They go on to argue that a multi-disciplinary approach is therefore required to examine the issues

Book reviews / Journal of Rural Studies 27 (2011) 343–345344

at the rural school-community interface. For this reason the volumedraws on authors with backgrounds ranging from educationaltheory, policy and leadership, through to sociology, demography,political science and community development.

In Section One the chapters are largely concerned with spaces ofidentity. Theobald and Wood argue that in the U.S. progress isdefined as urban growth to the extent that ‘rural youth see them-selves as non-participants in the American experience’ (page. 27).Their research focuses on the issue of rural marginalisation in theU.S. and how it ‘colours the aspirations of rural youth’ (page. 28).Howley and Howley consider social class relations in poor ruralcommunities and also argue that schooling in the U.S. favoursurban living and the development of the global citizen, with theresult that rural schooling facilitates out-migration. In the nextchapter Groenke and Nespor discuss the use of racist languageadopted by young people in their quest to adopt a global persona.Drawing the section to a close Youngblood Jackson continues thetheme of marginalisation and exclusionwith a Foucauldian analysisof schooling in a rural, conservative community to illustrate howthe school-community discourse favours white male students.

Section Two entitled ‘Placing Education’ consists of four chap-ters that consider the role of education in rural places. Schafft, Kill-een and Morrissey discuss the plight of transient school childrenfrom poor rural homes. The children move home and consequentlyschool repeatedly; yet these transient pupils are not recognised as‘in need’ (p.104) by the national US school system. In the nextchapter Corbett places a focus on language to explore the tensionshe experienced teaching in a rural coastal community school inCanada to illustrate the tensions between teaching a standardisedversus a place-based curriculum. He shows howencouraging pupilsto use their local dialect helped the pupils at school although it wasdisadvantageous in helping them to find employment outside ofthe community. Giroux, Jah and Eloundou-Enyegue also illustratehow rural disadvantage in schooling translates into the labourmarket through the case study of a rural school in Cameroon.Edmondson and Butler continue with the theme of education con-nected to places by discussing what it is like to be a practitioner inan area of rural disadvantagewith respect to the current ideologicalneoliberal discourse and how this impacts on rural communities.

In Section Three the chapters detail accounts of different ways ofbeing ‘rural’ in educational communities. Faircloth and TippeconnicIII discuss the notion of globalisation and how for indigenous tribes,globalisation is not a recent notion but one that has been a realityfor more than five hundred years. They go on to argue that at a locallevel tribal colleges have helped to preserve traditional languageand culture whilst at a global level the colleges develop worldwidepartnerships across educational institutions for Native students.Broadening out from this McDonough, Gildersleeve and Jarskydiscuss the educational opportunities for rural higher educationstudents and the disconnect between higher education and itslack of understanding towards the needs of rural students. Thenext chapter discusses the challenges of educational provision forboth adult and school-aged learners living in rural and sparselypopulated areas through Crump and Twyford’s discussion of aninteractive distance e-learning project in Australia. Bustamante,Brown and Irby discuss the linguistic and cultural challenges forteachers in rural Texas as the number of English Language Learnerscontinues to grow in small rural schools. Bringing the section toa close Butera and Costello detail their intervention to developand support the family-school partnership for teachers and parentsin a special educational needs rural setting.

In the conclusion Schafft draws on the empirical findingsdetailed in the thirteen essays to argue that the market-basedmodel of education reform and accountability is ‘strongly antithet-ical to community, to place, and to civic engagement’ (page 285) at

both a local and a global level. He then goes on to argue that thedilemma often posited as the ‘rural school problem’ linked to thedichotomy of rural versus urban society, is infact ‘a distractionfrom the real question, which is how we prepare ourselves andour children to live lives that are local and global’ (page 286) andthat crucially education ‘should equip people to live in community’(page 286) wherever that might be.

This book provides an important contribution to the oftenneglected issue of rural education and I believe will be of interestto both researchers and students within the fields of rural geog-raphy, the geography of education and education studies.

Marion WalkerLancaster Environment Centre,

Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YQ,United Kingdom

E-mail address: marion.walker@lancaster.ac.uk

doi:10.1016/j.jrurstud.2011.05.002

Michigan Family Farms and Farm Buildings: Landscapes of theHeart and Mind, Hemalata C. Dandekar, The University of Mich-igan Press, Ann Arbor (2010). 272pp., ISBN: 978-0-472-05105-2

Hemalata Dandekar’s study of Michigan Family farms examinesthe character of farms and farm folk in a number of differentregions throughout the state. She incorporates into her piece thethoughts and feelings of farm families with whom she had conver-sations in the 1980s and within this past decade, and shows theirattitudes toward the changing nature of the family farm. It placesthem in a light that effectively avoids nostalgic images of thepast, but which nonetheless is able to reflect upon the history offamily farming and its legacy. Using her skills in regional planningand rural development, Dandekar is able to effectively fit farmingpeoples within the landscapes and cultures of which they are a part.

Though she commentsupon the architectural formof farmbuild-ings frequently throughout the text, referencing her training inarchitecture and urban planning, Dandekar is more concernedwith exploring a two-fold argument in relation to American familyfarms. She argues that farmers have shown remarkable resilienceand effort as a means to retain the connection to the land that is anintrinsic part of farm life, whether presently or in the past. However,her concern is not merely to reflect this character of farm folk in thestudy. Instead she also desires to show that the style of life farmerslead epitomizes “hard work, frugality, independence, self-reliance,resilience and sustainability” and that it is these “values, attitudes,and capabilities that” contemporary society “allows to disappear atits peril.” (Dandekar, 2010, p. 1). The book therefore aims to allowreaders to both reflect upon the history of family farming, as wellas consider the role it might play in the future.

One of the major strengths of this book is that Dandekar avoidsspeaking for the people in the book. Instead she allows them toreflect upon the meaning and nature of family farming in theirown words, as she has added direct excerpts from the countlessinterviews she conducted in preparation for this study. In this waythe pages evoke the true voice of this group of Michiganders asthey confront the history and future of family farms. In doing sothey reference many different themes in farming: the meaning of‘local’ to ruralites; the place of women on the farm today and inthe past; the continuance of the legacy of family farms in light ofurbanization; farm preservation and taxation; aswell asmore ‘closeto home’ issues concerning farmers, including attachments to the