Online book discussion with Vron Ware on RETURN OF A NATIVE : Learning from the Land
As part of an occasional series on the rural humanities WiSER invites you to an online book discussion on
RETURN OF A NATIVE:
Learning from the Land
by Vron Ware
In what ways does the ‘rural’ (or the ‘countryside’) constitute a vital source of knowledge connecting the smallest places not just to their urban counterparts but to the rest of the world? Why and in what ways is transcending the urban-rural divide integral to the future of the planet? Vron Ware poses and attempts to answer these questions from the vantage point of the tiny English hamlet in which she was born and first lived.
The book shows how the artificial divide between rural and urban works to conceal the underlying relationship between these two fundamental poles of human settlement. Through stories, interviews and reportage gathered over two decades, the book demolishes tired notions of the rural that cast it as a separate realm of existence. It poses two over-arching questions: what does the word rural mean today? What will it mean tomorrow?
Ware writes from a feminist, postcolonial standpoint that is alert to the slow violence of historical processes taking place over many centuries: enslavement, colonialism, industrialisation, globalisation.
Vron Ware will be in discussion with Tariq Jazeel and Esther Peeren.
Vron Ware is a UK-based writer and photographer with an international reputation for her work on race, gender, peace, militarism and ecology.
Tariq Jazeel teaches human geography, postcolonial and race studies at the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation at UCL in the UK.
Esther Peeren teaches cultural analysis at the University of Amsterdam and leads the ERC-funded research project Imagining the Rural in a Globalized World.
Tuesday, 13th June 2023
6pm (SA time)
Register here