Reclaiming the Rural: Essays on Literacy, Rhetoric, and Pedagogy ed. by Kim Donehower, Charlotte Hogg, and Eileen E. Schell (review)

Agriculture is as old as humanity. Cultivators of the earth have been referred to by many names, from peasants and plebes to yeoman and farmers. What remains consistent is their position as the producers of the food on which every society depends. Yet, with the Industrial Revolution and subsequent migration to urban centers, rural communities have been overlooked as a site of cultural production and rhetorical invention. Reclaiming the Rural seeks to correct this problem by demonstrating the important role rural communities play in deliberations about persuasion, power, and social values. Written to an audience of those who teach rhetoric and composition, the editors of this volume suggest that "rural people and organizations have long worked to reclaim the rural, despite media representations that sometimes still erase the ways that rural people, spaces, and collectivities across regions and locales must work together in a global culture" (xv).

Reclaiming the Rural highlights how nostalgic representations of rural communities do not align with the embodied experiences of rural folk. For rhetorical scholars, this volume presents a compelling case that rural communities play an important role in the production of public culture and, as such, deserve more attention from both critical and pedagogical perspectives. To better-understand how "rural spaces and people relate—through representation or interaction" (xii), the volume is divided into three sections: "Land Economies and Rhetorics," "Histories," and "Pedagogies." Each of these sections brings together a collection of authors who offer a perspective from rural places, not merely about them, by locating rhetoric as central to any analysis of and performance by rural citizens.

Section 1, "Land Economies and Rhetorics," pits the present struggle of rural communities against the externally imposed nostalgia ascribed to it. For rhetorical scholars, discursive formations imposed on rural communities often involve nostalgic representations of an ideal that has never existed. Highlighting how these formations function to shape domestic and foreign policy, American identity, and rural citizenship, this section emphasizes the importance of rural America to studies of public and political culture. In chapter 1, Marcia Kmetz demonstrates how the Wind River Valley water controversy in Wyoming illuminates the difficulty of understanding the land apart from communities. As Kmetz explains, "The place shapes character; the land, in part, creates community" (21). She arrives at this insight by recounting the history of the region as one in which external perspectives viewed the land as empty, from the Homestead Act as filling an empty frontier to the present day need for water in urban areas. Regardless, the land has been constituted not by "a clear understanding of this particular place and its particular inhabitants" but by a belief in "the character of the nation as agrarian" (23). Rarely are rural communities given a voice in the rhetorical construction of place; instead, nostalgic rhetorics are projected onto those places, as Cory Brewster writes in chapter 2, by advancing two "rhetorical trends: attempts to dehumanize and ostensibly depoliticize agriculture . . . and . . . appropriate and redeploy long-standing agrarian tropes" (35). Examining two present-day agricultural literacy campaigns, "Growing a Nation" and America's Heartland, Brewster demonstrates how nostalgic symbols of tradition and progress "benefit large corporate interests regardless of the effects they might have on individual farmers, consumers, families, or communities" (39). The first section does an exemplary job of demonstrating the detrimental effects of nostalgia on rural communities where, as Cynthia Ryan describes in chapter 3, farming is reduced to "romanticized agrarianism" and farmers exist "in an imaginary landscape of wholesome values and simple lifestyles" (54).

While the first section focuses on the tension between progress and tradition, the second utilizes "Histories" as a way to give voice to rural persons and groups who provide rich alternatives to dominant narratives. Looking at both the United States and Mexico, these authors suggest that rural literacy has been a defining feature of citizenship...