Return of a Native: Learning from the Land

Vron Ware

ISBN 10: 1913462986 / ISBN 13: 9781913462987

Published by Repeater Books, 2022

Dispatched, from the UK, within 48 hours of ordering. Though second-hand, the book is still in very good shape. Minimal signs of usage may include very minor creasing on the cover or on the spine. Seller Inventory # CHL10641077

Synopsis:

From a fixed point in the middle of English nowhere, Vron Ware takes you through time and space to explain why transcending the urban-rural divide is integral to the future of the planet.

Rural England is a mythic space, a complex canvas on which people from many different backgrounds project all kinds of fantasies, prejudices, desires and fears. This book seeks to challenge many of these ideas, showing how the artificial divide between rural and urban works to conceal the underlying relationship between these two fundamental poles of human settlement.

This investigation of rurality is oriented from a fixed point in north-west Hampshire, marked by a signpost that points in four directions to two towns, four villages and two hamlets. Through stories, interviews and reportage gathered over two decades, the book demolishes tired notions of rural England that cast it as a separate realm of existence, whether marooned in a perpetual time-warp, or reduced to a refuge for the retired, wealthy urbanites, extreme nature-lovers, and, more recently, anyone tired of waiting out the pandemic in towns and cities. It poses two simple questions: what does the word rural mean today? What will it mean tomorrow?

The author is an ambivalent native, held captive to the land by an umbilical cord but always on the verge of fleeing home to the city. She 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. Both argument and narrative are propelled by the urgent need to reconsider the concept of ‘countryside’ in the context of the climate emergency and the patent collapse of ecosystems due to intensive farming which has poisoned the land.

About the Author: Vron Ware has been writing about racism, gender, history and national identity since the 1980s. Her books include Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History; Out of Whiteness: Color, Politics and Culture; Who Cares about Britishness?; and Military Migrants: Fighting for YOUR Country. She has worked as a journalist, photographer, environmental designer and academic.

Bibliographic Details

Title: Return of a Native: Learning from the Land
Publisher: Repeater Books
Publication Date: 2022
Binding: Paperback
Condition: Used; Very Good