Crossing Divides: Ethnicity and Rurality

This paper draws on research with people from African, Caribbean and Asian backgrounds regarding perceptions and use of the English countryside. I explore the complex ways in which the category "rural" was constructed as both essentialised "and" relational: how the countryside was understood most definitely as "not-city" but also, at the same time, the English countryside was conceived as part of a range of networks: one site in a web of "nature places" across the country, as well as one rural in an international chain of rurals--specifically via embodied and emotional connections with "nature". I argue that alongside sensed/sensual embodiment (the non-representational intuitive work of the body), we need also to consider reflective embodiment as a desire to space/place in order to address the structural socio-spatial exclusions endemic in (rural) England and how they are challenged. I suggest that a more progressive conceptualisation of rurality--a "transrural" open to issues of mobility and desire--can help us disrupt dominant notions of rural England as only an exclusionary white space, and reposition it as a site within multicultural, multiethnic, transnational and mobile social Imaginaries. (Contains 4 figures and 1 table.)