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. 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. 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.

What happens when people in societies stratified by race refuse to accept the privileges inherent in whiteness? What difference does it make when whites act in a manner that contradicts their designated racial identity? "Out of Whiteness" considers these questions and argues passionately for an imaginative and radical politics against all forms of racism.
Vron Ware and Les Back look at key points in recent American and British culture where the "color line" has been blurred. Through probing accounts of writers who have disguised themselves in order to investigate racism, the growth of the White Power music scene on the Internet, the meteoric rise of big band jazz during the Second World War, and the pivotal role of white session players in crafting rhythm and blues classics by black artists, Ware and Back upset the idea of race as a symbol of inherent human attributes. Challenging recent trends in academia, the authors argue against reconstructing whiteness as a distinct cultural identity. Ware and Back give us a timely reckoning of the forces that continue to make people "white," and reveal to us the polyglot potential of identities and cultures.