Back to the Land “Peasant-entrepreneurs”: The New Actors of Chinese Peasant Agroecology

The second of three chapters exploring the history of homesteading in the area around Berea, Kentucky, chapter 3 presents the story of rural subsistence from the late 1800s up to the economic boom generated by World War II. The chapter is framed in terms of the “parable of enclosure”--the idea that yeoman farmers would not voluntarily trade independent livelihood for capitalist wage labor--and argues that as industry and technology generated ever more advanced consumer goods (for example, refrigerators, radios, antibiotics), the peasant way of life became outmoded; once wage labor became available in the factories of the north, millions of Appalachians left the mountains. But, as the chapter documents, some chose to return to a homesteading life, forming an overlooked back-to-the-land movement.

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Founding New Sodom

Devotions and Desires ◽

10.5149/northcarolina/9781469636269.003.0013 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Daniel Rivers

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Gay Men ◽

Sexual Politics ◽

New Age ◽

The United States ◽

Natural World ◽

Gay Male ◽

The Creation ◽

Back To The Land

This essay looks at the worldview of gay male communalists across the United States in the mid-1970s as seen in the rural gay magazine Rural Free Delivery (RFD) in the critical years from 1973 to 1976 as well as in other extant archival sources related to gay communalism. As a clearinghouse for gay men involved in radical, back-to-the-land ventures, RFD provides a complex view of the creation of a largely white, gay male counterculture spirituality that fused the sexual politics of early gay liberationists with ecofeminist, animist, New Age understandings of sexuality, the natural world, and spirit. Gay men who were or who wanted to live in communal spaces nationwide sent letters and stories into RFD, which was published in a variety of gay male communal spaces during these years.

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Myth and the ‘home culture concept’

Engendering an avant-garde ◽

10.7228/manchester/9781526101198.003.0004 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Leah Modigliani

Keyword(s):

Art History ◽

Cultural Practice ◽

Intentional Communities ◽

Cultural Activity ◽

Urban Centre ◽

Home Culture ◽

American Artist ◽

Master's Thesis ◽

Cultural Expressions ◽

Back To The Land

Jeff Wall and Ian Wallace’s rejection of ‘home’ and ‘homeland,’ and the primacy of the manifesto as an important polemical tool in framing one’s work, are explored in Chapter 3 in relation to Wall’s art history master’s thesis on the Berlin Dada group, which established “myth” as an anti-critical cultural practice that was broadly applied to much of the cultural activity then active in Vancouver. Vancouver’s seeming “lack of history,” the existence of back-to-the-land intentional communities living outside of the urban centre, the proliferation of other performance and media based art groups, and the influence of visiting American artist Robert Smithson’s earthworks are all examined as cultural expressions deemed a-historical or romantic by photo-conceptualists.

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