ABSTRACT

This article draws on the work of Raymond Williams to argue that under covid-19 the dominant ‘ways of seeing’ the countryside and the city in Britain are working to obscure the structural violence of capitalism. Cultural narratives of ‘exodus’ from the city abound in British media, fuelling a material ‘race for space’ as the middle class rush to buy up rural properties. The ‘cottagecore’ social media aesthetic has proliferated, offering privatized solutions to the crisis through nostalgic imagery of pastoral escape. At the same time, nineteenth-century discourses of dark, diseased cities have been rearticulated, providing ideological support for racist migration policies. Exploited migrant workers in Leicester are framed as ‘modern slaves’ in the city’s ‘dark factories’; their bodies are transcoded as ‘dirt’ which must be ‘rooted out’ of the nation. We argue that these binary narratives and aesthetics of a bountiful, white countryside and an infested, racialized city lead to an ‘unseeing’ of the deep structural causes of inequality. We develop Williams’s analysis to show how these cultural imaginaries also sustain the gendered and racialized division of labour under capitalism, arguing that the country-city distinction, and the material injustices it obscures, ought to become a central focus for cultural studies.

摘要

本文借鉴雷蒙德·威廉姆斯的工作，认为在 covid-19 下，英国主要的“观察”乡村和城市的“方式”正在努力掩盖资本主义的结构性暴力。英国媒体充斥着关于城市“外流”的文化叙事，随着中产阶级争相购买农村房产，引发了一场物质“空间竞赛”。“山寨核心”社交媒体美学已经激增，通过对田园逃生的怀旧意象为危机提供私有化解决方案。与此同时，19 世纪关于黑暗、病态城市的话语被重新表述，为种族主义移民政策提供意识形态支持。莱斯特受剥削的移民工人在这座城市的“黑暗工厂”中被诬陷为“现代奴隶”；他们的身体被转码为“污垢”，必须从国家“根除”。我们认为，富饶的白人乡村和人口众多的种族化城市的这些二元叙述和美学导致人们“看不到”不平等的深层结构性原因。我们发展威廉姆斯的分析，以展示这些文化想象如何也支持资本主义下的性别化和种族化分工，认为乡村与城市的区别以及它所掩盖的物质不公正应该成为文化研究的中心焦点。