Our Rural Selves

Memory and the Visual in Canadian Childhoods

Claudia Mitchell, April Mandrona, Claudia Mitchell, April Mandrona

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780773556997
• eBook ISBN: 9780773558243
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología rural

Life in the countryside, often perceived as either idyllic or depleted, has long been misrepresented. Challenging the stereotypes and myths that surround the idea of rurality, Our Rural Selves interrogates and represents individual and collective memories of childhood in rural landscapes and small towns. Drawing on visual artifacts whose origins range from the early twentieth century to today, such as photographs, films, objects, picture books, and digital games, contributors offer readings of childhood that are geographically, ethnically, and culturally diverse. They examine the memories of Indigenous children, the experiences of back-to-the-land youth, and boom-or-bust childhoods within the petroleum, farming, and fishing industries. Illustrating often neglected and overlooked aspects of adolescence, this collection suggests new ways of studying social connectedness and collective futures. Innovative and revealing in its use of visual studies, autoethnography, and memory-work, Our Rural Selves explores representation, imagination, and what it means to grow up rural in Canada.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Rural Beginnings
• 2 George Agnew Reid’s Paintings in Relation to English Canadian Collective Memories of Rural Childhood in Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth-Century Canada
• 3 Making Green Gables Anne’s Home: Rural Landscapes and Ordinary Homes of Canadian Fiction and Film
• 4 Listening to the Rhythms of Rural Life, 1920–1940: Oral History and Childhood Agency
• 5 “I Never Had a Childhood”: Narratives of Work, Play, and Loss in Postwar Rural Atlantic Canada
• 6 Making Friends in the Middle of Nowhere: Handmade Dolls and a Back-to-the-Lander Childhood
• 7 Exploring Memory and Place through Wet Plate Collodion Photography: How a Newfoundland Childhood Inspired the Work Trace
• 8 How I Became Invisible: A Lesbian Childhood in the Woodsy North
• 9 Documenting a Transgender Rural Childhood: Exploring My Prairie Home
• 10 Pumpjacks, Social Class, and the Struggle for Belonging
• 11 An “Indian” Doll: A Mohawk Child’s Identity in Crisis
• 12 Teaching Larry Loyie’s As Long as the Rivers Flow: Real and Imagined Childhood Memories and the Intransigence of the Cattle Truck
• 13 Mapping Futures, Making Selves: How Rural Young People Experience The Real Game
• 14 Our Rural Futures
• Contributors
• Index