Beyond the Pastoral Paradise: Orienting Black and Muslim People in British Rural Space

Abstract

While there is an increasing number of Black and Muslim stories in urban settings, cultural imaginations of the British rural as linked to whiteness are pervasive. Despite there being a long-established presence of Black and Muslim people in British rural areas, their bodies are excluded or made to disappear to make the rural and, by extension, the nation (supposedly) safe. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s notion of white habit worlds, this article explores the specific ways in which popular imaginations of rural spaces in the UK orient Black and Muslim bodies in relation to rurality. I will argue that whiteness as the racialisation of the pastoral form is closely imbricated with the Christian pastoral notion of Eden by close reading season five of the TV crime drama Shetland, the feature film Four Lions (2010) and the documentary Arcadia (2017). By asking how these configure British rural space through their orientation of Black and Muslim bodies and how they contest or reinforce the (lack of) belonging of bodies considered ‘non-white’/‘non-Christian’ in rural spaces, I inquire how these productions complement each other in what they have to say about the presence of Black and Muslim bodies in British rural space and how this relates to wider debates about immigration and national identity.