ABSTRACT
Set against a post-Trump representation of rural America as a socioeconomically abandoned space, this chapter seeks to highlight how elements within loosely termed Americana music – exemplified here mostly by the U.S. West-based music of Willy Vlautin – articulate both critical but also often more hopeful everyday geographies. On the surface, Americana and Vlautin’s songs specifically often present a bleak and brutal picture of ‘abandoned rural America’, depicting rural and small city lives destroyed by both ‘internal’ and ‘external’ forces. Moreover, Vlautin suggests it is a condition little assuaged through the kinds of residential migration and more everyday mobilities associated with the established Frontier myth of salvation or today’s supposed era of mobilities. However, expressing Gibson-Graham’s call to ‘read for difference’ within the majority story and drawing on Campbell’s idea of an ‘affective critical regionality’, a minor positive and recuperative, if inherently fragile, rural America can be identified within Vlautin’s vignettes. Supposedly abandoned rural America can be seen to present modest and transient mundane spaces where a sense of existential value and celebration can be at least briefly (re)asserted. Such rural spaces express, in sum, what is termed an affective critical rurality.
