“Rooted Resistance provides an accessible and engaging genealogy of agrarian myth that is at work in today’s media and culture, from the seed of the twentieth century to the harvest of the twenty first.”
—Carrie Tippen, author of Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity
“As a whole, this book offers a deep interdisciplinary analysis of agrarian myth in terms of its many applications and use to influence U.S. social and political climates. This work offers a useful contribution to the food discourse literature by framing agrarian myth as an implicit or deliberate narrative throughout U.S. history, capable of being mobilized and repurposed to advance equitable food justice. Equally so, the book’s modern case studies caution of how agrarian myth can be rebranded for corporate profit, showcasing how underlying democratic virtues and public memories surrounding the American yeoman farmer have been used to resist or ignore present inequality in the food system. Overall, Rooted Resistance: Agrarian Myth in Modern America is a valuable resource for a wide array of graduate-level courses including communication, political science, environmental justice, and sociology targeting the critical complexities of rural social movements. It may also be helpful for environmental justice community leaders and advocates seeking to revise or evaluate their organization’s discourse and use of agrarian myth.”
—Christine da Rosa, Rural Sociology, December 2021
“In Rooted Resistance: Agrarian Myth in Modern America, Ross Singer, Stephanie Houston Grey, and Jeff Motter provide a riveting historical and rhetorical account of “agrarianism,” a philosophy that hinges upon the inherent virtue of pre-industrial family farming as a way of life, and of the connectedness among people and with the land that it fosters. … Rooted Resistance presents an ambitious project of knowledge building, critique, and social advocacy by way of painstakingly detailed rhetorical history and incisive analysis, whose ultimate goal is no less than to reveal the revolutionary potential of new agrarianisms to remake and save the world.”
—Rosalind V. Rini Larson, Digest: A Journal of Foodways & Culture, 7:2 (2019-2020)