Mobilities, Literature, Culture [1st ed. 2019] 978-3-030-27071-1, 978-3-030-27072-8

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xviii
Introduction: Mobilities, Literature, Culture (Marian Aguiar, Charlotte Mathieson, Lynne Pearce)....Pages 1-31
Front Matter ....Pages 33-33
Railing Against Apartheid: Staffrider, Township Trains, and Racialised Mobility in South Africa (Sarah Gibson)....Pages 35-63
“Stationary Trivialities”: Contrasting Representations of the American Motel in Vladimir Nabokov and Jack Kerouac (Elsa Court)....Pages 65-86
Mobilising Affective Brutality: Death Tourism and the Ecstasy of Postmemory in Contemporary American Culture (Pavlina Radia)....Pages 87-112
Front Matter ....Pages 113-113
Mobility, Attentiveness and Sympathy in E. M. Forster’s Howards End (Nour Dakkak)....Pages 115-137
Narrative Senses of Perspective and Rhythm: Mobilising Subjectivity with Werther and Effi Briest (Roman Kabelik)....Pages 139-162
Running (in) Your City (Kai Syng Tan)....Pages 163-186
Front Matter ....Pages 187-187
Migrant Labour, Immobility and Invisibility in Literature on the Arab Gulf States (Nadeen Dakkak)....Pages 189-210
“Flotsam of Humanity”: Bodies, Borders, and Futures Deferred (Mike Lehman)....Pages 211-233
Front Matter ....Pages 235-235
Cycling and Narrative Structure: H. G. Wells’s The Wheels of Chance and Maurice Leblanc’s Voici des ailes (Una Brogan)....Pages 237-257
Autonomous Vehicles: From Science Fiction to Sustainable Future (Robert Braun)....Pages 259-280
Science Fiction Cinema and the Road Movie: Case Studies in the Estranged Mobile Gaze (Neil Archer)....Pages 281-306
Back Matter ....Pages 307-322

Citation preview

STUDIES IN MOBILITIES, LITERATURE, AND CULTURE

Mobilities, Literature, Culture Edited by Marian Aguiar Charlotte Mathieson Lynne Pearce

Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture Series Editors Marian Aguiar Department of English Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA, USA Charlotte Mathieson University of Surrey Guildford, UK Lynne Pearce English Literature & Creative Writing Lancaster University Lancaster, UK

This series represents an exciting new publishing opportunity for scholars working at the intersection of literary, cultural, and mobilities research. The editors welcome proposals that engage with movement of all kinds—ranging from the global and transnational to the local and the everyday. The series is particularly concerned with examining the material means and structures of movement, as well as the infrastructures that surround such movement, with a focus on transport, travel, postcolonialism, and/or embodiment. While we expect many titles from literary scholars who draw upon research originating in cultural geography and/ or sociology in order to gain valuable new insights into literary and cultural texts, proposals are equally welcome from scholars working in the social sciences who make use of literary and cultural texts in their theorizing. The series invites monographs that engage with textual materials of all kinds—i.e., film, photography, digital media, and the visual arts, as well as fiction, poetry, and other literary forms—and projects engaging with non-western literatures and cultures are especially welcome. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15385

Marian Aguiar · Charlotte Mathieson · Lynne Pearce Editors

Mobilities, Literature, Culture

Editors Marian Aguiar Department of English Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Charlotte Mathieson School of Literature and Languages University of Surrey Guildford, UK

Lynne Pearce Department of English Literature & Creative Writing Lancaster University Lancaster, UK

Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture ISBN 978-3-030-27071-1 ISBN 978-3-030-27072-8  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27072-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: YUBO/Getty This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

This collection arose out of a conference held at Lancaster University in the UK in April 2017. This event, co-hosted by the Centre for Mobilities Research [CeMoRe], the Department of English Literature and Creative Writing, and Lancaster’s Institute for the Creative Arts [LICA], celebrated the inauguration of the new Palgrave Macmillan book series—Palgrave Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture— from which this volume takes a slightly modified title. Our first thanks must therefore be to the Palgrave Macmillan team in New York, originally headed by Ryan Jenkins, who, in conversation with Charlotte Mathieson, first floated the idea of the series; also, to CeMoRe and the other departments at Lancaster who provided the conference with essential administrative and financial support. Some 80 delegates—from 30 countries—attended the two-day event and represented a wide range of disciplines from across the Humanities and Social Sciences. As both conference organisers and editors of the book series, we were thrilled by the richness and variety of the papers inspired by the “mobilities, literature, culture” theme and guessed (correctly) that it augured well for the future of the series. Our second “thank you” is therefore to all those who participated in the conference regardless of whether they feature in the pages that follow or not; those two days were, without question, a landmark moment in the “humanities turn” within mobilities scholarship. In the eighteen months since, there has been an explosion of interest in this new subfield, as evidenced by the opening of two new international centres dedicated to research on mobility and the v

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

humanities (the University of Padua, Italy, and the University of Konkuk, in South Korea), and events focusing specifically on literary mobilities are attracting wide audiences. When our commissioning editor, Ryan Jenkins, left Palgrave Macmillan, his place was taken by Allie Troyanos (formerly Bochicchio), and we would like to offer Allie heartfelt thanks for the enthusiasm and commitment she has shown the series. She has ensured that the proposals we receive move through the reviewing process swiftly, and has overseen the commissioning of some excellent volumes. Rachel Jacobe, Allie’s editorial assistant, has been equally wonderful to work with and has overseen the production of this and our other books in the series with great skill and professionalism. We would also like to extend special thanks to our independent copy-editor, Paul Poplawksi, who helped us get this book to press by the deadline when we were under great pressure. Other individuals we would like to thank include: colleagues at CeMoRe, past and present—most notably, the late John Urry (former Director and founder of the Centre), Pennie Drinkall (former CeMoRe administrator and ongoing secretary for the Mobilities journal), and Monika Büscher (current CeMoRe Director); Bruce Bennett (our conference co-organiser); Nour Dakkak and Muren Zhang (Lancaster Ph.D. students who headed up our “conference team” and put in many hours of work before and during the event); and our keynote speakers/presenters— Kat Jungnickel, Ruth Livesey, Peter Merriman, and Andrew Kötting. We would also like to thank all the family and friends who continue to support us through our various academic endeavours: Marian would like to thank her husband and children for their loving support and her home university Carnegie Mellon University for its enduring collegiality; Charlotte would like to thank her friends and family, as well as her colleagues in the School of Literature and Languages at Surrey, and especially the Mobilities Research Group; and Lynne would like to thank Viv Tabner, Hilary Hinds, and all her friends in Scotland. May 2019

Marian Aguiar Charlotte Mathieson Lynne Pearce

Contents

1

Introduction: Mobilities, Literature, Culture 1 Marian Aguiar, Charlotte Mathieson and Lynne Pearce

Part I  Mobility and Nation 2

Railing Against Apartheid: Staffrider, Township Trains, and Racialised Mobility in South Africa 35 Sarah Gibson

3

“Stationary Trivialities”: Contrasting Representations of the American Motel in Vladimir Nabokov and Jack Kerouac 65 Elsa Court

4

Mobilising Affective Brutality: Death Tourism and the Ecstasy of Postmemory in Contemporary American Culture 87 Pavlina Radia

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CONTENTS

Part II  Embodied Subjectivities 5

Mobility, Attentiveness and Sympathy in E. M. Forster’s Howards End 115 Nour Dakkak

6

Narrative Senses of Perspective and Rhythm: Mobilising Subjectivity with Werther and Effi Briest 139 Roman Kabelik

7

Running (in) Your City 163 Kai Syng Tan

Part III  Geopolitics of Migration 8

Migrant Labour, Immobility and Invisibility in Literature on the Arab Gulf States 189 Nadeen Dakkak

9

“Flotsam of Humanity”: Bodies, Borders, and Futures Deferred 211 Mike Lehman

Part IV  Mobility Futures 10 Cycling and Narrative Structure: H. G. Wells’s The Wheels of Chance and Maurice Leblanc’s Voici des ailes 237 Una Brogan 11 Autonomous Vehicles: From Science Fiction to Sustainable Future 259 Robert Braun

CONTENTS  

ix

12 Science Fiction Cinema and the Road Movie: Case Studies in the Estranged Mobile Gaze 281 Neil Archer Index 307

Notes

on

Contributors

Marian Aguiar  is an Associate Professor of English in the Literary and Cultural Studies Program at Carnegie Mellon University. Her fields of expertise include culture and globalisation, postcolonial studies, especially pertaining to South Asia and the South Asian diaspora, and transnational feminism. Her most recent book, Arranging Marriage: Conjugal Agency in the South Asian Diaspora (University of Minnesota, 2018) looks at gendered cultural narratives produced in transnational contexts, identifying how narratives about arranged marriage bear upon questions of consent, agency, state power, and national belonging. Her first book, Tracking Modernity: India’s Railway and the Culture of Mobility (University of Minnesota, 2011), explores cultural representations of modernity by considering how the railway was imagined in colonial, nationalist, and postcolonial South Asian contexts as a mobile space. She continues to work on both transnationalism and the imagination of movement with her current book project Refugee Mobilities and in her capacity as co-editor of the Palgrave Macmillan book series Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture. Neil Archer is a Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Keele University. Amongst other research interests, he has written widely on the road movie, including the books The Road Movie: In Search of Meaning (Wallflower, 2016) and The French Road Movie: Space, Mobility, Identity (Berghahn, 2013). He has also contributed a chapter to the recent The Global Road Movie (Intellect, 2018), and has published articles on the xi

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

road movie in Mobilities, Studies in European Cinema and New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film. His most recent book is Twenty-FirstCentury Hollywood: Rebooting the System (Wallflower, 2019). Robert Braun  is a senior researcher at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna. His main research interest is in the politics of knowledge and societal transformation. His current research focuses on the transition to autonomous mobility and responsible research and innovation. His latest work includes the monograph Corporate Stakeholder Democracy (CEU University Press, 2019) and the book chapter “Privacy, Democracy and Social Fairness in the Future Road Transport System” in The future of road transport—Implications of an automated, connected, low-carbon and shared mobility, edited by A. Raposa and B. Ciuffo (EU PO, 2019). Una Brogan is a freelance translator and researcher. She previously taught in the English department at Université Lyon 3-Jean Moulin, and completed her Ph.D. on bicycles in British and French literature in the period 1880–1914 at Université Paris 7-Diderot. Originally from Northern Ireland, she took degrees in French, history, literary translation, and comparative literature at Oxford, Warwick, and Paris IV-Sorbonne universities, in between stints as a bicycle courier, bike tourer, and environmental activist. She recently contributed a chapter on bicycles in Proust for an edited collection, Texts on Two Wheels: Bicycles in Literature and on Screen, published in 2016 by University of Nebraska Press. Elsa Court is an independent researcher and journalist whose academic work focuses on transatlantic perspectives in postwar American culture and mobilities studies. Her first monograph, “Emigre Representations of the American Roadside: Explorations in Literature, Film, and Photography 1955–1985” is forthcoming with the Mobilities, Literature, and Culture series at Palgrave. A French citizen based in London, she writes a monthly column on transnational identities for the Financial Times. Nadeen Dakkak is a Ph.D. candidate and associate tutor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. Her research is interested in literary representations of the experience of migration to the Arab Gulf States. Nour Dakkak was awarded her Ph.D. in English Literature from Lancaster University in 2018. Her research centres on human–world relations in the depiction of everyday life in nineteenth- and twentieth-century

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS  

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literature and culture. She is the co-editor of Anticipatory Materialisms in Literature and Philosophy, 1790–1930 (forthcoming) and is currently working as an Associate Lecturer at the Arab Open University, Kuwait. Sarah Gibson is a Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Communication, Media and Society and the Academic Leader: Teaching and Learning in the School of Applied Human Sciences at the University of KwaZuluNatal. She previously worked at Surrey University and Lancaster University in the UK. Her current research focuses on the politics and poetics of mobilities in the global South. She has published in journals such as the Journal of African Cinema, Journal for Cultural Research, Space and Culture, Tourist Studies and Third Text, and co-edited Mobilizing Hospitality: The Ethics of Social Relations in a Mobile World. Roman Kabelik is recipient of a DOC-team-fellowship of the Austrian Academy of Sciences at the Department of German Studies at the University of Vienna. He is currently working on his doctoral thesis on mobilities in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German literature and is affiliated with the Vienna-based interdisciplinary research platform Mobile Cultures and Societies. Mike Lehman is a Ph.D. candidate at Emory University. His current project, “Border Agency,” explores alternative conceptions of citizenships and human rights by exploring literature that focuses on the border. He suggests that reading the border involves not only the thematics but also the formal and aesthetic troping of movements as integral to an implicit argument about rendering an imagining of the border as generative and creative rather than the limit space of nations. His research interests include refugee studies, mobilities studies, critical border studies, postcolonial theory, migration studies, and aesthetics. Charlotte Mathieson is a Lecturer of Nineteenth-Century English Literature in the School of Literature and Languages at the University of Surrey. She researches travel and mobility in nineteenth-century l­iterature and culture, and publications include Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the Nation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600–present (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). She has also published articles on authors, including Charlotte Brontë and Charles Dickens, in journals including the Journal of Victorian Culture and Nineteenth-Century Contexts. She was Chair of the Feminist and Women’s Studies Association UK & Ireland (2016–2019) and

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co-convenes the Transport and Mobility History Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, London. Lynne Pearce is Professor of Literary and Cultural Theory in the Department of English Literature and Creative Writing at Lancaster University (UK) where she has worked for nearly 30 years. Her early work focused on feminist literary and cultural theory but she has since undergone her own “mobilities turn” through her involvement in projects on regional and diasporic writing in the British Isles (including the AHRC-funded project Moving Manchester, 2006–2010) and her interest in automobility. Her book publications in this field include Postcolonial Manchester (with Corinne Fowler and Robert Crawshaw) (Manchester University Press, 2013), Drivetime: Literary Excursions in Automotive Consciousness (Edinburgh University Press, 2016) and Mobility and the Humanities (with Peter Merriman) (Routledge, 2017). Her most recent book, Mobility, Memory and the Lifecourse in Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture, has been published in the Mobilities, Literature, and Culture series (Fall 2019). Lynne is currently Director for the Humanities at Lancaster’s Centre for Mobilities Research [CeMoRe] (https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/cemore/). Pavlina Radia is Interim Dean of Arts and Science; Professor of English Studies; and the Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Collaboration in the Arts and Sciences at Nipissing University. She is the author of Nomadic Modernisms and Diasporic Journeys of Djuna Barnes and Jane Bowles; Ecstatic Consumption: The Spectacle of Global Dystopia in Contemporary American Literature; and co-editor of Food and Appetites: The Hunger Artist and the Arts (with A. McCulloch). Her new work, The Future of Humanity: Revisioning the Human in the Posthuman Age, co-edited with S. Winters and L. Kruk, is forthcoming with Rowman & Littlefield. Kai Syng Tan  FRSA SFHEA is a UK-based artist, curator, academic, and consultant. She is concerned with the body and mind in (com)motion as a process of interrogation and intervention in a world in (com)motion. Kai’s work has been featured at the South London Gallery, MOMA (New York), Royal Geographical Society, Biennale of Sydney, ASEAN Para Games, Live Art Developmental Agency Study Guide and Fuji TV. Kai is currently also King’s College London Artist in Residence and Visiting Fellow, Peer Review College member for UK Research and Innovation

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS  

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and Arts and Humanities Research Council, Trustee of Music in Detention (a charity transforming the lives of detainees in UK through the arts), Research Committee member of UK Adult ADHD Network (a professional body for clinicians and researchers on ADHD and mental health), and advisor for PsychART (colliding creativity, art, and psychiatry). Kai’s Ph.D. was from the UCL Slade School of Fine Art. http://www.kaisyngtan.com.

List of Figures

Fig. 7.1

“ANTI Adult RUN! RUN! RUN! Masterclass #antiadultrun,” Kai Syng Tan (2015). Local children teaching adults the principals of unadulterated fun. Collaborator: Alan Latham. Participatory art commissioned by ANTI—Contemporary Art Festival 2015, Kuopio, Finland (Photo Pekka Mäkinen) Fig. 7.2 “Kaidie’s 1000-day Trans-Run: Speed-play-drift” (Kai Syng Tan [2013]. Digital art) Fig. 7.3 “Kaidie’s 1000-day Trans-Run: Blasting Big Brother. Can You See Me Now?” (Kai Syng Tan [2013]. Digital art) Fig. 7.4 “Kaidie’s 1000-day Trans-Run: Unbound Chinese Feet” (Kai Syng Tan [2013]. Digital art) Fig. 7.5 “Kaidie’s 1000-day Trans-Run: Running with the cranes (that re-claim land to build all-in-one “integrated resorts” of shopping malls and casinos) (Kai Syng Tan [2013]. Digital art) Fig. 7.6 “Kaidie’s 1000-day Trans-Run: the runners are revolting” (Kai Syng Tan [2013]. Digital art) Fig. 7.7 “Kaidie’s 1000-day Trans-Run: Lines of Nondon” (Kai Syng Tan [2013]. Based on GPS mappings of my runs in London. Digital art) Fig. 12.1 The illusory transparency of glass highlighted: screen grab from Children of Men (Strike Entertainment/Hit and Run Productions/Universal Studios, 2006)

169 170 173 175

178 180 182 295

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 12.2 The “cocoon” of the motor-car as illusory safe space: screen grab from Children of Men (Strike Entertainment/Hit and Run Productions/Universal Studios, 2006) Fig. 12.3 Photo-realistic CGI: digitally-inserted vehicles, in a screen grab from Monsters (Vertigo Films, 2010) Fig. 12.4 Photo-realistic CGI: digitally-inserted road signs, in another screen grab from Monsters (Vertigo Films, 2010) Fig. 12.5 The uncanny nature of “fantasy” automotive space: screen grab from 28 Days Later (DNA Films/UK Film Council/Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2002) Fig. 12.6 Public space stripped of its purpose: screen grab from 28 Days Later (DNA Films/UK Film Council/Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2002)

296 297 297 301 302

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Mobilities, Literature, Culture Marian Aguiar, Charlotte Mathieson and Lynne Pearce

This collection has its origins in an international conference of the same name which was held at Lancaster University (UK) in April 2017. Papers were delivered by scholars from an exceptionally wide range of humanities disciplines including English, American and Global Literature, Creative Writing, History, Geography, Film Studies, the Visual Arts and Performance Studies, as well as from the social sciences. Over half of those who participated were established academics, and delegates travelled to Lancaster from all over the world including New Zealand, the USA, and South Africa as well as from continental Europe and the Middle East. Mobilities, Literature, Culture represents some of that early thinking M. Aguiar (*)  Department of English, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA C. Mathieson  School of Literature and Languages, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK L. Pearce  Department of English Literature and Creative Writing, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK © The Author(s) 2019 M. Aguiar et al. (eds.), Mobilities, Literature, Culture, Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27072-8_1

1

2  M. AGUIAR ET AL.

brought to fruition. Our prime objective in putting this collection together is to further advance the recent “humanities turn” in mobilities studies with a particular focus on scholars who approach the field through literary and cultural studies. Mobilities studies works towards a rigorous assessment of the social and spatial aspects of mobile practices within their cultural milieu. Its focus encompasses a wide range of movements, from the largescale technologies of global travel, to transnational interconnections, to everyday local mobilities—including journeys by foot, road, rail, air, and sea, at local, regional, national and transnational levels. Mobilities studies recognises that mobility operates at multiple scales of meaning, any and all of which constitutes a society’s mobile culture. This volume charts the ways literary and cultural studies has already played a significant role in developing a field often identified with the social sciences. The book’s scholarship is deeply informed by cultural geography’s vision of a mobilised reconceptualisation of space and place, but also by the contribution of literary scholars in articulating questions of travel, technologies of transport, migration and (post)colonialism through a close engagement with textual materials. In this way, our hope is that the collection will speak to scholars working in both the humanities and social sciences as well as across that divide. Interest in the field of mobilities studies has been growing exponentially since the millennium. Most notably, Lancaster’s Centre for Mobilities Research [CeMoRe], started by John Urry and Mimi Sheller in 2003, now has a mailing list of nearly 1000 scholars from every possible disciplinary background (see https://www.lancs.ac.uk/cemore/), while its recently launched Global Mobilities Network shows that over forty institutions around the world are now engaged in mobilities research (see wp.lancs.ac.uk/globalmobilities/). Most recently, we have witnessed the emergence of two new centres dedicated specifically to mobilities and the humanities: one at the University of Padua in Italy (see https://www.dissgea.unipd.it/en/research/mobility-and-humanities) and the other at the University of Konkuk, South Korea (see mobilityhumanities.org for details of this programme and the Konkuk Asian Mobility Humanities Network [AHMN]). One of our aspirations for the Mobilities, Literature, Culture collection, and for the larger book series to which it belongs, is that our timely intervention will speak to these interdisciplinary debates and encourage a new generation of literary scholars to explore the usefulness of mobilities theory for their research, as well as signal to social scientists the contribution text-based materials can make to their own methodologies.

1  INTRODUCTION: MOBILITIES, LITERATURE, CULTURE 

3

Here it is important to note that we follow some groundbreaking scholarship from the past decade in cultivating this subfield; the international centres cited above may be new, but mobilities research which draws upon literary and cultural materials and textual approaches is already well established; when we range across cognate subjects such as historical and cultural geography, we see that publications on cultural mobilities of all kinds are already well established (see subsection following for details), and many more are waiting in the wings judging from the numerous submissions that have passed our desks since the inauguration of the series in 2017. Further, the three editors of the series have been working in this emerging field for some time: Lynne Pearce has (together with Peter Merriman) spearheaded mapping the relation between mobilities and humanities (see section following for details) as well as publishing on literary representations of automobility and the mobilities of intimate personal relationships; Charlotte Mathieson has been researching and publishing on nineteenth-century British sea narratives and other travel literature as well as exploring the mobilities of the nineteenth-century novel; and Marian Aguiar, based in the U.S., has published on both African and South Asian representations of colonial and postcolonial railways, and has been researching new scholarship on refugee migration for the past few years. Several other scholars who have been trailblazers in this area of research are named in the section which follows and in the individual chapters of this book. Thus, with this edited volume, we are not so much claiming the invention of a further mobilities subfield as much as identifying a confluence of different thinking, theorising a critical genealogy for mobilities from a humanities (and specifically literary) perspective, and affording this extraordinarily rich interdisciplinary field greater visibility. This is particularly critical for North America, where—notwithstanding some significant scholarship that approaches mobility-related topics from a humanities perspective—there are not the same networks as those that have been established in the UK and Europe. Similarly, mobilities studies is still in its relative infancy when it comes to rethinking technologies of transport and the social construction of movement in non-Western spaces. Representations of these global spaces appear throughout this volume—commuter trains in South Africa, runners in Singapore, refugees in the Mediterranean and migrant labourers in the Gulf region—where they are connected thematically in order to show how movement has become a constitutive part of

4  M. AGUIAR ET AL.

so many different social, historical and geographical practices, situations and events. Following an opening section which aims to provide an overview of how textual criticism of different kinds is contributing to the humanities turn within mobilities studies, the Introduction proceeds to provide readers with summaries of the four sections into which the book has been organised—Mobility and Nation, Embodied Subjectivities, Geopolitics of Migration, and Mobility Futures—each of which combines reflections on the individual chapters with a contextualisation of the thematic focus concerned.

Literary Criticism Meets the “Mobilities Turn” Literary criticism is arguably one of the last disciplines to annex the mobilities theories devised and developed by geographers and sociologists in the 1990s and early 2000s. Indeed, ours is the first published volume to bring mobilities research and literary scholarship together in a dedicated way even though certain sub-groups, such as those working on children’s literature (e.g., Murray and Overall 2017), and individuals, such as the editors of this collection, have been doing so for the best part of ten years. It is also notable that literary scholars’ engagement with mobilities theory has lagged behind their embrace of spatial theory, with the establishment of journals such as GeoHumanities in the US and Literary Geographies in the UK—as well as Palgrave Macmillan’s “Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies” series—pre-dating the inauguration of our own “Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture” series in 2017. However, it is also possible to narrate the genealogy of the “mobilities turn” (Sheller and Urry 2006; Hannam et al. 2006) in such a way that the poststructuralist literary revolution of the 1980s—as well as the subsequent explosion of interest in postcolonial studies—laid the intellectual foundations for the “turn.” In this section, we lay out this alternative history of mobilities scholarship—first articulated by Tim Cresswell (2014) and Peter Merriman (2014, 2016, 2017) across a series of articles in Progress in Human Geography, as well as by Merriman and Pearce in the Introduction to Mobility and the Humanities (Merriman and Pearce 2017)—and then reflect upon what both literary scholars and those working in the social sciences stand to benefit from the exploration of mobilities through textual sources. This will include some reflections on the methodological issues associated with moving between research

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5

focused on the materiality of “mobile lives” (Elliott and Urry 2009) and that centred on textual representations, as well as the methodological tension between the posthumanist approaches that now dominate sociological and cultural studies research (especially in the UK/Europe) and the subject-centred traditions that still persist in a good deal of literary scholarship notwithstanding the poststructuralist revolution. As noted in the opening to this chapter, one of our aspirations for the “Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture” series is that it will encourage a new generation of literary scholars to discover the usefulness of mobilities theory for their research, as well as to signal the contribution text-based materials can make to research originating in the social sciences. Before making the case for the role of literary studies in the pre-history of the “mobilities turn,” it is first important to register the ongoing tussle between human geographers and sociologists concerning the origins of the turn itself. While there can be no doubt that it was Mimi Sheller and John Urry who did the naming (through the publication of their 2006 article as well as the inauguration of the Centre for Mobilities Research at Lancaster University (UK) [CeMoRe] in 2003), the work of British geographer, Nigel Thrift, on non-representational space in the 1990s (see Thrift 1994, 1995, 1996) arguably paved the way. Culminating in his book, Non-Representational Theory (2008), Thrift’s interventions were instrumental in moving human geography beyond the place-bound and “sedentarist” characterisations of the spatial realm and refiguring it as mobile, motile and ephemeral. Similarly, cultural geographer Tim Cresswell’s early publications—many of them making use of literary texts (see Cresswell 1993, 1997, 1999)—had begun to conceptualise a world in which the mobilities that characterised the lives of certain groups of people (e.g., nomads, tramps) was an important means of investigating changes in the social realm and world order. By the time Cresswell’s On the Move was published in 2006, however, the Lancaster sociologists had already claimed the “turn” as their own and effectively shifted its “origins” from a humanities-based discipline (geography) to a social-science based one (sociology) (see Cresswell 2014). This said, it is important to acknowledge that John Urry had also signalled the need to move beyond traditional conceptions of the social order some years before his naming of the turn itself (see, for example, Urry 1999), and it is perhaps time to lay these disputes concerning the “origins” of mobilities scholarship to rest and instead celebrate what, from the perspective of hindsight, appears to have been a unique

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moment of shared, and synergistic, enlightenment across multiple disciplines. Indeed, the volume which has recently been published in celebration of the late John Urry’s life and work—Mobilities and Complexities (2019)—captures brilliantly not only the interdisciplinary origins, but also the multi-disciplinary applications, of the mobilities paradigm. Returning to the dates when Cresswell’s first articles on nomads and tramps began to appear (1993, 1997) it is, moreover, possible to argue for the influence of some landmark literary critical publications on mobility and displacement that also began to appear around this time. Following the explosion of interest in postcolonial theory and “world literature” (as it was then styled) in the 1980s and early 1990s (see, for example, Said 1978; Canclini 2005 [1989]; Spivak 1987; Bhabha 1994), text-based studies emerged which focused specifically on travel and mobilities (including migration) in the contemporary world; these include Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturalism (1992) and Caren Kaplan’s Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (1996). The “thematic” of mobility developed in volumes such as these has continued to influence literary research in postcolonial and migration studies through to the present without the authors concerned necessarily being aware of the sort of theorising of mobility that has come to be associated with the mobilities paradigm per se. Undoubtedly, a US–UK split is at work here, since British/European mobilities scholarship still has a minority following in the US despite the fact that both applications may be traced back to common philosophical roots: notably, continental poststructuralism (i.e., the work of figures such as Saussure, Lacan, Foucault, and Kristeva) and the “processual” philosophy of Bergson and of Deleuze and Guattari). Therefore, although a good deal of literary scholarship in the field(s) of postcolonialism, transculturalism and migration studies may not be aware of the “mobilities turn” per se, there is often a noticeable overlap between the publications in terms of thematics and debates. When we conceptualised the “Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture” book series we were very aware that the concept of mobility would figure differently across the proposals we received on account of this bifurcated genealogy, but concurred that this could be used to promote future dialogue. Contemporary literary and historical scholars who have brought mobilities theories to bear upon their postcolonial/transcultural research include Georgine Clarsen (2009) and Catharine Coleborne (2015) as well as one of the editors of this volume, Marian Aguiar (2011, 2018),

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while Mimi Sheller—one of the originators of the “mobilities turn” (Sheller and Urry 2006)—herself comes from a literary background (see Sheller 2003). In conclusion, we would propose that literary studies can most certainly be written into the history of mobilities studies via the alternative genealogy we have proposed here, but we also believe that text-based scholarship has much to gain from a dedicated engagement with the work of the geographers and sociologists we have cited above (see Adey 2010 for an overview of the field) in the same way that the work of Henri Lefebvre (1991) and Michel de Certeau (1984) has contributed to the now well-established “spatial turn” in literary studies. Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space (1991) and, in particular, his conceptualisation of “representational space” (Lefebvre 1991), is also extremely useful when we turn to the methodological implications of bringing ethnographic and text-based scholarship together within the field of mobilities scholarship. By making the case for the extent to which discourses and their associated representations impact upon our “lived” experiences of space in the material world (e.g., how our familiarity with a particular location via its depiction in a novel or film will influence our perception/reception of it in any subsequent embodied encounters), Lefebvre highlighted the crucial role the imagination plays in the production of social space, and the same logic may, of course, be applied to mobilities. Nowhere has this been more apparent than in the production and consumption of automobility where, since the earliest days of motoring, manufacturers have been acutely aware of the fact that what they are selling is an experience (i.e., driving and/or “passengering” [Laurier et al. 2008]) that is culturally mediated. From the 1910s onwards, we see motor manufacturers selling sensations and ideologies (e.g., the sensation of “flying” and its connotations of “freedom”) that prospective purchasers will have read about in magazines and novels and which are very evidently in excess of the functional aspects of driving. For this reason, scholars in the social sciences working on automobility have been compelled to take into consideration the multiple—and, indeed, historical—cultural discourses by which motoring has been inscribed in their attempt to analyse humanity’s enduring love affair with the car (see Wollen and Kerr 2002; Dennis and Urry 2009; Mom 2015; Pearce 2016). Further, and by the same token, Lefebvre’s formulation of representational space as a circuit of meaning-production—whereby the representation feeds the experience and the experience feeds the ­representation—means that the work of literary/cultural commentators

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has more of a foothold in the material world than has always be recognised. Most of us, when working with literary and other texts, are very anxious not to give the impression that we are naively confusing the textual representation of an experience (so often overlaid with symbolism or narrative significance) with its equivalent in the material world. However, when a text’s overtly symbolic use of a cultural phenomenon is placed in its proper historical/cultural context it often becomes clear that it was chosen as a trope on account of its topicality. Pearce’s (2014) article on early twentieth-century automobility reflects upon this sort of representational circuit with reference to Elizabeth Bowen’s novel, To the North (1932), which includes several scenes in which the protagonists’ (tragic) love story is figured through through their “motor-flights” in speeding cars. These episodes are clearly of huge symbolic significance in the novel as well as being integral to its plot, but it may also be argued that the reason Bowen chose to tell her story via such tropes was precisely because they resonate with the cultural moment; this was the period (the late 1920s) when more and more people were “taking to the road” (or desiring to do so), hence grounding the representation in the historical present in a very specific way. With Lefebvre’s model in mind, textual critics should therefore learn to more be confident about the application of their work to wider social debates. Along with the methodological issues raised by working with textual representations (see Murray and Upstone 2014 for further discussion of this), the current vogue for posthumanist theory among mobilities scholars based in sociology and geography also figures as a point of contrast with a good deal of literary scholarship which continues to centre on the experience of the (human) subject (even when conceptualised through a non-essentialist poststructuralist lens). In contrast, the “mobilities paradigm” as laid out by Sheller and Urry in their 2006 article was very much influenced by “actor network theory” [ANT] (see Latour 2007), and mobilities scholars following in their footsteps have insisted that we attend to the circulation of goods, finance, commodities and data alongside the movement of people in order to better understand the complex production of subjectivity in the contemporary world. John Law (also based in Lancaster during this period), who played a leading role in popularising ANT as an approach in Science and Technology Studies [STS], observed that: “what we call the social is materially heterogenous: talk, bodies, texts, machines, architectures, all of these and many more are implicated in and perform the social” (Law and Hansard 1999). As well

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as “de-centring” the human subject, ANT’s emphasis on the interdependence of humans and things has also led to the conceptualisation of human and non-human hybrids such as Tim Dant’s “driver-car” (2004). As well as exploring the ways in which modern, highly-technological, vehicles increasingly interact with the humans who drive them in ways which complicate the notion of agency and look forward to fully autonomous vehicles (AVs), Dant’s article also demonstrates the way in which humans are sutured into a complex, global “car-system” (Elliott and Urry 2009) connecting the oil industry, car manufacturers and the cultures of automobility in a seemingly irresistible way (see also Pearce 2016, 36–37). ANT, as developed by Latour and others, evolved out of Deleuze and Guattari’s re-modelling of ontology as an “assemblage” of contingent, mutable actors (physical, social, psychological, ideological, etc.), and many mobilities scholars—especially those working in the field of cultural geography—have developed rich and evocative ways of conceptualising space and place—including what Tim Edensor has identified as “extended mobile space” (e.g., the temporal-spatial corridor of the road)—in these terms (Edensor 2014 [our italics]). Edensor’s work also exemplifies the phenomenological method of observing and describing these complex matrices of people and things in great detail when seeking to capture the “rhythms” of everyday life (see Edensor 2003, 2010, 2011). For literary scholars whose work has, historically, centred upon the human subject through the study of textual characters, these alternative posthumanist approaches will, for some, feel very alien and counter-intuitive. That said, there is a now well-established engagement with STS and posthumanist approaches in the work of literary scholars working on science fiction (see Hayles 1999), and Victorian Studies has recently experienced its own “new materialist” turn in response to the popularity of Bill Brown’s “thing theory” (Brown 2001). The benefits of a “distributed consciousness” approach to texts is that it enables us to grasp the contingency of the human subject within a “systems-based” social order with new clarity and, from a mobilities perspective, to recognise that “mobile [human] lives” (Elliott and Urry 2009) cannot be separated from those of other animals or, indeed, the machines, commodities and services that constitute the fabric of daily life. This said, for those of us who retain a deep interest and fascination in human psychology—including the workings of memory—it is sometimes a challenge to reconcile an approach which focuses on the “production”

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of the subject in his or her immediate social-historical context with the diachronic evolution of subjects across the lifecourse; as Lynne Pearce explores in her recent work (Pearce 2019), it is difficult to investigate individual memory without recourse to longitudinal models of subject development and the role of “ego-centric” story telling in the knitting together of diverse experiences. Significantly, few of the chapters included in this volume is written from a dedicated posthumanist standpoint for the good reason that the mobile experiences of individual subjects still take centre stage in the analyses; however, some (for example, the chapter by Robert Braun on science fiction and autonomous vehicles) do engage with recent work in STS and acknowledge the extent to which mobile subjectivity is produced through a complex array of socio-economic systems and “more-than-human” agencies. Similarly, Mike Lehman’s chapter on the troubling circulation of human subjects around the globe via their body parts (i.e., the trafficking of human organs) vividly demonstrates the ways in which flows of people and commodities cannot necessarily be distinguished in the contemporary world.

Mobility and Nation The role of mobilities in connecting—and disconnecting—nations is a prominent theme throughout mobility studies: from its beginning, the new mobilities paradigm has taken into account the “transformation of nation through mobilities” (Hannam et al. 2006) and the way in which mobility impacts upon “national images and aspirations to modernity” (Sheller and Urry 2006). Such discussions have accounted for: the role of transport infrastructures in the development of nation-states’ social, political, and economic structures; the impact of enhanced networking capabilities on the emergence and evolution of national consciousness; and the role of mobilities in the construction of national imaginaries and cultural images of the nation. So, too, have the interplays and intersections between the nation-state and international contexts been discussed, looking at the impact of transnational flows of people, capital, and culture, on the construction and perception of the nation. For many nations the onset of modernity and the emergence of new mobile technologies arose as coterminous with the development of the nation-state, the concept of the nation thus emerging as integrally bound up with the mobilities through which it was connected, experienced, and traversed (Urry 2007; Cresswell 2006). In nineteenth-century Europe,

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the rise of new technologies such as the railway, and the associated possibilities of intra-national connection that it enabled, was crucial in developing both the reality and the imagined consciousness of a connected nation-state (Urry 2007); in Victorian Britain especially, the railway thus accrued symbolic resonance in the national imaginary (Mathieson 2015). Elsewhere, the associations are often more complex and historically variable: as Marian Aguiar discusses, in India “the railway became a kind of moving theater that staged first a colonial, then a national, and finally a global identity” (Aguiar 2011, xii); in this volume, Sarah Gibson examines the intra-national politics within South Africa’s township railways as a space where racial inequalities are enacted. In nations that came to prominence at different historical moments, other mobilities carry greater symbolic force. In the United States of America, it was the road that came to capture the national imaginary, symbolising the ideals of freedom and liberty of the American dream (Urry 2007; Edensor 2004). Indeed the association of mobility with liberality and freedom became, as Tim Cresswell has explored, enshrined as a “right of citizenship” in the United States, the apotheosis of the notion of “mobility as freedom—as liberty—[which] lies right at the heart of some of the foundational ideologies of the modern world” (Cresswell 2006, 151), examined in this volume in Elsa Court’s essay. The belief in mobility as a “right”—“the right to the seas,” “the right to airspace”—is, as Paul Virilio asserts (2006, 61), in turn inscribed as a political category in which the regulation, prohibition, and enforcement of mobility emerges as a necessary corollary of the nation-state (Cresswell 2006, 27). Throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century, the internationalism of mobility has engendered associated narratives that intersect with nation-oriented contexts, at times embracing the possibilities of transcultural exchange, and at others conceiving of mobility as a threat to the nation—themes that play out in Pavlina Radia’s essay in this volume. If cultural practices have been inherent to the formation of nations, providing narratives that construct and assert as well as contest and critique, then it follows that the explorations and examinations of ­mobility found within literature, film, artistic, and other cultural sources play a crucial role in this process—not just representing but also contributing to the production of the nation through their perceptions and interpretations (Merriman and Pearce 2017). Cultural mobilities encapsulate the multiplicities of the theoretical and critical contexts mapped out above. They serve to map out the nation, creating the nation spaces

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through which characters move in novels and films; they examine questions about who belongs to the nation and who has the right to travel in and through it, and how; they provide space to examine the social and political dimensions of mobility through such facets as race, gender, and class; and they examine the international contexts through which nations are created. Literary representations form part of the “representational space” through which social space is constituted (Lefebvre 1991, 33–46), and thus these depictions are as much part of the mobilities of the nation, a key site through which national mobilities are constructed, conceived, and challenged. The essays in this section approach these themes with a particular focus on the role of literature in contesting the ideal projection of the nation as a seamlessly and democratically connected space. The way in which mobilities disconnect as much as connect are prominent themes in Sarah Gibson’s essay “Railing against Apartheid: Staffrider, Township Trains, and Racialised Mobility in South Africa.” While the railway served as a connecting force in the formation of South Africa as a nation-state, it was uniquely and intricately tied up with the racial inequalities inherent therein, both contributing to and further enabling the structures of apartheid. As Gibson explores in her essay, railways participated in the racialised spatial dynamics of apartheid South Africa, serving as commuter transport for labourers from townships to the city; the train itself also embodied the segregation through the provision of separate transport cars for black migrant labourers. This racialised mobility politics, as Gibson terms it, is intricately explored in literature of the period, and her examination of short stories published in Staffrider by authors including Mango Tshabangu, Miriam Tlali, Michael Siluma, Brian Setuke, elucidates how the railways “function as a key metaphor of alienation and resistance to apartheid.” Through this, the literary text emerges as a powerful site through which to “rail against” the injustices of apartheid. While the movements inherent within mobility are a fundamental site of examination, many theorists have noted the importance of looking at the stopping places that punctuate the way: since John Urry’s recognition of the mobility/moorings dialectic (Urry 2003), the “exceptionally immobile platforms” that “configure and enable mobilities” (Hannam et al. 2006, 3; Adey 2006) have become significant. Elsa Court’s analysis of the American roadside in her essay “‘Stationary Trivialities’: Contrasting Representations of the American Motel in Vladimir Nabokov and Jack

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Kerouac,” contributes to these examinations, looking at the role of the motel as it intersects with the ideology of the American road as a symbol of freedom and imagination. Turning to the great American road fiction of the twentieth century, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), Court identifies how the motel figures as a site “symbolising the failure of the quest” in its stasis, but comes to have powerful potential as a site through which “narrative­ interruption and existential doubt” can be staged. Such interruption is doubly embedded in Lolita through the transnational mobility of its author, Nabokov; Court suggests that this affords a unique position through which to examine America’s national mythology anew. The transnational displacements of Nabokov prefigure the later rise of an international tourist industry. As with other modes of mobility, tourism is far from removed from the national political structures of the culture in which it occurs, and perhaps the most complex of such intersections is found in “death tourism”: sites of memorial and memorialisation that serve both as a commemoration to traumatic events but also represent sites of “grief turned spectacle.” Pavlina Radia’s essay “Mobilising Affective Brutality: Death Tourism and the Ecstasy of Postmemory in Contemporary American Culture” incisively examines the ways in which such sites intersect with national imaginaries and identities, in the case of America’s war memorials as they are represented in literary texts including Shalom Auslander’s Hope: A Tragedy, Alissa Torres’s graphic novel, American Widow, and Amy Waldman’s The Submission. Building on Sheller and Urry’s recognition that “much travel and communication involve the active development and performances of ‘memory’” (2006, 218), Radia brings indicative new angles to mobility studies in developing in more detail the intersection of mobility with affect, theorising how “memory is not only a form of mobility, but also an embodied performance that lives on in and through memorials and texts as physical and figurative monuments of the past that are persistently mobilised and on the move.” The essay also usefully shows the dialogue that can be constructed between lived experiences and literary representations, reading these as part of the same cultural fabric of mobilities. Radia’s essay leaves us considering the temporality of transport and mobility as part of their nation-building affect, be it the enduring physical infrastructures that connect past, present, and future mobilities, the “active material practices” of travel through which the nation is

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constructed (Massey 2005, 118), or the imaginative conceptualisations of mobility that are shaped and reshaped from one cultural moment to the next. These essays point us to think about the way in which the nation is constantly reconstructed and relived through mobile practices and representations, as part of an ongoing, mobile dialogue about the nation-state and its international contexts. So, too, do they show the active role that literary texts have as participants in the construction and development of national imaginaries both historically and today, providing rich resources for mobilities scholars to conceptualise and understand national mobilities.

Embodied Subjectivities The embodiment of mobility as a subjective, experienced, practice is a central theme of research in the field. Indeed embodiment is a central, inescapable factor of movement. As John Urry writes: [T]ravel always involves corporeal movement… Bodies navigate backwards and forwards between directly sensing the external world as they move bodily in and through it, and discursively mediated sensescapes that signify social taste and distinction, ideology and meaning. The body especially senses as it moves. It is endowed with kinaesthetics, the sixth sense that informs one what the body is doing in space through the sensations of movement registered in its joints, muscles, tendons, and so on. (2007, 48)

This focus on the corporeality of mobility emerged, in part, from an earlier reassertion of the body in feminist geography, which worked to assert the body as a place within socially produced space (Rose 1993; Longhurst 1995; McDowell 1999), and to understand the ways in which bodies experienced spaces differently according to the interaction of physical, social, and cultural contexts. The synthesis of these theories with those fostered by the new mobilities paradigm ensured that the ways in which mobility is experienced, practised, interpreted, and represented through the body has remained at the forefront of mobilities scholarship. This has involved an understanding of the physicality of mobility—how the body produces motion, and changes and is changed by its movement through space—and an interest in the sociocultural contexts which inflect upon how movements are performed, experienced and interpreted (Cresswell 1999, 2006, 2010).

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The re-centring of the body in this way opens up a number of new theoretical debates and enquiries. The first may be seen to be the embedding of the body within the material landscape of travel, a participant in the production of space through mobility: if travel is an “active material practice” in which “you are not just travelling through space or across it … you are also helping … to alter space, to participate in its continuing production” (Massey 2005, 118), then the body is an active participant in this process, changing and changed by its movement through space. In this respect, the body is, as Sheller and Urry write, “an effective vehicle through which we sense place and movement, and construct emotional geographies” (2006, 216). The “emotional geographies” of mobility (see, for example, Davidson et al. 2005) has also opened up a rich seam of exploration vis-à-vis the interrelationship of embodiment with subjectivity; for example, the connections between travel and agency, and the complex overlap between emotions, perception and the somatic experience (see Merriman 2012; Pearce 2014). Studying the body has also allowed scholars to develop a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which factors such as class, gender, race, and sexuality, impact upon travel, moving away from the universal to a better understanding of how different bodies move and negotiate spaces differently (Cresswell 1999; Uteng and Cresswell 2008): a debate to which Tan’s chapter in this volume actively contributes. The humanities have had much to offer on this theme. Indeed as Peter Merriman and Lynne Pearce have recently stated, “if there is a common thread running through much arts and humanities research on mobility, we feel it might be encapsulated in the concepts of ‘kinaesthesis’ and ‘kinaesthetics,’” the sensations and aesthetics of movement (2017, 6). A focus on how mobility is embodied as a sensory and aesthetic experience, and how this is represented in a range of cultural texts and practices, has allowed humanities scholars to not only draw upon, but also contribute to, developing theorisations of embodied mobilities. Cultural analyses and creative practices have enriched conceptual understandings of such aspects as the sensations of movements and the relationship between body and space, as well as accounting for the historical and geographical variabilities of corporeal phenomenologies of mobility (Bond 2018; Mathieson 2015). Creative engagements with embodied mobilities are also transforming the practice and writing of mobilities

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research as they accommodate embodied subjectivities on a formal and aesthetic level (see Merriman 2017). In Nour Dakkak’s chapter, “Mobility, Attentiveness and Sympathy in E.M. Forster’s Howards End,” the embodied experience of movement is brought into sharp relief at a moment of historical change. Dakkak explores how—at the start of the twentieth century, and the moment at which the motorcar brought a new embodied experience of space and time—the depiction of embodied motion provides a means of working through the impacts of modern mobilities. However, Dakkak shows that such changes are not only apparent in representations of motoring, but also resonate throughout depictions of other modes of transport, thus situating Howards End as a text “that marks modernity not only through the depiction of modern mobilities but also through celebrating other types of movement whose particularity the new technologies have made visible.” Embodied mobilities are thus persistent through the text, integrally connected to both the movements of the characters through space as well as their “identities, personal relations and sense of belonging.” In Roman Kabelik’s chapter “Narrative Senses of Perspective and Rhythm: Mobilising Subjectivity with Werther and Effi Briest,” attention shifts to how the aesthetic qualities of literary texts can work to “actively provide sensations and feelings of mobility in its multiple forms and dimensions” in their readers. Studying two German novels, Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) and Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest (1895), Kabelik examines how the narratives utilise perspective and rhythm to convey the experience of mobility in the reader, thus suggesting “the experiential dimension of mobilising subjectivity is not a code hidden in the literary texts but produced in interaction with them.” In Kabelik’s reading, the intricate relationship between mobilising subjectivity and aesthetic form are eloquently and incisively drawn out in ways that develop our conceptual understanding of the capabilities and affordances of literary form as a mobilised and mobilising experience. In the final chapter in this section, Kai Syng Tan’s “Running (In) Your City,” the relationship between mobility, embodiment and form is creatively examined and embedded in both the practice and text of Tan’s research. Arguing for a reassertion of running—which has been comparatively neglected in comparison to walking in mobilities research—Tan interweaves critical and theoretical engagement with her own practice as an artist and as a runner to explore ways of “running art-fully” as a

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mobile method through which to embody and examine the city; and more broadly, to “acknowledge and celebrate how there are different bodies, and show how running draws attention to the precarious, fragile situations these bodies are in and reveal how global mobilities are enacted, and recommend new ways forward.” Tan’s work is situated as both an examination and a catalyst for others to create their own tactics and “response-abilities,” calling for different mobile approaches to “help to move things forward.” We conclude this section then with a dynamic provocation to use literary and cultural mobilities to examine our own embodied subjectivities of mobility. In this way, as in Kabelik’s examination of the mobilised experience of reading, and in Dakkak’s examination of the historical responsiveness of Forster’s text, we see how literary and cultural texts not only represent mobilities, but are also vital constituents of the ways in which mobility itself is experienced as an embodied, subjective act that is informed by, and through, the cultural context in which it occurs.

Geopolitics of Migration This section takes as its central topic the geopolitics of migration, and features chapters that call attention to the ways movement takes on particular forms in transnational contexts. The chapters specifically concern themselves with how contemporary global movements—including transnational labour and commodity flows, as well as refugee migration— reflect and reinforce uneven global economies by enabling and arresting movement. In this way, both chapters in this section focus primarily on relations between the Global South and North, using literary studies as a way to elaborate these relations. The work here intersects with the fields of postcolonial and diaspora studies, while also drawing on the research in mobilities studies authored by John Urry, Mimi Sheller, Peter Adey, Tim Cresswell, Lynne Pearce and Peter Merriman, among others (see Urry 2007; Adey et al. 2014; Adey 2010; Cresswell 2006; Merriman and Pearce 2017). This part of the introduction sutures those fields together as it contextualises the chapters in these broader fields. Postcolonial and diaspora studies have drawn attention to movement as an element of empire, as the “pattern of dominion or possessions laid the groundwork for what is in effect now a fully global world” (Said 1993, 6). Scholars like Edward Said highlighted the global nature of such dominion, and charted the vectors that inscribed control, but they

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also considered how movement was a modality that itself reinforced the power structures of colonialism. James Clifford elaborated the concept of “dwelling-in-travel” (Clifford 1997, 26) and turned attention to “discrepant cosmopolitanisms”—cultures of displacement and transplantation embedded in histories of economic, political and cultural interaction (36). Empire suggests relocation for some and dislocation for others. Global exploration and colonisation enabled the processes of empire by defining trade routes, by laying claim to territories, and by transporting people in and out of such spaces. The trade of African slaves comprised the largest forced migration of people, with over 12 million people taken to the Americas. Paul Gilroy draws attention to the foundational aspect of this displacement to people of the African diaspora and to modernity itself—“routes” as well as “roots” (1995, 19) as constituent to EuroAmerican economies. Sailors, soldiers, and colonial administrators were also on the move as part of colonial expansion; so too were merchants, religious persons, wives, nurses, prostitutes, scholars, and leisure travellers. Concurrently and later, colonial subjects travelled inwards to the metropolitan centres of Europe on the paths worn outwards and moved laterally between colonial spaces, as in indentured labor. Postcolonial studies has placed leisure travellers, once seen as more objective observers to the role of empire, squarely inside the workings of empire. Edward Said has talked about travel writing as part of the “ensemble of relationships between works, audiences, and some particular aspects of the Orient,” that made up the formation of Orientalism (Said 1978, 28). Noting that “writing and travel have always been intimately connected,” (Hulme and Youngs 2002, 2), Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs helped define a literary field of travel writing that found in the quotidian records of day-to-day life the foundations of empire and relationships between locations. The mobilities of empire included objects and ideas as well as people. Networks of trade circumnavigated the globe: spices drove ancient and medieval Mediterranean, Asian and European trade; opium was transported on a triangle between India and China and Britain; natural specimens that included plants, mineral, animals and even people were collected from Africa, Asia and Latin America and brought to Europe (Pratt 1992). Technologies also travelled; for example, as the British brought the railway to India, they carried with them a colonial modernity that had been given form in Victorian England. Such forms were never absolute, and the “traveling modernity” (Aguiar 2011, 3) took on new forms through this global movement. Thus empire created

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vectors in which commodities and knowledge moved about the globe, but through that process the mobilities concerned came to be inscribed by the power dynamics of colonialism. While the constituent experiences of expansion, travel, relocation and dislocation have always been a part of the fields of postcolonial and diaspora studies, the “mobilities turn” that emerged mostly out of social science fields (though grounded in the philosophy of Walter Benjamin, Henri Lefebvre, and Michel de Certeau) brought sharpened attention to movement itself as an object of study, rather than the outcome of movement. Lisa Malkki challenged the idea of “rootedness” in the context of refugee displacement (Malkki 1992). Caren Kaplan uncovered the power inequities in notions of travel and, along with Inderpal Grewal, elaborated new ways of thinking about diasporas as dynamic two-way relations of transnationalism (see Kaplan 1996; Grewal and Kaplan 1994). Mobilities studies was fundamental to rethinking technologies of travel in terms of the global South. Aguiar’s Tracking Modernity: India’s Railway and the Culture of Mobility, interpreted the railway both as a concept and as a representational object to explore the dialectics of modernity made evident through movement. Anticipating some of the work in this collection, Robert Aguirre argued in Mobility and Modernity: Panama in the Nineteenth Century Anglo-American Imagination that the mobility enabled by the Panama canal paradoxically produced new immobilities (2017). Meanwhile, Lindsey B. GreenSimms examined the notion of automobility, a term developed as a critical tool to understand the culture of cars and car movement primarily in Euro-American contexts, as an idea that took on new significance in African contexts (2017). Similarly, Stéphanie Ponsavady—in another volume in the “Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture” series, has argued that in French Colonial Indochina, “the system, experiences, and representations of automobility had political, economic, social, and psychological aspects, all of which helped to maintain beliefs in the colonial empire and the French Republic at times when the French were questioning both” (2018, 2), while in this collection, Sarah Gibson demonstrates that township commuter trains were the site of resistance as well as control in apartheid South Africa. Yet while it has been useful to recognise the many different kinds of global movements that have comprised the histories of empire, it is problematic to see all kinds of movement as equivalent. This is particularly evident when one considers the movements of people. As the history of slave migration tells us,

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not all kinds of global movement had the same amount of volition: not everyone is equally free to move; not everyone who moves wants to go; not everyone who relocates occupies the same relation to a new space. The phenomenon of global migration includes both movement and stasis, and the relation between these two directly produces social life and space (Adey 2010). For some, like those in Jamaica Kincaid’s “small place,” home becomes a place of stagnation, while for others, global mobility gives rise to new economic and social opportunities (Kincaid 1988). Both works in this section feature literary representations. For Nadeen Dakkak, in this volume, literature provides a forum to expose types of mobility and immobility rendered invisible in other kinds of representations of migrant labor. Mike Lehman, meanwhile, uses the idea of kinaesthetics developed by Merriman and Pearce (Merriman and Pearce 2017) as a way to rethink ontologies through the aesthetics of movement as represented in the poetry of Caroline Bergvall. Nadeen Dakkak’s chapter considers how the migration of global manual labor features the coexistence of forms of mobility and immobility. In her chapter, “Migrant Labor, Immobility and Invisibility in Literature on the Arab Gulf States,” Dakkak considers the relocation of labourers from South Asia to the Gulf. Here, what is most often considered agential—the ability to move—becomes recast as exploitability as the workers transform into an embodied commodity of labor outside the benefits of the nation state. She writes, “The perception of migrant workers’ bodies as mobile and lacking in agency makes them attractive in the eyes of both the institutions that import them and the local agencies that facilitate this process in the sending countries” (Nadeen Dakkak). One might easily reproduce such a perspective in scholarly work about these workers, but Dakkak cautions the reader to note that the perception of mobility only takes into account one perspective, a vision that maps the global movement of labor. From another point of view, the workers are static. Dakkak notes that while one kind of mobility makes these workers exploitable for their labor, that capacity for transnational movement is coupled with both physical and social immobility in the host country. Because of restrictions like the contract sponsorship or kafāla system, migrant laborers in the Gulf are prevented from moving around inside their host country. This lack of capacity to move within the nation can, ironically, prevent them from putting down roots, as they are unable to build anything other than a

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rudimentary life inside there. Here, Dakkak draws on Urry’s notions of “mobility-systems” that vary in each society and that “have the effect of producing substantial inequalities between places and between people in terms of their location and access to these mobility-systems” (Urry 2007, 51). Such systems are not only infrastructural, like the kafāla system, but may also be systems of circulation within, or traversals across, borders as designated by the state. This flow, inside, across and between borders is the primary focus of Mike Lehman’s chapter, “‘Flotsam of Humanity’: Bodies, Borders, and Futures Deferred.” Lehman attaches mobility to nationhood. He explores a national imaginary in which citizenship appears as a right to movement, across as well as within borders. Such an imaginary leaves a segment of people outside the state, caught in stasis unable to enter into the full entitlements of the state. Such entitlements are claimed geographically, for example by the refugee who crosses the border and can claim asylum, as well as symbolically, by the citizen whose passport allows for exit and entry denied to the illegal migrant. In advancing this thesis, Lehman is working across the fields of transnationalism and border studies (an approach that recognises that the boundaries that halt traffic are themselves spaces worthy of exploration in their own right). Here he draws on Tom Nail’s theories of migration that examine the structures of the border not simply as contiguous lines mapping the nation, but entities in and of themselves with constituencies and logics (Nail 2015). Movement, the lack of movement, or selected movement in those border spaces, Lehman argues, redefines the state itself in which “migrants are always moved in and out of the nation to retain its perpetual, static structure and in which the national form is always taken as the global future.” Looking more carefully at kinds of movements that are enabled, Lehman sees that not all aspects of mobility are suspended, even as migrants are caught in stasis. He considers the circulation of body parts in the global organ trade and the ways that “wastes,” even in the bodily form of corpses that become “flotsam” when they fall out of the boats in the Mediterranean, move across boundaries proscribed for living people. Pairing Nadeen Dakkak’s and Michael Lehman’s work together in an exploration of the geopolitics of migration, one may see, first, that freedom through movement is arrested within mobility systems marked by power differentials, and, second, that movement itself does not always enable freedom in these contexts.

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Mobility Futures Since the inception of the mobilities paradigm in the early 2000s (Sheller and Urry 2006), mobilities and futures have gone hand in hand. This has arguably been fuelled, in part, by the research councils’ preference for research which is addressed to urgent social and environmental concerns, and mobilities research has already made a major contribution to such issues through its focus on sustainable transport, urban design, the impact of climate change and the potential of new technologies to provide solutions to some of these challenges.1 This said, many sociologists and geographers working in the field have long recognised the usefulness of historical literary texts in helping us to better understand how societies have sought to “manage” their relationship to the future in the past and to compare how the future was thought about then and how it is today. Indeed, the opening chapter of the late John Urry’s book, What Is the Future? (2016), focuses specifically on “Past Futures” in the form of a review of literary and filmic utopias and dystopias from the work of Thomas More to the science-fiction writers of the twentieth century. He concludes: Although it is impossible to “know” what the future has in store for us, most societies thus developed procedures and discourses through which the future could be anticipated, talked about and in some sense known, whether that perceived future was in the hands of gods or humans. People have imagined, predicted, divined, prophesied and told the future. These forms of future anticipation in the past—what can be termed “past futures”—provide some key terms and issues in subsequent future-making. (Urry 2016, 32)

The chapters in this volume which deal with “mobility futures” likewise engage with literature and film to this end. Texts which imagine the future—whether located in the science fiction genre or otherwise—have long fascinated literary and cultural scholars on account their de-familiarisation of everyday life, their f­ormal experimentation and their often radical political vision, while the topic of transport futures is one which speaks to any number of complex social concerns. In line with Urry’s own project, the three authors gathered together in this this section—Neil Archer, Robert Braun and Una Brogan—focus on the way in which the futuristic imaginings of texts

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produced in the past (be this the fin de siècle or more recent decades) have sought to anticipate and shape the future of transportation, either through a utopian annexation of new technologies (notably, the bicycle and the car) or as a dystopian “early warning system” of where such innovations may lead us. Una Brogan’s chapter, “Cycling and Narrative Structure,” explores two delightful texts from the very end of the nineteenth century— H. G. Wells’s The Wheels of Chance (1896) and Maurice Leblanc’s Voici des Ailes (1898)—and argues that the reconfiguration of time and space brought about by cycling (e.g., the variable speed and pace, the ability to stop or pause, the opportunity to change direction at a whim) may be linked to narratological experiments within the texts themselves. As Brogan summarises in her abstract: “Wells and Leblanc experiment with various new means of structuring and punctuating their novels according to the rhythms and interruptions of journeys by bicycle.” Both texts also capture what was then the novel bodily experience of cycling in ways that anticipate the early twentieth-century literature on motoring (see Merriman 2012; Pearce 2016; Nour Dakkak in this volume). However, for Wells and Leblanc, these exciting new temporalities and sensations have a further application in that they function as “aides to courtship” for the couples as the centre of the stories and hence anticipate recent debates in mobilities studies about the way in which different modes of transport may help to generate, develop and sustain intimate personal relationships (see Bissell 2018; Pearce 2019). Robert Braun’s chapter on autonomous vehicles, meanwhile, employs literary texts from the early years of the twentieth century— David Keller’s “The Living Machine” and Isaac Asimov’s “Sally” (both first published in the 1930s)—in order to show what needs to change before the “driverless car” can become a practicable and sustainable transport option. In contrast to Brogan’s, this is a chapter which engages literature in the service of topical mobilities debates rather than to produce new readings of the texts themselves, fascinating though they both are. In his critique of the limitations of these early science-fiction representations of autonomous vehicles, Braun draws upon Louis Althusser’s notion of the “Ideological State Apparatus” to exemplify the way in which the “sociotechnical imaginary” of automobility has historically been annexed by multiple capitalist institutions (e.g., the oil industry, the car manufacturers, the robotics industry),

24  M. AGUIAR ET AL.

none of which have any interest in a fully-functioning integrated transport system. He thus concludes: “It is now clear… that the transformational nature of the autonomous connected vehicle is not its driverlessness, but rather its potential to transition from the “system of automobility” to the radically reconceptualised social and geographical realm of post-automobility.” In methodological terms, the chapter is thus an excellent example of how literary texts can be annexed to support research and policy-making in the social sciences. For Neil Archer, the way in which textual materials—in this case, recent science-fiction road movies—may contribute to topical mobilities debates is one of the overt objectives of his chapter (“Science Fiction Cinema and the Road Movie”). Building on an earlier article (published in the Mobilities special issue, “Mobility and the Humanities” [Archer 2017]), Archer seeks to demonstrate how a more sophisticated narratological and generic awareness of film as a medium lends new layers of complexity—and enlightenment—to the engagement of film texts when used in the service of sociological and political thought. As he observes, although mobilities scholars like Urry cite films quite frequently in their analysis of twentieth- and twentyfirst-century culture (What Is the Future? [Urry 2016], quoted above, is a case in point), it is typically in a rudimentary “thematic” way. By contrast, Archer’s chapter turns upon the argument that it is in their radical experimentation with “alternate ways of seeing” that the more complex political messages of dystopian road movies such as Children of Men (2006), Monsters (2010) and Twenty Eight Days Later (2002) is to be found. Focusing on the ways in which the directors of these films have explored automobility in the context of environmental disasters of the near future, Archer demonstrates the often subtle and ironic filmic techniques used to capture our doomed love affair with the car; for example, in Children of Men, the representation of the empty, devastated, “post-apocalyptic” landscape is captured via a mobile camera mounted in the protagonists’ “getaway” vehicle (whose pollution has, of course, contributed to the apocalyptic landscape they are fleeing). Here, as in Twenty-Eight Days, the fantasy of escape associated with the road trip is thus turned on its head. Taken together, these chapters by Brogan, Braun and Archer may therefore be seen to demonstrate not only what the arts—literature and film, in this instance—can contribute to our investigation of all manner of social mobilities (human, societal, technological) in and of themselves, but

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also how the “close reading” skills of humanities scholars can enrich our use of such texts; awareness of this methodological distinction— between what textual materials represent in terms of “data” and what dedicated critical approaches can discover in them—is crucially important for all those engaged in cross-disciplinary mobilities research. Returning to the “futures” theme of this section, all the chapters may be seen to engage with the changes to “auto-mobility” effected by technology in ways that help us understand why the transport revolution of the twentieth century has had such a lasting impact on society and culture (see Mom 2015). For Brogan’s authors—Wells and Leblanc—the autonomy facilitated by cycling extends to the realm of intimate relationships, with Leblanc’s text, in particular, looking towards a far more liberal social future as far as the practice of courtship and marriage are concerned. Central to all three chapters, indeed, is an acknowledgement of the personal freedoms promised and delivered by twentieth-century automobilities, even if (in Archer’s and Braun’s chapters) this is also seen to lead to problematically entrenched ideologies vis-à-vis the benefits of motoring. Because cars have functioned as such potent symbols of both “freedom” and “the future” for so long, we struggle to conceive of a truly alternative future without them and the values they represent. As Braun’s chapter argues, moving “beyond the car” thus requires a huge leap of the imagination and further recognition that auto-mobilities (walking and cycling included) were never simply about transport or getting from “a” to “b.” As Pearce has argued elsewhere (Pearce 2016, 2017), what twenty-first-century subjects are being asked to surrender is not so much a mode of transport but the independent decision-making that goes with it, and it remains to be seen how ready we really are to accept further automation in our daily lives including our personal mobilities.

Conclusion The chapters which follow showcase a fascinating archive of literary, filmic and cultural representations—and, indeed, embodiments—of mobilities of every kind. As noted above, they also demonstrate how the close-reading skills of the textual critic can enhance the significance of such sources in the context of mobilities research across the disciplinary spectrum. It is our hope that this volume will contribute this interdisciplinary conversation at a time when the political need for collaboration

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to address the pressing concerns of our day—migration and displacement, travel and tourism, sustainable transport and care for the environment (including its heritage) to mention but a few—was never more urgent. While there has, to this point, been a tendency for “mobility” to mean something rather different to scholars working in literary studies than in the geographical and social sciences, it is our belief that the best of the work to come will actively enter into dialogue with the research that has emerged from the mobilities paradigm as conceptualised by Sheller and Urry thirteen years ago (Sheller and Urry 2006). In particular, it surely benefits us all to attend to the entanglement of mobilities of all scales and registers in our daily lives—both human and non-human—and to realise how a change to one may have vital consequences for another. Literary and historical texts—both contemporary and historical—have been charting these complex interactions for centuries and also provide us with invaluable information on how the human subject has experienced the great mobilities transformations of the past (as illustrated in this volume in the chapters on early cycling and motoring) via the somatic registers of the body and, even more elusively, the way in which movement informs our conscious and unconscious thoughts and, of course, our memories and fantasies of the future. We therefore present the chapters which follow as a taste of the wonderful research we believe is yet to come in this latest inflection of the “mobilities turn.”

Note 1. See CeMoRe [Centre for Mobilities Research] website for full details of recent mobilities-related research projects funded by the British Research Councils at Lancaster University (https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/cemore/) and also DEMAND [Dynamics of Energy, Mobility and Demand]: https://demand.ac.uk/.

References Adey, Peter. 2006. “If Mobility Is Everything Then It Is Nothing: Towards a Relational Politics of (Im)mobilities.” Mobilities 1 (1): 75–94. Adey, Peter. 2010. Mobility. London: Routledge. Adey, P., D. Bissell, K. Hannam, P. Merriman, M. Sheller, eds. 2014. The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities. London: Routledge.

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Aguiar, Marian. 2011. Tracking Modernity: India’s Railway and the Culture of Mobility. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Aguiar, Marian. 2018. Arranging Marriage: Conjugal Agency in the South Asian Diaspora. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Aguirre, Robert D. 2017. Mobility and Modernity: Panama in the NineteenthCentury Anglo-American Imagination. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Archer, Neil. 2017. “Genre on the Road: The Road Movie as Mobilities Research.” In Mobility and the Humanities, edited by Peter Merriman and Lynne Pearce, 17–27. London and New York: Routledge. Asimov, Isaac. 1995 [1935]. “Sally.” In The Complete Robot, 9–28. London: HarperCollins. Auslander, Shalom. 2012. Hope: A Tragedy. New York, NY: Picador. Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge Classics. Bissell, David. 2018. Transit Life: How Commuting Is Transforming Our Cities. Cambridge: MIT Press. Bond, Emma. 2018. Writing Migration Through the Body. New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan. Bowen, Elizabeth. 2006 [1932]. To the North. New York: Anchor Books. Brown, Bill. 2001. “Things.” Critical Inquiry 28 (1): 1–22. Canclini, Nestor Garcia. 2005 (1989). Cultural Hybridity: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Clarsen, Georgine. 2009. Eat My Dust! Early Women Motorists. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Clifford, James. 1997. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late 20th Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Coleborne, Catharine. 2015. Insanity, Identity and Empire. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Cresswell, Tim. 1993. “Mobility as Resistance: A Geographical Reading of Kerouac’s On the Road.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 18: 249–262. Cresswell, Tim. 1997. “Imagining the Nomad: Mobility and the Postmodern Primitive.” In Space and Society: Interpreting Modernity and Postmodernity, edited by Georges Benko and Ulf Strohmayer, 360–379. Oxford: Blackwell. Cresswell, Tim. 1999. “Embodiment, Power and the Politics of Mobility: The Case of Female Tramps and Hobos.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 24: 175–192. Cresswell, Tim. 2006. On the Move: Mobility in the Western World. London and New York: Routledge.

28  M. AGUIAR ET AL. Cresswell, Tim, 2010. “Towards a Politics of Mobility.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28: 17–31. Cresswell, Tim. 2014. “Mobilities I: Moving On.” Progress in Human Geography 38 (5): 712–721. Dant, Tim. 2004. “The Driver-Car.” Theory, Culture and Society 21 (4–5): 61–79. Davidson, Joyce, Liz Bondi, and Mick Smith, eds. 2005. Emotional Geographies. Aldershot UK and Burlington VT: Ashgate. de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dennis, Kingsley, and John Urry. 2009. After the Car. Cambridge: Polity Press. Edensor, Tim. 2003. “M6—Junction 19–16: Defamiliarising the Mundane Roadscape.” Space and Culture 6 (2): 151–168. Edensor, Tim. 2004. “Automobility and National Identity.” Theory, Culture and Society 21 (4–5): 101–120. Edensor, Tim. 2010. “Walking in Rhythms: Place, Regulation, Style and the Flow of Experience.” Visual Studies 25 (1): 69–79. Edensor, Tim. 2011. “Commuter: Mobility, Rhythm and Commuting.” In Geographies of Mobilities: Practices, Spaces, Subjects, edited by Tim Cresswell and Peter Merriman, 189–203. Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Edensor, Tim, 2014. “Rhythm and Arrhythmia.” In The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities, edited by Peter Adey, David Bissell, Kevin Hannam, Peter Merriman, and Mimi Sheller, 163–171. London and New York: Routledge. Elliott, Anthony, and John Urry. 2009. Mobile Lives. London and New York: Routledge. Gilroy, Paul. 1995. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Green-Simms, Lindsey B. 2017. Postcolonial Automobility: Car Culture in West Africa. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Grewal, Inderpal, and Caren Kaplan, eds. 1994. Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hannam, Kevin, Mimi Sheller, and John Urry. 2006. “Editorial: Mobilities, Immobilities and Moorings.” Mobilities 1 (1): 1–22. Hayles, Katherine. 1999. How We Become Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Hulme, Peter, and Tim Youngs. 2002. The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jensen, Olé B., Sven Kesselring, and Mimi Sheller, eds. 2019. Mobilities and Complexities. London and New York: Routledge.

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Kaplan, Caren. 1996. Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement. London: Duke University Press. Keller, David. 1935. “The Living Machine.” In Wonder Stories 6 (12): 1465–1511. Kincaid, Jamaica. 1988. A Small Place. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Latour, Bruno. 2007. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-NetworkTheory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Laurier, Eric, Hayden Lorimer, Barry Brown, Owain Jones, Oskar Juhlin, Allyson Noble, Mark Perry, Daniele Pica, Phillippe Sormani, Ignaz Strebel, et al. 2008. “Driving and Passengering: Notes on the Ordinary Organization of Car Travel.” Mobilities 3 (1): 1–23. Law, John, and John Hansard. 1999. Actor Network Theory and After. Oxford and Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Leblanc, Henri. 2012 [1898]. Voici des Ailes. Paris: Editions Le Pas de Cote. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991 [1974]. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Longhurst, Robyn. 1995. “The Body and Geography.” Gender, Place and Culture 2 (1): 97–106. Malkki, Lisa. 1992. “National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity Among Scholars and Refugees.” Cultural Anthropology 7 (1): 22–44. Massey, Doreen. 2005. For Space. London: Sage. Mathieson, Charlotte. 2015. Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the Nation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. McDowell, Linda. 1999. Gender, Identity and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies. Cambridge: Polity Press. Merriman, Peter. 2012. Mobility, Space and Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Merriman, Peter. 2014. “Rethinking Mobile Methods.” Mobilities 9 (2): 167–187. Merriman, Peter. 2016. “Mobilities II: Cruising.” Progress in Human Geography 40 (4): 555–564. Merriman, Peter. 2017. “Arrivals.” Progress in Human Geography 41 (3): 375–381. Merriman, Peter, and Lynne Pearce, eds. 2017. “Mobility and the Humanities.” Mobilities 12 (4): 493–508. Mom, Gijs. 2015. Atlantic Automobilism: Emergence and Persistence of the Car. Oxford and New York: Berghan Books. Murray, Lesley, and Sara Upstone, eds. 2014. Researching and Representing Mobilities: Transdisciplinary Encounters. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

30  M. AGUIAR ET AL. Murray, Lesley, and Sonia Overall. 2017. “Moving around Children’s Fiction.” In Mobility and the Humanities, edited by Peter Merriman and Lynne Pearce, 80–92. London and New York: Routledge. Nail, Tom. 2015. The Figure of the Migrant. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Pearce, Lynne. 2014. “A Motor-Flight Through Early TwentiethCentury Consciousness: Capturing the Driving-Event 1905–1935.” In Researching and Representing Mobilities: Transdisciplinary Encounters, edited by Lesley Murray and Sara Uptstone, 78–98. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Pearce, Lynne. 2016. Drivetime: Literary Excursions in Automotive Consciousness. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Pearce, Lynne. 2017. “Driving as Event: Re-thinking the Car Journey.” In Mobility and the Humanities, edited by Peter Merriman and Lynne Pearce, 93–105. London and New York: Routledge. Pearce, Lynne. 2019. Mobility, Memory and the Lifecourse in Twentieth-Century Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ponsavady, Stéphanie. 2018. Cultural and Literary Representations of the Automobile in French Indochina: A Colonial Roadshow. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturalism. London and New York: Routledge. Rose, Gillian. 1993. Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity Press. Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. London: Vintage Books. Said, Edward. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Press. Sheller, Mimi. 2003. Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies. London: Routledge. Sheller, Mimi, and John Urry. 2006. “The New Mobilities Paradigm.” Environment and Planning A 38 (2): 207–226. Spivak, Gayatri. 1987. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. London and New York: Routledge. Thrift, Nigel. 1994. “Inhuman Geographies: Landscapes of Speed, Light and Power.” In Writing the Real: Five Cultural Geographies, edited by Paul Cloke et al., 191–248. London: PCP. Thrift, Nigel. 1995. “A Hyperactive World.” In Geographies of Global Change, edited by R. J. Johnston, P. J. Taylor, and M. J. Watts, 18–35. Oxford: Blackwell. Thrift, Nigel. 1996. Spatial Formations. London: Sage. Thrift, Nigel. 2008. Non-representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect. London and New York: Routledge. Torres, Alissa. 2008. American Widow. New York, NY: Villard.

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Urry, John. 1999. Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities of the Twenty-First Century. London and New York: Routledge. Urry, John. 2003. Global Complexity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Urry, John. 2007. Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity Press. Urry, John. 2016. What Is the Future?. Cambridge: Polity Press. Uteng, Tana Priya, and Tim Cresswell, eds. 2008. Gendered Mobilities. Aldershot: Ashgate. Virilio, Paul. [1977]. Speed and Politics. 2006. Translated by Marc Polizzotti. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Waldman, Amy. 2011. The Submission. New York: Picador. Wells, H. G. 2010 [1896]. The Wheels of Chance [Facsimile of the original text]. Milton Keynes: Lightning Source UK. Wollen, Peter, and Joe Kerr. 2002. Utopia: Cars and Culture. London: Reaktion Books.

PART I

Mobility and Nation

CHAPTER 2

Railing Against Apartheid: Staffrider, Township Trains, and Racialised Mobility in South Africa Sarah Gibson

As a nation, South Africa has been “born out of processes of mobility” (Nuttall 2004, 735) such as the Mfecane, European colonialism, the Great Trek, and labour migrancy. The making of South Africa is fundamentally “the story of visible and invisible mobilities” (Nyamnjoh 2013, 660). It is the frequently invisible railway mobilities of Black migrant labourers moving between the township and the city during the apartheid period that will be explored in this chapter. These railway journeys reveal both the “racialized mobility” of South Africa as well as “the centrality of mobility to South African everyday life” (Pirie 2015, 40). During the apartheid period (1948–1994), the space of the township emerged as a space of immobility that functioned to contain the Black population outside of the “White” city. However, the economy was dependent upon the mobility of the Black migrant labourer from the township to the city as a “temporary sojourner.” This daily commute S. Gibson (*)  Culture, Communication and Media Studies, School of Applied Human Sciences, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa © The Author(s) 2019 M. Aguiar et al. (eds.), Mobilities, Literature, Culture, Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27072-8_2

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was enabled through the construction of public transportation systems and commuter railways. These township trains were a “significant force” (Pirie 1987, 283) in materialising South Africa’s racially segregated cities under apartheid, with approximately 1.5 million Black migrant labourers commuting daily between the townships and the city centres (Pirie 1992b, 175; McCaul 1991; Witulski 1986).1 This everyday mobility routine of commuting became a key site of regulation and resistance to apartheid’s racialised mobility politics. This chapter explores the symbolic meanings of these uniquely South African township trains as represented in the magazine Staffrider and its associated book series, the Staffrider Series. These were both published by Johannesburg’s Ravan Press, a publishing company first created in 1972 that is known for being “critical, creative and socially committed” (Moss 1997, 18). Ravan Press positioned itself as “a radical publisher dedicated to publishing new or previously marginalised voices and offering new paths for the country’s culture” (Penfold 2017, 48). Whilst the Staffrider magazine was published between 1978–1993 and comprised 11 volumes of, typically, 4 issues each, the Staffrider Series published a total of 28 lowcost paperback books including novels, short stories, anthologies, and poetry between 1979–1986. Through the publication of popular history, social documentary essays, photography, and art as well as the traditional literary genres of poetry, fiction and drama (Oliphant 1992, 99), Staffrider and the Staffrider Series not only provided “a counter discourse” to the officially-sanctioned apartheid media narrative but also created “a space for those rendered invisible by the system to contribute to media and cultural production” (Manase 2005, 56). The promise of Staffrider was: A South Africa in which Meadowlands and Morningside were on the same page, where Douglas Livingstone of Durban and Mango Tshabangu of Jabavu were side by side, with nothing between them but a stretch of paper and a 1-point rule. The resonance of such a simple idea is almost impossible to recapture now, but in the demented, divided space of apartheid it was bracing. All the other borders the magazine crossed between fiction and autobiography, written and spoken word, lyrical flight and social documentary rest on that first idealistic gesture. (Vladislavic 2008)

It was therefore committed to crossing boundaries, both within the pages of its publications as well as within the nation. Whilst the township space is “deeply embedded in the nation’s social imaginary” (Mbembe et al. 2008, 239), it is the township train that

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is focused on here. The train is culturally significant in South Africa (Barnard 2007, 7) and has been described as “the only trope powerful enough to assemble the microcosm” (Wade 1994, 78). A key focus of Staffrider texts were “the difficulties encountered during the daily travels by train” (Manase 2005, 56–57). While critical analyses of the train in South African literature have tended to focus on poetry (McClintock 1987; Wright 2010, 2011; Jones 2016), this chapter will instead focus on the township train short story or “faction” that blurred the boundaries between fact and fiction (Zander 1999).2 The short story in Black South African writing enabled authors to focus on the community through its typical setting “in communal or public places” such as trains and railway stations (Trump 1988, 44). This chapter analyses the following township train short stories which were all associated with Staffrider: Mango Tshabangu’s “Thoughts in a Train” (1978), Michael Siluma’s “Naledi Train” (1978), Bereng Setuke’s “Dumani” (1980), and Miriam Tlali’s “Fud-u-u-a” (1989). A key focus of Staffrider was the blurring of the “documentary” and “imaginative” genres (Vaughan 1984, 200) and these short stories are all located at the intersection between journalism and creative writing (Seroke 1981, 42). These texts all attempt to derail apartheid through creatively and critically engaging with the symbolism of South Africa’s “railway apartheid” (Pirie 1989) through focusing on the commute between Johannesburg’s Park Station and the township of Soweto. These representations of “railway based mobility” (Urry 2007, 91) and “railing” (Mom et al. 2009, 30) on the township trains offer oppositional representations of a mobile modernity in South Africa during the apartheid period. In exploring how “riding the rails” (Fraser and Spalding 2012) functions as a key metaphor of alienation and resistance to apartheid, in “reading and writing the rails” (Spalding and Fraser 2012) these Staffrider texts rail against the apartheid structures of racial oppression that dominated the national imaginary at that time.3

Mobilising the Railways in South Africa The railways “played a fundamental role in industrial capitalism and the organization of its national (and international) space” (Lefebvre 2003, 212). It is therefore “not only communications media which enable the ­construction of the imagined community of the nation, but also physical communication and transport links” such as the railways (Morley 2000, 34). In nineteenth-century Britain, the railways heralded “a new era of national

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community and identity” (Mathieson 2015, 6) through their construction of a national networked community of people, objects, and materials. Similarly, the railways developed a national consciousness which enabled South Africans to move around and experience themselves as part of a connected nation. The railways were “a defining technology of the modern world” (Revill 2012, 8), and their invention in the nineteenth century was nothing less than a “revolution for mobility” (Thomas 2014, 215). The “machine ensemble” (Schivelbusch 1986) of the railway technically ­conjoined the route and the vehicle to form an indivisible entity in contrast to previous forms of transportation. The railway system revolutionised “the contours of time, space and everyday life” (Urry 2007, 92), and introduced the railway compartment and the railway station as new public spaces of sociability (Urry 2007, 104). This “railway mobility system” was central to the emergence of “new times, spaces and sociabilities of public movement” (Urry 2007, 91). The term “railing” refers to this rail-based mobility, and incorporates railsubjects, rail-objects and rail-scapes (Mom et al. 2009, 30). The railway signalled a number of important changes: the flattening of nature; the passengers’ movement through space; the moving landscape that could be viewed through the window; the enclosed space of the train compartments that placed strangers in close proximity; and the standardisation of time through timetabling (see Urry 1994, 119; Schivelbusch 1986). The railway system appeared to unify the nation for the traveller through the ordering of “railway space” (the railway map that featured only certain places on the railway route) and “railway time” (the railway timetable was regulated and systematised) (Mathieson 2015, 8). However, while the railways were predominantly associated with the nineteenth century in Britain, Europe and America, they were an early twentieth century phenomenon in Africa, India and Latin America (Urry 2007, 93; Wolmar 2009). In South Africa, the growth of the railways did not begin in earnest until the 1880s and 1890s, and they were central in the construction of what eventually became South Africa (McCracken and Teer-Tomaselli 2013, 427). South African Railways [SAR], a fusion of the Cape Government Railways, Natal Government Railways, and the Netherlands South African Railway Company, was created as part of the 1909 South Africa Act that led to the Union of South Africa in 1910 (Foster 2008, 202). It eventually became South African Railways and Harbours [SAR&H] in 1922. The railways were seen “as an instrument of social change” (Foster 2008, 202) that ensured that economic and social integration of the previously separate colonies of

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the Cape of Good Hope, Natal, Orange River Colony and the Transvaal. The railways were “an iconographic symbol of the progressive white state” during the early twentieth century (Foster 2008, 203). The headquarters of the South African Railways and Harbours was established in Johannesburg in the 1920s, thereby positioning the new economic centre of South Africa in the Witwatersrand in contrast to the colonial port cities of Cape Town and Durban (Foster 2008, 204). Johannesburg’s main railway station is Park Station. In 1890, “Park Helt” was the first site to have passenger facilities on the original route between Boksburg and Braamfontein, and it was only in 1894 that it became known as “Park Station” (Jackson 1952, 167). By 1897, Park Station “boasted an imposing steel and glass structure removed from the Amsterdam Exhibition and large enough to house all station offices and passenger facilities” (Klintworth 1975, 324). This Victorian structure was replaced during the building-boom of the 1930s with a new Park Station complex designed by Gerard Moerdijk and Gordon Leith (Kruger 2013, 12). The modern complex of Park Station “announced the nation-building power of the SAR&H” (Foster 2008, 204). In South Africa, the arrival of the railways signalled “the advent of cultural modernity” (Wright 2010, 3). The railway is therefore “a powerful and multivalent symbol” of industrialisation, urbanisation and colonisation (Wade 1994, 76). Histories of transportation systems such as the railway are “crucial starting points for thinking about the relation between theories of race and mobility in white-settler countries” (Nicholson and Sheller 2016, 5) such as South Africa. The railways cannot be untangled from their colonial histories and geographies. The colonial expansion and development of the railway was a celebration of a cultural modernity conceived as rationality, technological progress, and a privileged form of mobility (Aguiar 2011). Frantz Fanon wrote that “cutting railroads through the bush, draining swamps, and ignoring the political and economic existence of the native population are in fact one and the same thing” (Fanon 2001, 201). Whilst the railways were mobilised in South Africa at the turn of the twentieth century as a result of “railway imperialism” (Davis et al. 1991), it was the shift to “railway apartheid” (Pirie 1992a) that reveals the changing significance of the railways in imagining the national and cultural identity of South Africa at distinct political moments. The railways are mobilised in the South African cultural imagination as a way of creating and critiquing myths of national identity and belonging.

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Racialising Mobility in South Africa Railway-based mobility reveals the “the politics of mobility” (Cresswell 2006, 2010) in the social and cultural context of apartheid South Africa. Such a mobility politics refers to “the ways in which mobilities are both productive of such social relations and produced by them” (Cresswell 2010, 21). These “power geometries” of mobility do not merely involve “the issue of who moves and who doesn’t […] it is also about power in relation to the flows and the movement. […] Mobility, and control over mobility, both reflects and reinforces power” (Massey 1994, 149–150). This “power geometry” of mobility was apparent during the period of apartheid in South Africa, where there emerged “a racialized mobility politics” (Nicholson and Sheller 2016, 4). The “racialization of mobility” refers to how practices and institutions of mobility, such as the railways, have been racialised (Seiler 2009, 232). These racialised politics highlight the mobility inequality and injustice of apartheid, as a racial project “concerned with the management of mobilities” (Sheller 2018, 57). Whilst the “new mobilities paradigm” (Sheller and Urry 2006) enables an understanding of how “mobility is relative with different historical contexts being organized through specific constellations of uneven mobilities” (Sheller and Urry 2016, 12), it has been critiqued for being “firmly anchored in the global North” (Pirie 2009, 21). This chapter engages with the call for “understandings of mobilities in the context of Global South cities” (Priya Uteng and Lucas 2018, 2) through its focus on the racialised mobility politics of the township train commute between Johannesburg and Soweto.4 The ideology of apartheid was introduced in 1948 following the National Party’s election success, and its rhetoric appealed to the rise of Afrikaner ethnic nationalism (Dubow 2014, 16). “Apartheid” was a neologism which translates as “apartness” or “separateness” (Dubow 2014, 10). In South Africa however “apartheid” was “a translingual representation of institutionalized racism” that was codified into “a systemic legal structure that divided South Africans into racial groups” (Freuh 2003, 41). The Population Registration Act (1950), Group Areas Act (1950), Natives (Abolition and Coordination of Documents) Act (1952), Native Laws Amendment Act (1952), Bantu Education Act (1953) and the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act (1953) were all central to the ideology of apartheid (Guelke 2005, 84). It was through the “control over education, employment, and mobility” that apartheid

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successfully institutionalised racism in South Africa (Freuh 2003, 43). These laws which governed “the mobility of Africans” were collectively known as “influx control” (Harber 2018, 160). While the Population Registration Act (1950) “provided for the compulsory classification of the population into discrete racially defined groups” of White (European), African (Bantu or Black) and Coloured (Christopher 1994, 101), the Group Areas Act (1950) effected “the total urban spatial segregation of the various population groups” (Christopher 1994, 102). The Group Areas Act restricted the homes of Black Africans to either the peri-urban, dormitory townships or to the rural homelands (or Bantustans) and following the Group Areas Act, Black, Coloured and Indian South Africans were forcibly removed from central city spaces. The apartheid city was “divided into compartments” (Fanon 2001, 29) between the (White) settler and the (Black) native. The township refers to an urban residential area created for Black migrant labour, usually beyond the town or city limits, and was a means of providing a cheap migrant labour force for the city. The township was thus “a peculiar spatial institution scientifically planned for the purposes of control” (Mbembe 2003, 26) and was the material and physical embodiment of apartheid ideology. Interestingly, the Group Areas Board required that “each group area should be separated from others by suitable buffers. Railway lines, main roads, rivers, streams and ridges all form separation media and these should be used as far as possible” (Floyd 1960, 205). These buffers “were to act as barriers to movement and therefore restrict social contact” (Christopher 1994, 103). So, whilst the railway lines functioned as physical barriers to contain the Black population within the township and outside the city, the railways also enabled the daily movement between the township and the city. The railways enabled the movement of people across different racialised geographical spaces through the production of racialised passenger transport routes and corridors (Pirie 2015, 44). Social contact between population groups was further restricted through the segregation of public space. From 1948 onwards, “Whitesonly buses, railway carriages, ambulances, park benches, beaches, ­swimming pools, libraries, toilets and even lifts in public buildings were a pervasive feature” in South Africa (Guelke 2005, 27). The 1949 Railway & Harbours Amendment Act “enforced racial segregation in trains” (Simons and Simons 1969, 604) and the 1953 Reservation of Separate Amenities Act created “separate social environments for the White and

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other population groups” (Christopher 1994, 142). In introducing this 1953 Act, Mr. C. R. Swart, the Minister for Justice, explicitly justified the Act in reference to the railways by arguing that: If a European has to sit next to a non-European at school, if on a railway station they are to use the same waiting-rooms, if they are continually to travel together on the trains and sleep in the same hotels, it is evident that eventually we would have racial admixture. (Christopher 1994, 5)

The compartmentalised city spaces were literally reproduced in the different compartments on the train, with the 1953 Act legalising “railway apartheid” in South Africa (Pirie 1989, 183). With the passing of this Act, trains and train stations “ceased to be public places where people of different backgrounds would encounter one another” and “South Africans on-the-go lost an opportunity to identify mutually and associate as people sharing the mundane task of movement” (Pirie 2015, 42). As well as the separation of races on the train into different compartments, railway stations were architecturally designed to consolidate racial divisions with station platforms throughout the Johannesburg commuter system separated into segregated areas for whites and non-whites (Revill 2012, 143). Johannesburg’s Park Station was “one of the most potent monuments to racial segregation” (Richards and MacKenzie 1986, 91). In designing the new station in 1952 it was noted that “suburban non-European traffic will be catered for on lines similar to those adopted for the European suburban passenger” (Jackson 1952, 174). The 1952 Natives (Abolition of Passes and Coordination of Documents) Act required all Africans to carry identification as a way of “ensuring that control over African influx into the towns could be exercised” (Davenport and Saunders 2000, 390). The Pass Laws controlled the “spatial mobility” of Blacks (Dubow 2014, 12) in that they curtailed and controlled freedom of movement, as well as regulating the length of time that could be spent within the city as they were expected to be “temporary sojourners” (Guelke 2005, 28). This Pass system had two contradictory aims: an “exclusionary need” to restrict Black Africans from the city centre and an “inclusionary need” to ensure cheap migrant labour within it (Savage 1986, 181). The apartheid legislation of spatial engineering, as a “deliberately ­distorted form of urbanization” (Pirie 1992b, 173), thus maximised the need for public transportation systems which materialised through the

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construction of commuter railways and the subsidisation of commuter fares.5 These commuter railways were a significant force in “shaping and articulating South Africa’s racially segmented cities” (Pirie 1987, 283). While the “influx control” laws were attempts to restrict and control the mobility of Black Africans, there also “had to be a way to move people as needed” (Harber 2018, 160) within racialised compartments and corridors. This was “the commuting conundrum” (McCaul 1991) of the apartheid era. Despite restrictions imposed by “influx control” on their freedom of movement, mobility was an enforced and everyday occurrence for township dwellers. While the railway is a technology or medium of movement, this movement is prescribed by the iron rails of the railway. The township trains perhaps best represent what Michel de Certeau identified with the railway system, when he described the railway as a “travelling incarceration” and the train compartment as a “module of imprisonment” (de Certeau 1984, 111). Township residents were “captive” users of public transport as a combination of long geographical commuting distances between home and work, and the low income wages earned, made other transport options unfeasible (Pirie 1986, 42). In the compartmentalised apartheid city, the native is condemned to “immobility” and is “hemmed in” (Fanon 2001, 40). They are captured and incarcerated by apartheid’s racialised structures. This racialised mobility politics of the journey between the city and the township cannot be equated with the conceptualisation of commuting as “a privileged form of mobility” (Edensor 2011, 189; Aldred 2014). For the population of Black migrant labourers in South Africa, having been forcibly removed to dwell in the marginal spaces of the township, the daily commute is anything but a privileged form of mobility: it is an enforced, compulsory and incarcerated mobility. The railway journeys experienced by these township dwellers are thus a manifestation of travel as well as travail.6 The daily commute to and from work is a distinctive modern routine, where commuting time is “a surplus labor which correspondingly reduces the amount of ‘free’ time” (Debord 2006, 59), and is associated with the rise of “compulsive time” (Lefebvre 1971, 53). The everyday routine of commuting travel objectified and dehumanised the passengers, transforming “a man from a traveller into a living parcel” as John Ruskin famously phrased it in the nineteenth century (Schivelbusch 1986, 121). This was more so in twentieth-century South Africa where commuting was a racialised mobility practice.

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However, whilst Black commuters were constrained by compartments, corridors and timetables through their dependence on the railways, there remained opportunities for resistance. These commuters were “not just units of unconscious freight” and their experience of public transport was “more than just uniform and passive mobility” (Pirie 1992b, 173). The train becomes part of the daily commute and the railway line is imagined as being “like an umbilical cord” between the township and the city (Kiernan 1977, 215). While the train is part of township dwellers’ everyday life, it is also a daily reminder of the racist discrimination of apartheid policies: it is a symbol of industrial technology associated with speed and time; of exclusion from “white” areas, in that the train removes them from the city at the end of the day; of white control over African lives in the form of Government departments; of African dependence and impotence experienced through the daily commute; and of danger associated with both accidents and crime (Kiernan 1977, 215– 216). Trains then “are not simply a means of getting from one place to another. They give expression to the status of black people as foreigners in South Africa, as a migrant labour force” (Vaughan 1984, 198–199). So the public transport of the railways signified not just the arrival of modernity in South Africa but also oppression and subservience (Pirie 1992b, 177). The railways, then, “came to play an ambiguous and variable role in the historical geography of African townships” (Pirie 1987, 293). Trains became “a significant feature of the movement between the township and the city” (Mbembe et al. 2008, 246). It is “the migrant worker” rather than the flâneur who is “the paradoxical cultural figure of African modernity” (Mbembe and Nuttall 2008, 23) and the experience of travelling by train is “the key image of African urbanity” (Kruger 2013, 74). The railways became central to how modernisation and urbanisation were racialised in in this specific national context, and the imagery of the migrant worker’s daily commute on the township trains increasingly became mobilised in anti-apartheid movements in the South African cultural imaginary.

Staffrider: Railing Against Apartheid Staffrider magazine was launched in 1978, following the Soweto uprisings of June 1976 nearly two years earlier.7 The magazine was initially conceived by Mike Kirkwood and Muthobi Mutloatse who had identified a need for a community-based magazine, following the banning of

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anti-apartheid cultural and political organisations (Oliphant 1990, 358). The Staffrider magazine ultimately became one of South Africa’s “most successful cultural journals ever published” (Oliphant and Vladislavic 1988, viii). The magazine was “the most representative literary magazine of the Soweto era, the high-water mark of the Black Consciousness period” (Mzamane 1991, 182). As publications influenced by the Black Consciousness Movement, Staffrider and the Staffrider Series had “a socially transformative role” (Gqola 2001b, 32) in emphasising “positive images of Blackness” (Gqola 2001a, 132). As Mutloatse writes “the black community is hungry […] ever-ready-and-willing to lay its hands on ‘relevant’ writing, writing by blacks about blacks” (Mutloatse 1980, 1). The Staffrider dictum is that “black literature is the property of the people loaned to creative writers” and “it is the concern of all Staffriders to take our contributions to our rich black heritage back to the people” (Mutloatse 1980, 6). Black Consciousness writing in South Africa predominantly focused on “transforming consciousness, overcoming fear, and building racial pride” (Mzamane and Howarth 2000, 176), and the three dominant motifs in Staffrider of “Blackness, revolt against oppression, [and] the people” (Vaughan 1984, 197) reflected these aims. The texts published were simultaneously “the voice of the people” and “the polemical activation of that voice” (Vaughan 1985, 196). It was the “black township reading public” (Vaughan 1985, 195) and their everyday experiences that were rendered visible through the publication of Staffrider and the Staffrider Series. The explicit policy of Staffrider was “to encourage and give strength to a new literature based on communities, and to establish important lines of communication between these writers, their communities, and the general public” (Editorial 1978, 1). This writing “continually re-shaped its idea of the ‘nation’ and, in turn, offered a new way for us to write South Africa’s national literature” (Penfold 2017, 3). From the outset, Staffrider promoted “an aesthetics of calculated defiance and collectivity” (McClintock 1987, 599) that challenged literary standards as well as traditional modes of creation and distribution. This aesthetics of resistance was reflected in the naming of the magazine and book series. The first issue of the Staffrider magazine explained that: A staffrider is, let’s face it, a skelm of sorts. Like Hermes or Mercury— the messenger of the gods in classical mythology—he is almost certainly as light-fingered as he is fleet-footed. A skilful entertainer, a bringer of

46  S. GIBSON messages, a useful person but … slightly disreputable. […] Like him or not, he is part of the present phase of our common history, riding “staff” on the fast and dangerous trains of our late seventies. (Editorial 1978, 1)

A staffrider, as Mike Kirkwood explains, is “someone who rides ‘staff’ on the fast, dangerous and overcrowded trains that come in from the townships to the city, hanging on to the sides of the coaches, climbing on the roof, harassing the passengers. A mobile disreputable bearer of tidings” (Kirkwood 1980, 23). Staffriders were “symbols of a new order” as they “epitomized freedom and revolt” (Pirie 1992b, 176). It was this freedom and resistance embodied in the mobile figure of the staffrider that made it so appealing in the naming of the magazine: “we drew a comparison between the liberties the staffrider took with the law and the liberties we wanted the magazine to take with censorship system” (Kirkwood 1980, 23). In a 1979 article published in Staffrider, Mafika Gwala characterised Black writing as focusing on “the complex nature of ghetto life” and stimulating “an awareness of positive values in indigenous culture” (Gwala 1979, 55). A key example highlighted in his discussion was that of “the over-loaded ghetto trains” (Gwala 1979, 55) moving between the townships and the city. These were publications that were dedicated to the publication of the everyday experiences of township dwellers, and were central to what Njabulo Ndebele termed “the rediscovery of the ordinary” (Ndebele 1986) and the rise of “populist realism” (Vaughan 1982, 121) in South African writing. The short story as a genre is able to communicate the experiences of constant pressure and the imminent threat of disruption: “a condition of harassed movement appears generic to township life” (Vaughan 1982, 128). It is significant that “travel” is a key motif within Staffrider as it is “an aspect of black life that is absolutely pervasive” and that is “tied into the specific terms of exploitation and oppression” in South Africa (Vaughan 1984, 198–199). While critical attention has been paid to the imagining of the staffrider figure (Vaughan 1984, 1985; Gqola 2001b), little consideration has been given to how the “railway mobility system” (Urry 2007, 91) and the experience of “railing” (Mom et al. 2009, 30) during the apartheid period has been imagined, represented and negotiated within Staffrider and the Staffrider Series. While representations of the train “pervade South African literary production of the apartheid era as surely as ­railways formed part of the daily fabric of the lives of millions of black

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South Africans” (Alvarez 1996, 102–103), there has been little attention paid to the representation of commuting on these township trains. The commuter is often a “frustrated, passive and bored figure” (Edensor 2011, 189) and as such the commuter’s experience of train travel has been neglected in contrast to the active, resistant, and protesting ­figure of the staffrider. The monotonous tedium of commuting renders the experience invisible, as “the journey itself remains enigmatic” (Pirie 1993, 713–14). The four short stories analysed below all focus on the journey between Johannesburg and Soweto and represent the embodied experience of the commute on these township trains.

“Thoughts in a Train” Mango Tshabangu’s short story “Thoughts in a Train” was first published in Volume 1 Issue 2 (1978) of Staffrider. The short story is a first-person narrative of the journey between Johannesburg and Soweto, and Tshabangu is both the commuter and the narrator. The journey through the space enables Tshabangu to reflect more widely on the racialised spatial structures of apartheid. Tshabangu narrates both his own journey within the train compartment, but also narrates the experience of his friends Msongi and Gezani as they move through the spaces of the city centre. The railway mobility is juxtaposed with the pedestrian mobility of walking through the suburbs of Johannesburg. The narrator’s train of thought moves from the railway compartment to the city space and back again, from railing to walking. These different modes of mobility highlight the racialised mobility politics in constructing apartheid and in securing and legitimating the discourse of whiteness associated with the rise of Afrikaner ethnic nationalism through the emotional geographies of fear. The cultural politics of fear are implicated in relationships of bodies, space, and the politics of mobility (Ahmed 2004, 70).8 The train is imagined as an industrialised mechanical object for Tshabangu. Described as alien objects in the landscape, the narrator describes them as “these things” (Tshabangu 1978, 27). The setting of this short story is the crowded commuter train which is a ­ “symptomatic expression of urban black experience” (Vaughan 1982, 129). The experience of the commute on the overcrowded trains represents the township commuters oppression and imprisonment, with “our bodies sweating out the unfreedom of our souls” (Tshabangu 1978). In describing the train compartment, Tshabangu foregrounds the physical

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discomfort and proximity to strangers involved in travelling on the overcrowded trains: “we stand inside in grotesque positions—one foot in the air, our bodies twisted away from arms squeezing through other twisted bodies to find support somewhere” (Tshabangu 1978, 27). The railway compartments are congested, as he reflects that “it’s as if some invisible sardine packer has been at work” (Tshabangu 1978, 27). The commuters are metaphorically imagined as sardines who have been packed so closely together that they cannot move easily, and the train is imagined as an industrialised tin. The passengers are dehumanised and objectified, being passively transported inside and along the iron structures of the railways. The township train with its Black passengers is opposed to the White suburban trains as “we move parallel to or hurtle past their trains” (Tshabangu 1978). These trains moving in parallel reflect the parallel tracks of apartheid. While the township train is associated with overcrowding and congestion, the suburban train is “almost always empty” (Tshabangu 1978) reflecting the different mobility options ­ available to those in power in South Africa. While the overcrowding has led to standing room only for the Black passengers who are positioned in grotesque and undignified positions, the White passengers are seen to “sit comfortably on seats” (Tshabangu 1978). The exploitation of the Black migrant labour system is realised through the spatial restriction of oppression on the train but is also imagined through the temporal duration of the journey. The commuting time is the subject of rhetorical questions, reminding the township reading community of how their time is wasted and undervalued through the enforced commute: “How far is it from Soweto to Johannesburg? It is forty minutes or forty days. No-one knows exactly” (Tshabangu 1978, 27). This is the empty wasted time associated with modernity. Yet, despite the mechanised and industrial power of the trains, the railways and apartheid structures have not managed to completely overpower the Black migrant workers who travel on them, as in railing “there is no doubt as to our inventiveness” (Tshabangu 1978, 27). It is through riding the rails that enables the commuters to be active participants on the train journey and to find their communal identity and culture. The community of Black passengers is foregrounded as they are “on the lookout for those of our brothers who have resorted to the insanity of crime to protest their insane conditions” (Tshabangu 1978, 27). The ­figure of the staffrider in this story is not a criminalised figure, but rather a young figure (reminiscent of the 1976 student protests in Soweto):

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“We, the young, cling perilously to the outside of coach walls,” and the act of staffriding or riding the rails is associated with bravery and resistance rather than criminality: “We are not a helpless gutless lot whose lives have been patterned by suffering. The more daring of us dance like gods of fate on the rooftop” (Tshabangu 1978, 27). The experience of the train journey also transports the narrator to reflect on the experience of petty apartheid within the city, with the train acting as a metaphor for urban and national space. Msongi and Gezani experience fear whilst “walking through the rich suburbs of Johannesburg” (Tshabangu 1978, 27). In contrast to the townships they are travelling home towards on the train, the White suburbs are protected by “the numerous policemen who patrolled the streets and snarled in unison with their dogs at Black boys moving through the streets” (Tshabangu 1978, 27). This fear in the suburbs is connected to the closed windows on the White suburban train: “he’d been noticing the shut windows of their train” (Tshabangu 1978, 27). When a fellow passenger throws a bottle of beer at their train, the White passengers “jumped into the air” and “the shut windows were shattered wide open, as if to say danger cannot be imprisoned” (Tshabangu 1978, 27). While the suburbs of Johannesburg and the White suburban trains are “full of fear” and “oppress even the occasional passer-by,” the community of the townships and the township trains is celebrated for its sense of community and conviviality: “they did not have stone walls or electrified fences in Soweto” (Tshabangu 1978, 27).

“Naledi Train” Michael Siluma’s “Naledi Train” was first published in Volume 1 Issue 4 (1978) of Staffrider. In introducing it, the editors comment on “how often Staffrider writers return to the theme of the journey” (Siluma 1978, 2) and write that this should come as no surprise given that “black South Africa spends a good part of a lifetime ‘on the move’” (Siluma 1978, 2). They challenge the readers to “judge whether Michael Siluma gets things right in this depiction of a typical trip from Park Station into deep Soweto” (Siluma 1978, 2). This echoes the self-conscious remit of Staffrider as a two-way line of communication between the writer and the community: “the writer is attempting to voice the community’s experience (‘This is how it is’) and his immediate audience is the ­community (‘Am I right?’)” (Editorial 1978, 1).

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Naledi Station is the last station on the line that runs from Park Station to Soweto. This journey from Park Station to Naledi Station is the structuring device for the story. Departing from Park Station, the story finishes once the narrator has disembarked from the train at his destination, once he has arrived at Naledi Station. Incidents and ­reflections on the train journey are interposed with the narrator charting the journey and its various stops and stations along the way: Park Station, Braamfontein Station, Mayfair Station, Grosvenor Station, Langlaagte, Croesus Station, New Canada, Mzimhlophe Station, Phomolong Station, Phefani Station, Dube Station, Ikwezi Station, Merafe Station, and finally Naledi Station. This is a first-person reflection or account of the journey home by train which begins with “I show my ticket to the barrier-attendant and descend the flight of stairs leading onto the adjacent platforms one and two, Park Station” (Siluma 1978, 2). He notices that “the platform is filled with black faces as the train stops” (Siluma 1978, 2). This crowd of black faces are his “brothers and sisters” (Siluma 1978, 2). “It is sweat, heat and noise” and “we are still packed like sardines” (Siluma 1978, 3). The speed of the train annihilates the space between the stations, represented through the ellipses and gaps: “Mayfair … Grosvenor … Langlaagte, then Croesus Station” (Siluma 1978, 2). The train is constantly described as speeding in Siluma’s story as “the train speeds towards Naledi” (Siluma 1978, 4). The train’s industrial mechanised speed is foregrounded through its frictionless mobility: “the iron wheels roll on: the iron rails offer no resistance” (Siluma 1978, 4). Despite the speed of movement, the train journey itself is described as one of tedium and boredom: it is a “long and exhausting ride” (Siluma 1978) due to the number of stations the train stops at. Within this train from Park Station to Naledi, he witnesses the effect of the staffriders/criminals: “We have just left Phomolong Station when pandemonium suddenly erupts as, wide-eyed with fear, the people in the other compartment stampede like wild buck scenting a lion, towards our compartment” (Siluma 1978, 3). A beer can is thrown out of the window of the train and hits a man on the platform. As the narrator wonders if he is the only person to have witnessed this, a fellow passenger, “an African sister,” suddenly exclaims: “Africans! You hear them demanding freedom but look at the things they do. Do they expect the white people to grant them freedom while they still behave like this?” (Siluma 1978, 3). The narrator pities the woman:

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“how misguided she is to believe that it is the white man who will decide whether and when to grant us freedom” (Siluma 1978, 3). He looks at his “poor misguided African sister” and realises that her appearance explains her statement: “instead of black plaited African hair she wears long brown wig that looks like a white woman’s hair” (Siluma 1978, 4).

“Dumani” Bereng Setuke’s “Dumani” was first published in Forced Landing (1980), edited by Mothobi Mutloatse and the third publication of Ravan Press’s Staffrider Series. It focuses on the experience of journeying home and is an account of the commuting experience. This monotonous, repetitive, everyday mobility on these township trains could happen at “any time during the day on any day of the week” (Setuke 1980). The story’s title, “Dumani”, refers to the third-class section or the “Black” section of the train. It is the “first coach in the train, and the last when the train is travelling in the opposite direction” (Setuke 1980, 60–61). “Dumani” derives “its feared name from the sound it makes when the train is in motion, especially at high speed—‘ukuduma’ in Zulu, ‘the buzzer’” (Setuke 1980, 61). In contrast to the first-class coach “which is occupied by the wellto-do middle-class passengers and is always guarded by a ticket-examiner” (Setuke 1980, 61), the “dumani” coach is a dangerous space, where commuters encounter “iniquity and corruption on a scale that would leave Sodom and Gomorrha dumb with shame” (Setuke 1980, 61). This dumani coach has “no authoritarian intervention from the train-driver or the guard” and is a space where the staffriders “are free to do what they want to victimise the ‘blind-deaf-and-dumb’ passengers anytime, anywhere” (Setuke 1980, 61). The railway station’s segregation, with the “non-white” and “white” train platforms, architecturally represent the ideology of apartheid and the differing experiences of travelling by train. While the “white-only” concourse holds white passengers who have “enormous dignity,” the “non-white” concourse is “trampled to the edges by people of the ghettoes” (Setuke 1980, 58). The third-person narrator of this story recalls that “walking down the ‘non-white’ stairs on the platform where trains leave for the ghettoes one sees a sea of black faces” (Setuke 1980, 59). These parallel tracks, or separate experiences of railing, is also featured through the timetable. While the “non-white” passengers are “waiting

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impatiently for the uncertain arrival of the much-resented Soweto-bound train,” in contrast the “white” passengers’ trains “arrive and depart […] regularly according to the schedule” (Setuke 1980, 58). In contrast to the mechanised and industrial clock time that structures the timetables, the township dwellers’ experience of commuting is anxious and uncertain. The commuters are described as waiting for the trains to arrive and depart. While the passengers are separated or portioned at the train station following the regulations of “petty apartheid,” it is on boarding the train that the black passengers or “the Soweto-train fraternity” (Setuke 1980, 63) are divided between the commuter, anxiously and impatiently travelling home after a day’s work, and the staffrider, riding the trains in order to victimise the commuters. The commuters are figured as “innocent passengers” whilst the staffriders are criminalised as “amateur gangsters” who routinely pick the pockets of the innocent commuters “throughout the day in each and every train on the railway-line” (Setuke 1980, 58). The commuters are further described as “train-commuters” (Setuke 1980, 64) and as the “poor hijacked passengers” (Setuke 1980, 65). The commuters are “unsuspecting passengers,” the staffriders are “hooligans” who target “the pockets of those who are boarding and alighting from the train at every station” (Setuke 1980, 60). It is inside the train compartment that the opposition within the “Black” community is created: “the train is now packed to capacity with the seated and the standing; the robbers and the robbed, the assailants and the victims; the jubilant and the disgusted; the confident and the confused; the residents and the non-residents” (Setuke 1980, 62). The passive commuter stands and these “standing passengers are expected to cram themselves like a flock of sheep” in order to give space for the staffriders to play games and drink alcohol (Setuke 1980, 63). Mobility within the train is also controlled. While the commuters’ movement is limited in that “the more one manoeuvres in these coaches, the worse one is exposed to pickpocketing,” the “train gang” of staffriders have “free passage between one coach and the next” (Setuke 1980, 64). The passengers are assumed to be male with the exception of “some old women” and the “selfish young girl” (Setuke 1980, 62). These women in the train are either “an ailing old widow” (Setuke 1980, 63) or “a fit and healthy young lady” who is subjected to the male gaze of the staffriders (Setuke 1980, 62). The train is a space of sexualised crime. The trains are dangerous as women “do not dare commute on these

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trains” (Setuke 1980, 67) for fear of being raped and “‘Pulling-the-train’ means a woman being raped by a gang of hooligans” (Setuke 1980, 66). The account ends with the reader being directly addressed with the rhetorical question: “who is to blame for this state of affairs?” (Setuke 1980, 67). Setuke argues that “these criminals are children who are brought up in homes. Since charity begins at home, is it not a parental duty to give children a primary socialization, right in the home? Every day of their lives?” (Setuke 1980, 67). He appeals to the reader that “Dumani” is not the only coach in our train where all these inequities are carried out. This crime is spreading itself, and reaching out a hand to younger boys who will grow up and catch a ride with it. There are so many trains carrying passengers to and from various parts of our beloved, sunny South Africa, which are infested with young criminals molesting millions of helpless people. Unless something is done to check it, if not bring it to an end, there will, no doubt, forever be at the heart of our lives the recurring cycle that we call “DUMANI”. (Setuke 1980, 68)

“Fud-u-u-a” While the gendered experience of travelling by train is articulated in “Dumani,” it is the contributions from Miriam Tlali that fully represent the female perspective of travelling on the township trains. It is this female perspective that is fictionalised in her short story “Fud-u-u-a” (Tlali 1989). As Tlali explains “Fud-u-u-a!” is “a chant sung by distressed commuters trying to get on to crowded trains” (Tlali 1989, 27). Tlali’s writings are primarily concerned with offering “glimpses into the lives of Africans—mainly women—living on the margins of white, urban society” (Gunne 2014, 167). In her writing, the focus on the gendered experience of Black women was in contrast to most of the writings in Staffrider which focused on the Black male experience (Gqola 2001a, b). In the series “Voices from the Ghetto,” Tlali interviews an office cleaner who works in Johannesburg. Mrs. TH recounts that “we can’t go to Park Station; we may not sleep on the benches. We may not sit in the waiting rooms. We must stand outside. Even when there’s a train on the platform, we must not board it” (Tlali 1980, 3). The cleaners, as mobile women in the public spaces of the city centre, are mistaken for prostitutes: “they mistake us for streetwalkers” (Tlali 1980, 4). “Fud-u-u-a!” is a short story written in the third person and follows Nkele’s commute home from Johannesburg to Soweto. The reader

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is first introduced to Nkele as she “hurried towards Park Station” (Tlali 1989, 27) at quarter past five in the evening on a “typical Friday evening” (Tlali 1989, 28) in order to catch the “First-Stop Naledi train” (Tlali 1989, 27). Rushing to catch the train, Nkele is anxious whether she will make it on time as the “stupid Boer guard […] has the filthy habit of blowing the whistle a whole three, even four minutes before ‘ten to’” (Tlali 1989, 29). In her rush to enter the train station, “she mingled with the other pedestrians dodging, winding and scuttling along” (Tlali 1989, 27). The crowded city spaces look like “human avalanches” (Tlali 1989, 27). This crowd “was mainly black faces” as “most whites seemed of late to avoid moving along the main thoroughfares leading towards Park Station at that time of day” (Tlali 1989, 28). Within the city space, there is a shared Black community, as witnessed when the Black male commuter prevents Nkele from running out into the traffic. As she comments, “Our brothers are usually so protective towards us in town” (Tlali 1989, 28). In the city space and the railway station there is a “spirit of black solidarity” (Tlali 1989, 30). This is in stark contrast to the threat of violence experienced from her fellow Black commuters inside the railway compartment. The trains are also compared to the white trains with the two moving in parallel. Ntombi states that “what is annoying about this congestion is that you never see it happening in their trains—those ‘whites only’ coaches. They make sure that the white passengers sit comfortably” (Tlali 1989, 36). Whilst the White train is comfortable, the township train is described as “‘our’ sardine-like packed train” (Tlali 1989, 36). Nkele compares the throngs of commuters as she complains to herself that “we are like bees” (Tlali 1989, 27). The station has “throngs of passing commuters” (Tlali 1989, 30). She comments on “the force of the moving ‘stream’” of passengers, “the ‘torrent’ of male passengers” (Tlali 1989, 31), the “joggling, propelling throngs” and their “‘wrestling’ bodies” (Tlali 1989, 33). Shadi recounts her experience of violence on the train: “the train was packed and everyone was sandwiched into everyone as usual”; women “had to be strong to face the daily hazards of travelling in the trains of Soweto” (Tlali 1989, 35). Travelling on the train is described as “what was virtually the ‘front line’ of a black women’s battle for mere existence in the bustling city of gold” (Tlali 1989, 37). With the emergence of the railways, the train compartment was a gendered space in which women were vulnerable. This was a popular narrative during the

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Victorian period, where the dangers of railway mobility for women were foregrounded through the railway compartment as a key space of the railway system’s “geography of fear” (Despotopoulou 2015). The train compartment was potentially a site of a “dangerous incarceration, an entrapment” (Beaumont 2007, 152). The commute is a familiar everyday routine for Nkele: “the f­amiliar Friday-evening ‘stampede’ for trains, buses or taxis, etc. had now become, to her, like the other commuters, just one of those ­phenomena one had to live with and fight one’s way through” (Tlali 1989, 29). While the commute is a daily experience for Nkele, it is also a time of sociability for her. She travels home with her friend Ntombi every night, a friend she had made when she first “started travelling to work in town on board the Soweto trains” (Tlali 1989, 31).

Conclusion These commutes, the community of commuters, and the spaces of the railway station and the train compartment all draw attention to the racialised mobility politics of apartheid, and the focus on the everyday experiences of the township dwellers helps to raise the consciousness of the Staffrider community. The actual train journeys represented in these township train short stories function metaphorically as journeys towards “political self-education” (Vaughan 1982, 129). The township train compartments and the corridors they traverse all work to raise consciousness of the spatial structures of the nation under apartheid, and the figure of the commuter, as a migrant labour force, embodies the excluded national subject. However, these train compartments, corridors and commuters are both the failure of the apartheid nation and the promise of an imagined nation to come. The train is both a site of disconnection, exclusion and separation and of connection, conviviality and community (Jones 2013, 41–42). Railways are important as they both drive and reflect “broader changes in the social, cultural and economic landscape within which they are situated” (Thomas 2014, 215). The cultural significance of the commuter railways or the township trains reveals the “racialization of mobility” (Seiler 2009) within apartheid South Africa. Exploring the intersection of racial politics and mobility politics within this specific cultural context reveals the centrality of the railways in constructions of the nation. The railway was both a daily reminder of oppression and

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alienation but was also the inspiration for creativity and resistance. The short stories published by Staffrider reveal how the “mobilization of race” within the Black Consciousness Movement focused on revealing the “racialization of mobility” (Seiler 2009) in everyday life. Railing on the township trains enabled the authors published by Staffrider to rail against apartheid. While this chapter has looked to the past, these railway routes between Johannesburg and Soweto still operate today. Despite the abolition of mobility controls in post-apartheid South Africa and the “freedom of movement” being enshrined in the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa (1996), township trains continue to maintain “a system of labour for the majority and mass capital accumulation for the minority” (MADEYOULOOK and Mofokeng 2011, 65). The train, igado or isithemela, is “a means of transport that has become a stand-in for the distances between peoples, the construction of segregation and a mode of economic repression” and yet “somewhere between station and tracks, departure point and destination are the memories and futures of ordinary lives” (MADEYOULOOK and Mofokeng 2011, 65). Located somewhere between here and there, now and then, the railways continue to mobilise the failures, hopes, and dreams of the nation.

Notes 1. Township railway provision had three distinctive phases of development in South Africa from 1902 up until the 1960s and despite the apparent simultaneous development of townships and the railways, there was never any “unitary, harmonious state plan” (Pirie 1987, 293). 2. The new black literature of the 1970s was mainly poetry as a way of circumventing censorship in South Africa (Zander 1999, 15). Poetry and the short story were popular genres as they could be produced in shorter periods of time (Mzamane 1977; Trump 1988). 3. In the context of the railways, the noun “rail” means “one of a pair of parallel bars laid on a prepared track, roadway etc., that serve as a guide and running surface for the wheels of a railway train.” However, the verb “rail” can also mean “to complain bitterly or vehemently” (Collins English Dictionary 1999). 4. The “global South” refers to what has historically been regarded as “the non-West—variously known as the ancient world, the orient, the primitive world, the third world, the underdeveloped world, the developing world” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2012, 1). Many studies on racialised mobility

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have focused on the USA and the so-called “Jim Crow” practices where African-Americans were segregated on streetcars, buses, steamboats and railroads (Pirie 2015, 39; see, for example, Richter 2005). 5. The development of the township railways in South Africa was dependent on the “commuting” of the fares, which were subsidised by the Department of Transport, the South African Transport Services, and local authorities (McCaul 1991, 218). The word “commute” derives from the “commuting” of fares that were paid by nineteenth century Americans who regularly travelled to work by train (Aldred 2014, 450). Railways in South Africa are typically associated with two types of commute by the Black migrant labour force: the long-distance commutes associated with travel between rural homelands and the mines and the daily short-distance commutes between township and city centre (Pirie 1992b, 174). 6.  Whilst travel refers to the commonplace meaning of taking a journey, travel also evokes pain and work as “travel” is linked etymologically to “travail” or “labour, toil, suffering, trouble” (Kaplan 2003, 208). 7.  Soweto is South Africa’s largest township. The consolidated townships to the west of Johannesburg (the South Western Townships) were given the collective acronym of SOWETO in 1963 (Pirie 2016). Following the Soweto student uprising against the imposition of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction in schools, 1976 has retrospectively been identified as a key moment in resistance to apartheid (Kruger 2013, 96). 8. Sara Ahmed (2004) analyses in detail Frantz Fanon’s account of being hailed “Look, a Negro!” that occurred on a train (Fanon 2008, 84).

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Nicholson, Judith A., and Mimi Sheller. 2016. “Race and the Politics of Mobility: Introduction.” Transfers 6 (1): 4–11. Nuttall, Sarah. 2004. “City Forms and Writing the ‘Now’ in South Africa.” Journal of Southern African Studies 30 (4): 731–748. Nyamnjoh, Francis B. 2013. “Fiction and Reality of Mobility in Africa.” Citizenship Studies 17 (6–7): 653–680. Oliphant, Andries Walter. 1990. “Staffrider Magazine and Popular History: The Opportunities and Challenges of Personal Testimony.” Radical History Review 1990 (46–47): 357–367. Oliphant, Andries Walter. 1992. “Forums and Forces: Recent Trends in South African Literary Journals.” In On Shifting Sands: New Art and Literature from South Africa, edited by Kirsten Holst Petersen and Anna Rutherford, 91–103. Coventry: Dangaroo Press. Oliphant, Andries Walter, and Ivan Vladislavic. 1988. “Preface.” In Ten Years of Staffrider, 1978–1988, edited by Andries Walter Oliphant and Ivan Vladislavic, viii–x. Johannesburg: Ravan Press. Penfold, Tom. 2017. Black Consciousness and South Africa’s National Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Pirie, G. H. 1986. “Johannesburg Transport, 1905–1945: African Capitulation and Resistance.” Journal of Historical Geography 12 (1): 41–55. Pirie, G. H. 1987. “African Township Railways and the South African State, 1902–1963.” Journal of Historical Geography 13 (3): 283–295. Pirie, G. H. 1989. “Dismantling Railway Apartheid in South Africa, 1975– 1988.” Journal of Contemporary African Studies 8 (1): 181–199. Pirie, G. H. 1992a. “Rolling Segregation into Apartheid: South African Railways, 1948–53.” Journal of Contemporary History 27 (4): 671–693. Pirie, G. H. 1992b. “Travelling Under Apartheid.” In The Apartheid City and Beyond: Urbanization and Social Change in South Africa, edited by David M. Smith, 173–182. London: Routledge. Pirie, G. H. 1993. “Railways and Labour Migration to the Rand Mines: Constraints and Significance.” Journal of Southern African Studies 19 (4): 713–730. Pirie, G. H. 2009. “Virtuous Mobility: Moralising vs Measuring Geographical Mobility in Africa.” Afrika Focus 22 (1): 21–35. Pirie, G. H. 2015. “Colours, Compartments and Corridors: Racialized Spaces, Mobility and Sociability in South Africa.” In Cultural Histories of Sociabilities, Spaces and Mobilities, edited by Colin Divall, 39–51. London: Routledge. Pirie, G. H. 2016. “Letters, Words, Worlds: The Naming of Soweto.” In Place Names in Africa: Colonial Urban Legacies, Entangled Histories, edited by Liora Bigon, 143–157. Switzerland: Springer. Priya Uteng, Tanu, and Karen Lucas. 2018. “The Trajectories of Urban Mobilities in the Global South: An Introduction.” In Urban Mobilities in the Global South, edited by Tanu Priya Uteng and Karen Lucas, 1–18. London: Routledge.

62  S. GIBSON Revill, George. 2012. Railway. London: Reaktion Books. Richards, Jeffrey, and John M. MacKenzie. 1986. The Railway Station. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Richter, Amy G. 2005. Home on the Rails: The Railroad and the Rise of Public Domesticity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Savage, Michael. 1986. “The Imposition of Pass Laws on the African Population in South Africa 1916–1984.” African Affairs 85 (339): 181–205. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. 1986. The Railway Journey. Berkeley: University of California Press. Seiler, Cotten. 2009. “Mobilizing Race, Racializing Mobility: Writing Race into Mobility Studies.” In Mobility in History, edited by Gijs Mom, Gordon Pirie, and Laurent Tissot, 229–233. Switzerland: Presses universitaires suisses. Seroke, Jaki. 1981. “Staffriders Speaking: Black Writers in South Africa. Miriam Tlali, Sipho Sepamla, Mothobi Mutloatse.” Staffrider 4 (3): 41–43. Setuke, Brian. 1980. “Dumani.” In Forced Landing, edited by Mothobi Mutloatse, 58–68. Johannesburg: Ravan Press. Sheller, Mimi. 2018. Mobility Justice. London: Verso. Sheller, Mimi, and John Urry. 2006. “The New Mobilities Paradigm.” Environment and Planning A 38 (2): 207–226. Sheller, Mimi, and John Urry. 2016. “Mobilizing the New Mobilities Paradigm.” Applied Mobilities 1 (1): 10–25. Siluma, Michael. 1978. “Naledi Train.” Staffrider 1 (4): 2–4. Simons, Harold Jack, and R.E. Simons. 1969. Class and Colour in South Africa, 1850–1950. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Spalding, Stephen D., and Benjamin Fraser, eds. 2012. Trains, Literature and Culture: Reading and Writing the Rails. Plymouth: Lexington Books. Thomas, Peter. 2014. “Railways.” In The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities, edited by Peter Adey, David Bissell, Kevin Hannam, Peter Merriman, and Mimi Sheller, 214–224. London: Routledge. Tlali, Miriam. 1980. “Voices from the Ghetto: The Last Train from Faraday.” Staffrider 3 (4): 3–4. Tlali, Miriam. 1989. “Fud-u-u-a.” In Footprints in the Quag: Stories & Dialogues from Soweto, 27–42. Cape Town and Johannesburg: David Philip. Trump, Martin. 1988. “Black South African Short Fiction in English Since 1976.” Research in African Literatures 19 (1): 34–64. Tshabangu, Mango. 1978. “Thoughts in a Train.” Staffrider 1 (2): 27. Urry, John. 1994. Consuming Places. London: Routledge. Urry, John. 2007. Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity. Vaughan, Michael. 1982. Literature and Politics: Currents in South African Writing in the Seventies. Journal of Southern African Studies 9 (1): 118–138.

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Vaughan, Michael. 1984. “Staffrider and Directions within Contemporary South African Literature.” In Literature and Society in South Africa, edited by Tim Couzens and Landeg White, 196–212. Harlow: Longman. Vaughan, Michael. 1985. “Literature and Populism in South Africa: Reflections on the Ideology of Staffrider.” In Marxism and African Literature, edited by Georg M. Gugelberger, 195–220. London: James Currey. Vladislavic, Ivan. 2008. “Staffrider: An Essay.” Accessed 11 December 2018. http://chimurengalibrary.co.za/staffrider-an-essay-by-ivan-vladislavic. Wade, Michael. 1994. “Trains as Tropes: The Role of the Railway in Some South African Literary Texts.” In Altered State? Writing and South Africa, edited by Elleke Boehmer, Laura Chrisman, and Kenneth Parker, 75–90. Sydney: Dangaroo Press. Witulski, Udo. 1986. “Black Commuters in South Africa.” Africa Insight 16 (1): 10–20. Wolmar, Christian. 2009. Blood, Iron & Gold: How the Railways Transformed the World. London: Atlantic Books. Wright, Laurence. 2010. “Third World Express: Trains and ‘Revolution’ in Southern African Poetry.” Literator 31 (1): 1–18. Wright, Laurence. 2011. “‘Iron on Iron’: Modernism Engaging Apartheid in Some South African Railway Poems.” English Studies in Africa 54 (2): 1–15. Zander, Horst. 1999. “Prose-Poem-Drama: ‘Proemdra’: ‘Black Aesthetics’ versus ‘White Aesthetics’ in South Africa.” Research in African Literatures 30 (1): 12–33.

CHAPTER 3

“Stationary Trivialities”: Contrasting Representations of the American Motel in Vladimir Nabokov and Jack Kerouac Elsa Court

Many American road narratives which, either in literature or in film, are grounded in the motel locus are poised to make a comment on its evolution as a commercial phenomenon. The striking architecture of the motel grounds its structure in a time and place—mid-twentiethcentury America—so that in spite of its geographical isolation, and the strange compromise it represents between the social and the anti-social, the motel is a powerful icon of the modern American road; it is often related, in fiction as in visual culture, to the road’s dominant motifs of individualism, introspection, and physical and existential restlessness. The motel is a cultural and ideological symbol of one of the great romances of the twentieth century: the romance of the road, which is frequently interpreted as a romance of self-reliance and self-reinvention. While this romance can be argued to find its roots as far back as the picaresque genre at least, its mid-twentieth-century expression, the American road trip, makes use of a specific commercial landscape which quickly entered

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the realm of the universally familiar in its own right. The narrative which centres on the motorised (male) rebel, and on his desire to avoid the domestic and escape from the confines of society’s norms, tends to present the motel as a site of prolonged unsettled living, thereby symbolising the failure of the quest. The motel, like most services directed at tourists on the side of the road, presents a geographical as well as an ideological compromise. As Cara Rodway puts it, the motel presents itself as an “anomaly”: it is a structure which seeks to reconcile movement and stasis, freedom and comfort, rebellion and consumerism (Rodway 2010, 5). Its seemingly self-contradictory values give the motel an unusual aura, which fiction and film have sought to capture. Sarah Treadwell emphasises the following paradox: “Despite being utterly ordinary,” she writes, “motels nevertheless collect extraordinary levels of atmosphere; in films such as Lolita and Psycho, they are characteristically dubious even as they are inconsequential and necessary” (214). This statement is slightly confusing in that, unsurprisingly, Treadwell’s article illustrates its point by evoking Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita (1955), while overlooking the fact that Kubrick’s (1962) film adaptation, as I will discuss here, neglects the road episode, and in fact barely features motels at all (216). Such is the visual power of the novel’s evocations of the roadside, perhaps, that Treadwell’s jump from novel to film is partly understandable. More recently Dmitri Nabokov, referring to his father’s most acclaimed work as a “proto-road novel,” has noted that it is through highways and motels that Lolita has immortalised 1940s America (Nabokov 2009, xv). While the motel’s cultural existence certainly seems predominantly filmic, Lolita appears to be unchallenged as the great novel of the American motel. Further, as the afterword of Lolita suggests, an acute depiction of America’s postwar vacationing culture—largely, but not only, through the motel system—enabled Nabokov to claim the status of American writer. What cultural historian Katie Mills calls the “first era” of the postwar road narrative, traditionally signalled by the publication of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), can be read alongside the evolution, throughout the 1960s, of the figure of the American rebel (Mills 2006, 26). Anticipating the emergence of this cult hero by a few years, Lolita draws a complex, problematic picture of marginality and rebellion—one which, as I will contend, writes itself in relation to the roadside. The road, as a space but also as an activity and as a state of mind, has been thoroughly studied in the areas of literature and film criticism, social

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sciences, psychoanalysis, in relation to theories of space, and in relation to the great social changes that occurred in postwar America. But the American roadside has been comparatively overlooked outside of the social sciences. Treadwell’s article, which appeared in 2005, is one of a few examples of criticism specifically addressing the motel’s representations in culture. Historical accounts of the motel era make superficial reference to the novels and films which participated in the construction of a road hospitality myth. Most of them cite Nabokov’s Lolita as a valuable point of reference within literary fiction, but stay away from diving into cultural analysis. Geographers John Jakle, Keith Sculle, and Jefferson Rogers, authors of the most comprehensive social history of the American motel to date, suggest that if The Grapes of Wrath (1939) is the American novel which documents the westward exodus of the Great Depression and the transitory age of auto-camping in the history of roadside hospitality, Lolita documents, with the motel, the leisure and holiday lifestyle of the middle class in postwar America (33). This alone gives us reason to bring academic attention at last to the motel’s cultural history through its representation in Lolita. In this area, Lolita is often remembered for the mordant accuracy of its cultural observation. The present article will pick up on a supposition made respectively by Jakle, Nabokov scholar Alfred Appel, and theoretician Fredric Jameson, with respect to Nabokov as an American author: that it was his position as a foreigner in America that made him singularly perceptive of the idiosyncrasies of its innocuous everyday culture (Appel 1974, 245; Jameson 2007, 143). Jakle, Sculle, and Rogers write in their introduction to The Motel in America (1996) that it was because he was “comfortable in widely diverse languages and cultures” that “[Vladimir Nabokov] recognised early, as most Americans perhaps could not, the motel’s significance in American life” (16). It will appear therefore that a sustained exploration of the motel as theme may inform future readers and scholars of American literature on the perceptiveness and prescience of Nabokov’s portrait of postwar America through its roadside industry. In his afterword to Lolita, however, Nabokov exposes a playful, if not provocative approach to the question of realism, one in which roads and the roadside come into consideration. While his rendering of the American cultural landscape had already been noticed for its precision, Nabokov claimed, writing an afterword to Lolita in 1956, that the so-called “reality” of his novel was non-existent, save for the accuracy of some “local ingredients” which he admittedly “reinjected” into the

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text, amidst what he calls “the brew of individual fancy” (Nabokov 2000, 312). Using the language of biological experiment is not unusual for Nabokov; neither is it incidental here: the notion of scientific sampling introduces the context of the novel’s genesis and Nabokov’s empirical approach to what he identified as “average” American “reality.” He goes on to explain that the various stages of the writing of Lolita coincided with a number of road trips: Every summer my wife and I go butterfly hunting. The specimens are deposited at scientific institutions, such as the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard or the Cornell University collection. The locality labels pinned under these butterflies will be a boon to some twenty-first century scholar with a taste for recondite biography. It was at such of our headquarters as Telluride, Colorado; Afton, Wyoming; Portal, Arizona; and Ashland, Oregon, that Lolita was energetically resumed in the evenings or on cloudy days. (312)

Nabokov suggests that the American colour found in Lolita had been, like the lepidoptera of Colorado, Arizona, Wyoming and Oregon, collected on the road, and that he had found both equally challenging to capture and identify. His afterword evokes the difficulty, for the middle-aged novelist freshly arrived in America, in reading through and assimilating into a foreign society’s culture. Nabokov writes: “The obtaining of such local ingredients as would allow me to inject a modicum of average ‘reality’ […] into the brew of individual fancy, proved at fifty a much more difficult process than it had been in the Europe of my youth when receptiveness and retention were at their automatic best” (312). Going against classic notions of literary realism, Nabokov evokes the “task” of “inventing” true-to-life America, in other words the task of giving America a believable reality within what is acknowledged as a literary construct, that is, as the product of “individual fancy.” The success of such a task, Nabokov suggests, depended on the support of “average” and therefore reliable “reality”: that which is accessible to all, and provides a valid point of referential comparison in that it reflects the experience of many. The American everyday, in other words, is that side of the American experience which provides a grounding for the fancy of the individual mind. The motel, a symptom and a vehicle of the democratisation of road mobility in America, figures in Lolita as a social component of “average reality.” The present chapter will attempt to demonstrate

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that, through the motel, Nabokov addressed the one central theme of the emerging postwar road narrative genre: that of the relationship of the “free” motorised individual with their community, and the suspension and redefinition of that relationship. Further, in the context of the still recent opening of the field of mobilities studies to the humanities (Merriman and Pearce 2017), the genesis of Nabokov’s Lolita on the road may be studied as an ethnography of the American roadside, while the novel’s cultural after-life in Stanley Kubrick’s screen adaptation may be interpreted to further the argument of Nabokov’s international perceptiveness in reckoning with the cultural significance of a new form of American space: that designated for the purpose of highway hospitality.

The Motel as American Space Like the American roadside, the American suburb is exploited in the novel as one of the characteristic “average” spaces of middle-class living. Descriptions of the suburb as a typical “North American set” (313) signal the novel’s American “reality” through the fog of Humbert Humbert’s solipsistic perceptions of his new environment. There, neatly kept lawns, barking dogs, housewives’ book clubs and lakeside picnics set the tone for the narrator’s months acclimatising in the New World. The second part of the novel leaves the suburb for the road, and finds its “average reality” in the services offered by the newly expanding commercial roadside: motels, but also gasoline stations with adjoining diners or picnic tables, tourist attractions and their cafés and souvenir shops, complete the cultural portrait of the American middle class, whose pursuit of affordable leisure is conducted with near-ritualistic fervour to the four corners of the land. Like the suburb on the outskirts of the city, the roadside is located away from the thriving sector of activity, and provides a separate public space of finite comfort and marketable joy: a window into the consumer-minded spirit of postwar America. While Nabokov’s appropriation of what he calls “philistine vulgarity” was initially, and not so surprisingly, interpreted as a critique of American society, later criticism has emphasised the importance of the “exhilarating” (Nabokov 2000, 315) aspect of Nabokov’s playful attitude towards “average” America. Alfred Appel’s insistence in the 1970s that Nabokov “is not, as some friendly critics may have suggested, totally hostile to the ‘actual world,’” reminds us that, after claiming that he “loathed popular pulp,” Nabokov’s work

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was once accepted as a sustained critique of poshlost, that cultural attitude which he described as “the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive” (Appel 1974, 31). Emphasis on the pleasure Nabokov derives from the language of advertisement in studies such as Rachel Bowlby’s, have since largely qualified that judgement of Nabokov’s fiction as culturally elitist (Bowlby 1993, 46–71). In Lolita, the roadside shares with the suburbs a naïve spirit which the narrator thoroughly satirises—but which the author wants us to register in more nuanced terms. The “exhilaration” he finds in “average America” demonstrates Nabokov’s willingness to transcend the elite ideals of modernism and to have a creative encounter with the evolving cultural landscape of America. Indeed, it could be said that, for Nabokov, the so-called vulgar elements of America’s everyday culture is what revives the creative observation that is no longer “at its automatic best” (312). It is in these terms that Nabokov identifies his fictional treatment of the vulgar roadside motel with his journey to American authorship. The afterword, which acts as a defence of the novel against the claim of anti-Americanism, finally delivers the following statement: “I chose American motels instead of Swiss hotels or English inns only because I am trying to be an American writer and claim only the same rights that other American writers enjoy” (315). Yet Nabokov dissociates himself from his mobile protagonist, calling Humbert “a foreigner and an anarchist” (315) in the next breath and suggesting that he, unlike Humbert, has successfully achieved his American naturalisation in both cultural identity and social politics. “There are many things,” he writes, “besides nymphets, on which we disagree” (315). The novel’s portrait of the American motel, mediated by Humbert’s perception of America, thus reflects not only Nabokov’s observations about an authentic America, but also Humbert’s hermetic vision of American society. The roadside may therefore be even more important to Lolita than has already been acknowledged by criticism, in that its cultural relevance exceeds that of the motel alone. Fredric Jameson, on the other hand, compares Nabokov to Alfred Hitchcock and Raymond Chandler for his receptiveness to details of the quotidian which, to American-born authors, would be seen as peripheral or innocuous. Appel, finally, argues: Paradoxically enough, displaced and cultured Europeans such as Lang, Wilder, and Nabokov seem to approach Pop more confidently than Kubrick, the self-educated artist (an American archetype) whose ambition

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to make Important Pictures may actually alienate and isolate him from “vulgar” sources of inspiration. (245)

Because of the assumed “vulgarity” of America’s popular culture in Jameson’s and Appel’s comments, the American motel seems like a suitable object through which to assess Nabokov’s understanding of postwar America on the grounds of his foreign perspective. In order to test the overlapping statements made by Jakle, Appel, and Jameson, I will now move on to a comparison of Nabokov’s treatment of the motel in Lolita with that of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), the “other” emblematic American road novel of the 1950s.

Contrasting Depictions of the Motel in American Fiction Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, which was released a year before the American publication of Lolita, makes mention of the motel on a few brief occasions, but without it ever leading to a notable narrative event or a substantial visual description. Kerouac’s narrator, Sal Paradise, evokes on one particular instance the strange aura of “an ornate Spanishstyle motel that was lit like a jewel” (Kerouac 2000, 73), a structure which he only notes in passing. The cost of spending a night in a motel, though low, is an expenditure judged unnecessary by Paradise and his companions. Only women, who occasionally tag along on the adventure, seem to request this luxury: Sal’s Mexican girlfriend Terry, for instance, who is travelling with her young son, judges motels preferable to sleeping outdoors. Galatea, Ed Dunkel’s wife, is described as a nuisance for wanting to stop and rest: “She kept complaining that she was tired and wanted to sleep in a motel” and on two occasions “forced a stop” and made her companions waste money on a room (101). This attitude makes her unfit for the kind of adventure narrated in On the Road: “If this kept up,” explains Paradise, “they’d spend all her money long before Virginia.” Soon, Galatea and the domestic pull she represents are given up altogether: “Dean and Ed gave her the slip in a hotel lobby and resumed the voyage alone, […] and without a qualm” (101). Paradise’s male companions, the real agents of the journey, prefer taking turns sleeping at the back of the car: the novel reads as if the protagonists barely stopped driving in between their various destinations.

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The focus of Kerouac’s novel, as its very title indicates, is the trance of the road itself: the lyricism of On the Road testifies that the text is still under the spell of the act of driving long after the journey has ended. In achieving this rhythm, the book seeks to pay tribute to a group of marginal characters whose appetite for life is reflected in the seemingly endless journey. The road trip in the second half of Lolita is not quite so life-affirming: Humbert writes that the “raison d’être” of his trip—a ­circuit allegedly composed of “sidetrips and tourist traps, secondary circles and skittish deviations”—has been, all along, to keep Lolita “in passable humor from kiss to kiss” (Nabokov 2000, 154). Lolita’s quest is a perverse one which has already reached its goal, and only seeks to sustain Humbert’s abusive contact with Lolita: as such, Humbert’s story finds its home on the side of the road rather than on the road itself. Humbert who, in spite of an ongoing display of triumphant individualism, gives up on the adventure soon enough (“I did crave for a label, a background, and a simulacrum” [175]), actually despises youth and characters like Dean Moriarty, whom he virtually describes in the figure of the generic “Hitchhiking Man”: “the clean-cut, glossy-haired, shifty-eyed, white-faced young beasts in loud shirts and coats, vigorously, almost priapically thrusting out tense thumbs to tempt lone women or sad-sack salesmen with fancy cravings” (159). These young men, here described as local specimens of the specific territory of the highway, are recognised as belonging to a more mainstream “roadside species” than Humbert: their supposed sense of rebellion and embodiment of marginality is significantly more attractive—and more harmless—than Humbert’s solipsistic misanthropy. This appreciation of Humbert’s rebelliousness being at odds with the codes of popular culture is suggested by Lolita’s growing disgust of her abductor, pitched against her ever-eager plea to pick up the good-looking hitchhikers on the road. Framed within an extended catalogue of stopping places—motels, but also roadside restaurants, gasoline stations, rest areas with picnic tables, and tourist attractions including caves, lakes, canyons, scenic drives, and two separate reconstitutions of Abraham Lincoln’s home (155–158)—the actual moment of the road in Lolita is subordinate to the pause. The motel is introduced first of all, somehow perversely, as soon as the first sentence of Chapter 1, Part II has announced that the trip has begun: “It was then that began our extensive travels all over the States. To any other type of tourist accommodation, I soon grew to prefer the Functional Motel—clean, neat, safe nooks, ideal places for sleep,

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argument, reconciliation, insatiable illicit love” (145). Jumping forward to the motel is a provocative move: in doing so, Humbert writes around his repeated sexual abuse of Lolita, and yet places it to the fore. Though he cannot afford to articulate his pleasure in remembering the abuse itself, he may substitute it with the pleasure of playing with the motels’ colourful mediocrity, a mediocrity which, it is implied, did not diminish his enjoyment of them. Humbert insists that his reasons for selecting motels over “any other type of tourist accommodation” had nothing to do with their being particularly tasteful or comfortable. In fact, motels grant an amount of privacy which seems proportional to the poor quality of their service: Humbert presents the American motel as a place filled with incongruities where, as if by tacit agreement, almost anything goes. He suggests, for instance, that the motel may have already accommodated the strangest sexual practices in the periphery of his own sordid story, judging by the availability of strange “double units”: At first, in my dread of arousing suspicion, I would eagerly pay for both sections of one double unit, each containing a double bed. I wondered what type of foursome this arrangement was ever invented for, since only a pharisaic parody of privacy could be attained by means of the incomplete partition dividing the cabin or room into two communicating love nests. (145)

The mysterious rationale behind such layouts leads Humbert to make cynical assumptions, imagining “two young couples merrily swapping mates or a child shamming sleep to earwitness primal sonorities” (145). The motel’s management, generally speaking, is elusive and absent, so that the motel may be registered, even by a newcomer to America, as a flawed, unfinished, and therefore malleable institution, a parody of a social space where anything goes.

The Motel as Opposed to the Hotel Humbert’s account here emphasises a key difference between motel and hotel service: while a regular hotel proposes to attend to its clientele’s needs, the motel administration seems to have given up on this traditional notion of service. This is good news to Humbert since, as the reader knows from the recent Enchanted Hunters hotel episode, service goes with a form of social surveillance, and inclusion in the hotel

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depends on a certain number of social rules which are absent from the motel system. In comparison with the motel, the “pale palace” of the Enchanted Hunters, as described at the end of Part I, is presented as an institution of the past, stiffened by its close observance of conservative values. Mentally anticipating his first night with Lolita outside the structure of the family home, Humbert walks in through a lobby that is comically teeming with “old ladies and clergymen” (117). Next, his registration takes places through a difficult exchange with the desk staff, whose attitude, as Appel points out, is “euphemistically restrictive” (1974, 377).1 At the Enchanted Hunters, three black porters take turns in escorting Humbert and Lolita to the elevator door, then on to their room, and later deliver a cot which had only been half-heartedly requested by Humbert for the sake of keeping up appearances. This last porter expects a tip, a gesture which also is subject to custom: in his excitement, Humbert is tempted to hand him a “five-dollar bill,” but resolves to give a more appropriate tip for fear that even his “largesse” might seem suspicious (118–119). Only after having carefully played by the rules and received these attentions in the manner that was expected of him can Humbert close the door behind the porter and exclaim, to himself, “enfin seuls” (119). An enterprise of limited funds and staff, most likely tending to one-night-only guests, the motel provides limited comforts but complete laissez-faire with regard to etiquette, a situation which Humbert subverts to his needs. Still excited, in hindsight, that he has managed to pervert their comparatively permissive system, Humbert takes pleasure in replaying, for instance, the keen advertising strategies of motels, which betrayed insufficient comforts and therefore offered a guarantee of unruly intimacy: We came to know – nous connûmes, to use a Flaubertian intonation – the stone cottages under enormous Chateaubriandesque trees, the brick unit, the adobe unit, the stucco court, on what the Tour Book of the Automobile Association describes as “shaded” or “spacious” or “landscaped” grounds. The log kind, finished in knotty pine, reminded Lo, by its golden-brown glaze, of fried-chicken bones. We held in contempt the plain whitewashed clapboard Kabins, with their faint sewerish smell or some other gloomy self-conscious stench and nothing to boast of (except “good beds”), […]. (145)

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In retrospect, Humbert resents having decided on the Enchanted Hunters hotel for his first night alone with Lolita, when he remembers that “countless motor courts proclaimed their vacancy in neon light” along the way to the respectable inn, all of them presumably “ready to accommodate salesmen, escaped convicts, impotents, family groups, as well as the most corrupt and vigorous couples” (116). Humbert therefore derives great fun from the hypocrisy of the motel’s half-hearted marketing communications, which seem to emulate some of the traditional hotel’s standards, only with more emphasis and less conviction: Nous connûmes (this is royal fun) the would-be enticement of their repetitious names – all those Sunset Motels, U-Beam Cottages, Hillcrest Courts, Pine View Courts, Mountain View Courts, Skyline Courts, Park Plaza Courts, Green Acres, Mac’s Courts. (146)

These variations play on fantasies of open spaces and sophisticated luxury, neither of which the motel interiors can offer, and which Humbert subverts by exploiting what he thinks might as well be written between the lines. He demonstrates, for instance, the ease with which he can take the language of motel signs literally: “There was sometimes a special line in the write-up, such as ‘Children welcome, pets allowed’ (You are welcome, you are allowed)” (146). This perverse and tender joke, virtually addressed to Lolita, alludes to her dual position at Humbert’s side: a child in the eyes of the world, a pet or play-thing in the seclusion of motel cabins that are only operated by a blind, distant voice, whose parody of regulations is but a distant echo of civilised manners. In On the Road, forward movement comes with a—no doubt illusory—promise of self-discovery. In Lolita, the road trip is, on the contrary, a matter of connecting with the social so as not to appear to be on the run, though ultimately with the effect of successful social disappearance. The motel participates in allowing a form of erasure, as it equates living and moving on: it allows Humbert to transcend the normal system of social relationships implied in everyday settled living, providing him a lifestyle where he may enjoy, along with other travellers, what Marguerite S. Shaffer calls a “privacy in public,” that is to say, a chance to act spontaneously “without fearing the judgments of the quotidian milieu of family, friends, co-workers, and acquaintances” (Shaffer 2001, 243). Throughout the trip, Humbert’s prose displays a great capacity to take in the written language of the road, reproducing their often bold use of italics or capital letters,

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while ignoring or perverting the voice’s actual injunctions. Sign language is seen and remembered, yet its significance is presented as virtual and therefore ineffectual: the road’s is a disembodied voice, and a substitute for actual human interaction.

An Inconsequential Social Space Humbert’s discourse thus presents the modern American road as the terrain of a quest of unabated solipsism. In the motel, chances of human contact are cancelled: as Jakle, Sculle, and Jefferson point out, the motel cabin in fact prolongs the confined space of the car (1996, 329), so that the traveller maintains the illusion of solitary progress. This dimension of collective isolation is a novel feature in the history of travel narratives, brought about by the rise of the private automobile: Lolita, in portraying it, goes against the traditional use of the road motif in adventure narratives. Mikhail Bakhtin, for instance, defines this earlier expression of the road motif in his 1937 essay “Forms of Time and the Chronotope in the Novel,” where he identifies the road in literature as a space typically conductive of chance events and encounters (1982, 98). Referring to the Greek epic as well as to the novel, Bakhtin highlights the importance of the road as a spatial and temporal continuum which invites the workings of fate to be played out more distinctively than in the spaces of everyday living. “In the chronotope of the open road,” he writes, “the unity of time and space markers is exhibited with exceptional precision and clarity” (98), making it the site of important events and encounters in so many works of literature. The motel in Lolita demonstrates a new limitation of the potential Bakhtin alludes to: it is a truly anonymous system which plays down all possibility of encounter in spite of the fact that it caters to the traveller’s need to stop. As such, it seems to crystallise the modern American— male—motorist’s appreciation of individual travel for granting immediate freedom from attachment and the responsibilities attached to social conventions. As Humbert’s strategic restitution of the motel’s empty language shows, the motel could almost be a self-operated construct. Motel attendants, for themselves, are briefly evoked as a collection of generic “types” which come as yet another fixture of the places visited: “the reformed criminal, the retired teacher and the business flop, among the males; and the motherly, pseudo-ladylike and madamic variants among the females” (146), none of whom are given a voice in the text. These

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non-characters never transcend their quality as “types” and speak no individual word of welcome in the novel: their voice is often delegated instead to the conspicuous written instructions which Humbert finds, in certain motels, “pasted above the toilet,” and which distastefully enjoin guests “not to throw into its bowl garbage, beer cans, cartons, stillborn babies,” while other “special notices under glass” may list local “Things to Do” (146). In an effort to distract from his own shameful use of the highway’s social politics, Humbert muses as to “what frolics, what twists of lust, you might see from your impeccable highways if Kumfy Kabins were suddenly drained of their pigments and became as transparent as boxes of glass” (117), anticipating the theme of voyeurism which dominates motel narratives in American cinema and popular culture throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Lolita fixes the theme of the sexual exploits of guests as a recurring feature of motel narratives to come. By applying a spirited and cynical eye to the motel system, Nabokov’s narrator paints a society which simultaneously condemns and encourages deviance. Through this perverse portrayal of motels is sketched a new space where socially repressible acts somehow coexist with the mundane: “escaped convicts” share a roof with “salesmen” in transit; shamed “impotents” or “corrupt” and “vigorous” lovers with “family groups” (116). Lolita here even anticipates late-twentieth-century works of cultural anthropology such Michel Foucault’s (1984) essay on heterotopias as “other” social spaces, in which he imagines the sexual activities hosted by the motel as one step removed from being “in the open air,” because from their protective seclusion, and their location in the periphery of towns, have stemmed the motel’s cultural connotations, their place in the collective imagination (Foucault 1997, 350–356). In the 1940s, however, the as yet underrepresented motel is a springboard to write about an America which Nabokov knows to be underwritten: as such, the roadside motel is the site of a tango in which the middle class and the outsider (cultural, social, political) are closely engaged. Kerouac’s comparatively aloof description of the highway’s commercial landscape suggests America’s mistrust of its own pop culture in a sense which, as I will argue in the next section, is similar to that which has been criticised in Stanley Kubrick’s (1962) adaptation of Nabokov’s novel (Appel 1974, 244–245). Kubrick’s film, which was entirely shot in England and, partly for this reason, privileges narrative episodes of the novel which are not set on the road, produces a long, eventful, and

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memorable interpretation of the Enchanted Hunters hotel scene, but neglects the American motel just as it dismisses most of the screenplay Nabokov had been commissioned to write for it. While this screenplay was published individually in 1974 and is an object of study in its own right, the fact that its colourful and disturbing motel episodes should have been ignored by Kubrick shows there is room for arguing that there was a certain degree of unease about the emergence of American popular culture on the part of Americans who sought to elevate American art forms in Europe’s terms, a reserve which international writers like Nabokov made a point of bypassing.

The Motel in Lolita: A Screenplay Discussing Stanley Kubrick’s (1962) screen adaptation of Lolita, Appel concentrates on the director’s choice not to represent—or hardly to represent—roadside America in the film. Appel comments, in fact, on Kubrick’s lack of interest in the novel’s American cultural landscape at large: “To avoid harassment and make use of blocked overseas funds,” he writes, “Lolita was filmed in England. This explains why, except for some nondescript stock footage, the American landscape is absent from Lolita. But it doesn’t explain why Kubrick didn’t do more to remedy the situation” (Appel 1974, 244). To him, this lack of enthusiasm in reproducing the book’s American landscape, cultural and architectural, can be explained by Kubrick’s desire to elevate film from its assimilation into popular culture, to which, in the United States of the early 1960s, it was still essentially being confined. As an American film director, Appel argues, Kubrick failed to see that he could make use of popular culture and still strive toward a higher artistic form: Kubrick, the “self-educated artist,” had as a main ambition to make sophisticated moving pictures, and, for this reason, overlooked the mainstream cultural background which is so alive in Lolita (245). With this theory in mind, Appel goes on to evoke some of the simplest techniques that might have revitalised the “nondescript stock footage” of Kubrick’s American road, saying that: A lone California-based cinematographer could have quietly accumulated and mailed Kubrick the requisite footage of motels, gas stations, signs, and the nightscapes which confirm the desperate situation of Humbert and Lolita. Back-projection and other studio tricks would have accomplished the rest, certainly to the advantage of Kubrick’s curiously limp car scenes,

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which possess little of the drama of similar sequences in film noir, Robert Frank and Nabokov’s Lolita. (245)

Kubrick limits the motel to interiors, which, Appel suggests, “do not suffice” (245). Indeed the screenplay which Nabokov had initially written at Kubrick’s demand, only a small portion of which was put to use, insisted on a visual “evolution of the motel theme,” illustrated through variations of motel structures and names, which would have been put to the viewer’s consideration, presumably, by a number of close-ups on motel signs. Stage directions in Nabokov’s original screenplay make way for a whole strip of motels going from “the modest log cabin (Acme Cabins), through cottages in a row (Baskerville Cottages), garage-connected units (Crest Court), fused units (Dymple Manor) and the patio-and-pool type (Eden Lodge)” to “the fancy two-story affair (Foxcreek Ranch), a gradation which, if pursued further, would lead us back to the country hotel” (Nabokov 2012a, 164–165). This alphabetical “gradation” in quality, which Humbert’s survey of visited motels in the novel does not present, is here explicitly aimed at illustrating, by an effect of contrast, the helpless degradation of Lolita’s mood. The further they travel, the longer they remain transient, and in spite of the gradual upgrade to more and more elaborate accommodations, Lolita comes to the realisation that this extended holiday is turning into a permanent lifestyle of non-­belonging. Absent from the novel, there materialise in the screenplay dialogues in which Lolita’s complaints about her new life are verbalised, as in the ­following sequence: HUMBERT: I’m sure we are going to be very happy, you and I. LOLITA: But everything has changed, all of a sudden. Everything was so – oh, I don’t know – normal: the camp, and the lake, and Charlie, and the girls, and the – oh, everything. And now there is no camp, and no Ramsdale, nothing! HUMBERT: I don’t want you to cry. We’ll see things, we’ll go places. LOLITA: There’s no place to go back to. (Nabokov 2012a, 166)

As she lists the places emblematic of her life prior to the trip, Lolita defines a circuit of middle-class ordinary living which she can clearly see in its division between everyday activity and holiday time, suggesting that the motel is one step removed from the normative structure of middle-class living. The motel is in fact marginalised by Humbert’s use of it:

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if there is “no place to go back to,” the motel is a failure to constitute an alternative to a nonexistent home. A shell rather than a space of social living, the motel is effectively “nothing” from the moment that there is “no camp” and “no Ramsdale” as referential counterparts to it. The screenplay introduces an alternative life of the motel in the newly democratised family holiday, in a scene which, incidentally, escapes both Humbert’s attention and Lolita’s. The second act of Nabokov’s screenplay, which is divided between Humbert’s first night with Lolita at the Enchanted Hunters and the subsequent road trip episode, ends outside of a motel, with the departure of a “big family,” one morning at dawn, from an adjacent cabin to Humbert and Lolita’s. Humbert has accidentally locked himself out after a trip to the Coke dispenser in the penultimate scene, and has had to sleep in his car, after failing to awaken Lolita, then fast asleep—and half-naked—in the cabin. Having seen her thus through the cabin window, Humbert understands that calling for the manager’s help is out of the question, and resigns himself to sleeping in the car. Together, they form a picture of badly-camouflaged decadence, especially in comparison with the “sleepy children, portable icebox, accepted pet, crib” that gradually emerge from the motel cabin and board the “big station wagon” on which “the stickers of various resorts and natural marvels” reveal a parallel course to that taken by Humbert, simultaneous and yet resolutely separate (196). One of the children turns on the radio as soon as he boards the station wagon, which echoes Lolita’s behaviour upon entering motels, as Humbert writes that she would always “set the electric fan a-whirr, or induce me to drop a quarter into the radio” (147). In the motel, Lolita seeks the normative referent of everyday living, which she defines as the lives of “ordinary people” who, typically, do not live in “stuffy cabins” doing “filthy things” (158). The screenplay, which is of course not limited to Humbert’s perspective, renders the complexity of Nabokov’s vision of the motel as a place where perversion is tacitly acknowledged to be better ignored, while the lives of “ordinary people” seem to run their parallel course. The original typescript of Nabokov’s (1965) televised interview with Robert Hughes for the National Education Television (NET) reveals an anecdote pertaining to the author’s family vacations and their shared experience of the American motel. Traveling for months at a time during the academic summers, the Nabokov family’s extended motel stays evoke the porous distinction between everyday and marginal living in the context of a lifestyle supported by the roadside’s easy-access domesticity.

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VN: My little boy […] was five, six, and had always lived in boarding houses and hotels and pensions in Europe. So when he came to America he had apparently the impression he had come home and the kind of accommodations he was getting in motels was the normal thing for a little boy to have. When somebody at a garage would say, “Sonny, where do you live?” he would say, “In the little houses along the road.” It was very exact. RH: Sounds like the genesis of Lolita. VN: In a way, in a way. (Nabokov 1965)

Judging from this enigmatic reply, it would seem not only that Nabokov’s first-hand experience of roadside America in the 1940s enabled him to paint a tangible and self-contained illustration of America’s changing values and moral ambivalence towards the home, but that a personal experience of domestic dislocation was also prime material in the writing of Lolita. The joint efforts of restless cultural observation and the writing of personal loss fit Humbert’s experience but also, beyond it, a melancholy of make-believe which is dominant in the American experience of wealth, domesticity and consumerism after the Second World War.

Conclusion Europe’s spatial theorists of the late twentieth century, such as Michel Foucault but also Jean Baudrillard and Marc Augé, write, several decades after Nabokov, about the landscape of the American highway as the essential territory of emptiness and excess, one which made even more poignant sense in their vision of the cultural landscape of late twentieth-century America. Twenty-first-century mobility scholars posit that both the human body and the home are undergoing a process of transformation as transportation systems and the technology of connectivity change our understanding of proximity, while communication devices permit more and more of us more frequently to be “on the move” (Hannam et al. 2006, 2). It would seem, therefore, that the discipline’s interest in stationary systems surrounding mobility would urgently invite critical and historical perspectives on the fixed places designed to facilitate motion. Against both Augé’s (1995) cultural theorisation of “placelessness” on and around motorways, focusing on their abstraction and lack of

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meaning as a trait of hypermodernity, mobility scholars have argued that the places of transit that were built around and for the benefit of human hypermobility—such as airports, hotels, stations, and roadside spaces—are places that are rife with social potential and cultural meaning (Hannam et al. 2006, 6; Merriman and Pearce 2017, 52). While Anne Brigham (2015) convincingly argues for a reexploration of the American road as place of social and cultural incorporation, the present chapter has sought to make a case for the incorporation of Nabokov into the American canon via his observations of the American roadside. In his afterword Nabokov presents himself as having successfully realised his assimilation as an American through the recurrent road travels during which he gradually mustered the knowledge of America that made his first American novel. The yet under-discussed power of the roadside setting to stage narrative interruption and existential doubt in this cultural context makes it a haunting place in Lolita, as well as one of the places where the author successfully connects with America’s changing cultural identity. Although unprecedented in fiction, Nabokov’s capturing of the roadside’s melancholy spirit, and his formal description of the gasoline station’s aesthetic later in the novel, bear echoes with the mood of suspended time in Edward Hopper’s earlier painting Gas (1940), with which the following passage shares thematic and formal elements. A great user of roadside facilities, my unfastidious Lo would be charmed by toilet signs […]; while lost in an artist’s dream I would stare at the honest brightness of the gasoline paraphernalia against the splendid green of oaks, or at a distant hill scrambling out–scarred but still untamed–from the wilderness of agriculture that was trying to swallow it. (Nabokov 2000, 153)

Painted in the year of Nabokov’s arrival in the United States, Hopper’s iconic representation of the modern American roadside could have caught the author’s attention, at a time when Hopper’s fame was at a high point. The content and colours of Hopper’s picture are manifest in the gasoline station passages of Lolita, which emphasise the red pumps against the “splendid green” of trees in the background (153), and, in a later gas station description, the Mobil Gas “sign of Pegasus” (211). The sense of absorbing solitude which the narrator evokes seems similarly

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captured in the dusk-coloured environment of the isolated figure of Gas who, in the absence of a car from the picture, appears to be a roadside station attendant rather than a motorist. Humbert, who cites Claude Lorrain and El Greco while admiring the countryside, admits to a failed attempt at instructing Lolita about American art when he gives her, later in the book, a History of Modern American Painting for her birthday. Though he does not retrieve Hopper’s name or clarify the origin of his artistic vision of the roadside, Humbert briefly expresses his opinion on four contemporaries of Hopper, illustrated for Lolita in the book of painting: Grant Wood and Peter Hurd (“good”), on the one hand, and Reginald Marsh and Frederick Waugh (“awful”) on the other (199). Marsh, whose work has been exhibited alongside Hopper’s at the Whitney Museum of American Art since its opening in 1931, is an alternative example of the modern figurative painter, one who favoured grimy urban subjects and an array of themes belonging to the underbelly of the American everyday. Marsh is often quoted to have said for instance that he liked the “honest vulgarity” of movie posters and shop signs, and their capacity to convey a sense of what he called “reality exposed and not disguised” (Chilvers and Glaves-Smith 2009, 443). The “honest brightness of the gasoline paraphernalia” evokes this unmediated delivery of everyday living as a depthless narrative, a narrative of the surface, which appears as paradoxically innocent and plain from the lack of sophistication of its garish stylisation. Elsewhere in Nabokov’s work, the roadside’s liminality is recalled and used to represent the author’s experience of exilic dislocation, and then transcend it with unexpected epiphanies of memory. In the poem “An Evening of Russian Poetry,” for instance, the speaker remembers a “dusty place” which is “half town, half desert” where he experiences a flash of recollection from the homeland: And now I must remind you in conclusion, / that I am followed everywhere and that / space is collapsible, although the bounty / of memory is often incomplete: / once in a dusty place of Mora county / (half town, half desert, dump mound and mescquite) and once in West Virginia (a muddy / red road between an orchard and a veil / of rapid rain) it came, that sudden shudder, / a Russian something that I could inhale / but could not see. Some rapid words were uttered – / and then the child slept on, the door was shut. (2013, 137–141)

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In the mixture of melancholy and awe which penetrates Nabokov’s treatment of the American roadside lies the suggestion that the émigré traveller magnifies his relation to the New World in the remote parts of the land, where lonely motels make simultaneous—and self-contradicting— promises of homeliness and escape that seem somehow appropriately resonant. At the heart of Nabokov’s American work lies an antagonistic pull which simultaneously tries to embrace the new-found home and seeks to find in it an echo of the past. This melancholy wanderlust finds itself illustrated by the many-levelled ambivalence of the side of the road. Asked whether he considered himself American, Nabokov replied that he felt he was “as American as April in Arizona,” thereby suggesting that the “the flora, the fauna, the air of the Western states,” actually offered climactic “links” with “Asiatic and Arctic Russia” (2012b, 84). Taking advantage from the personal logic of his westward quest, Nabokov appropriates the frontier myth and gives it an unexpected geographical twist. Deserts, crossroads and roadsides evoke, in “An Evening of Russian Poetry,” the instability of a reinvented frontier space, still to be defined or appropriated: so unstable, in fact, that it shifts location and can only be caught or “inhale[d]” by chance (2013, 141). Nabokov’s work shows that homelessness makes for a paradoxical impulse and capacity to find a home in the places that preclude settlement: incidentally, fiction and poetry sublimate the losses of the author’s life experience, and the impossible hope of recovering his original home. As biographers have emphasised, Nabokov and his family would always avoid taking root in America, moving from house to house in term-time and travelling through the summers, only to take up new temporary accommodations in the fall. The Montreux Palace Hotel, where Vladimir and Véra Nabokov moved permanently after Lolita brought him fame—and enough money to abandon teaching duties—could be said to bear a faint echo of the fictional Riviera hotel where Humbert Humbert, the most unsavory of his anti-heroes, had begun his life: an ideally-suited place, perhaps, for the composition of later novels like the luxurious, continent-blending Ada (1969), and a simultaneous epitome of sophistication and impermanence.

Note 1. In his annotations to the passage, Appel notes that the desk clerk “coldly bestowed on [Humbert] a Jewish-sounding name,” and, until corrected by him, led him to believe that they were out of rooms (377).

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References Appel, Alfred. 1974. Nabokov’s Dark Cinema. New York: Oxford University Press. Augé, Marc. 1995. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1982 [1975]. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Brigham, Anne. 2015. American Road Narratives. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Bowlby, Rachel. 1993. “Lolita and the Poetry of Advertising.” In Shopping with Freud. London: Routledge. Chilvers, Ian, and John Glaves-Smith. 2009. A Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Art, 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1997 [1984]. “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias.” In Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, edited by Neil Leach, 350–356. London: Routledge. Hannam, Kevin, Mimi Sheller, and John Urry. 2006. “Editorial: Mobilities, Immobilities and Moorings.” Mobilities 1 (1): 1–22. Jakle, John A., Keith A. Sculle, and Jefferson S. Rogers. 1996. The Motel in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Jameson, Fredric. 2007 [1990]. Signatures of the Visible. London: Routledge. Kerouac, Jack. 2000 [1957]. On the Road. New Edition. New York: Penguin Classics. Kubrick, Stanley. 1962. Lolita. Los Angeles: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Merriman, Peter, and Lynne Pearce. 2017. Mobility and the Humanities. Mobilities 12 (4): 493–508. Mills, Katie. 2006. The Road Story and the Rebel: Moving Through Film, Fiction, and Television. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Nabokov, Vladimir. 1965. Interview with Robert Hughes: Emended Typescript with Author’s Manuscript Corrections. Vladimir Nabokov Papers, Berg Collection, New York Public Library. Nabokov, Vladimir. 2000 [1970]. The Annotated Lolita. London: Penguin Classics. Nabokov, Vladimir. 2009. The Original of Laura: Dying Is Fun. New York: Knopf Publishing Group. Nabokov, Vladimir. 2012a. Plays: Lolita, a Screenplay: The Tragedy of Mister Morn. London: Penguin Classics. Nabokov, Vladimir. 2012b [1973]. Strong Opinions. London: Penguin Classics. Nabokov, Vladimir. 2013. Collected Poems. London: Penguin Classics.

86  E. COURT Rodway, Cara. 2010. “Roadside Romance? The American Motel in Postwar Popular Culture.” PhD dissertation, King’s College London. Shaffer, Marguerite S. 2001. See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880–1940. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books. Treadwell, Sarah. 2005. The Motel: An Image of Elsewhere. Space and Culture 8 (2): 214–224.

CHAPTER 4

Mobilising Affective Brutality: Death Tourism and the Ecstasy of Postmemory in Contemporary American Culture Pavlina Radia

In Shalom Auslander’s (2012) novel, Hope: A Tragedy, the main ­protagonist, Solomon Kugel struggles with the transgenerational impact of traumatic memory, pondering the ways in which traumatic events like the Holocaust or 9/11 have become subject to what Erica Doss calls America’s “memorial mania” (2010, 2). When his mother takes him on a tour of Sachsenhausen, hoping to teach her son a lesson, Kugel notes the irony of this sacred pilgrimage as the tour guide leads a group of eager tourists to “half a dozen steel crematoriums built into the foundation wall” (Auslander 2012, 177). While his mother spends her days reconstructing and “editorializing” the Holocaust, Kugel asks: What’s the harm in forgetting? What does remembering do? …what if the only thing we learn from the past is that we are condemned to repeat it regardless? The scar, it seems, is often worse than the wound. If only there was a Miracle-Away for the past. A Forever-Gone for brutalities, atrocities, indignities great and small. (Auslander 2012, 106–223) P. Radia (*)  Nipissing University, North Bay, ON, Canada © The Author(s) 2019 M. Aguiar et al. (eds.), Mobilities, Literature, Culture, Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27072-8_4

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Auslander’s novel broaches the difficult conundrum of memory and forgetting, the ethics of memorialisation and the limits that mem­ ory poses to those who are called to bear witness ex post facto. But he also questions the increasing rise of death tourism and its mobilisation of affect as a commemorative act. Like Auslander’s novel (2012), Alissa Torres’s graphic memoir, American Widow (2008), and Amy Waldman’s novel, The Submission (2011), similarly ponder the relationship between affect, memory, and its mobilisation of the 9/11 attacks on America. These literary narratives ask: who remembers and how; who has the right to memory or to memorialisation; and what is the line between remembrance and appropriation? What drives American culture’s preoccupation with tragedy and its memorialisation? What mobilises the ecstasy of postmemory that frames the discourses of tragic tourism? From the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum marking the Mall of Washington, D.C., the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Pentagon Memorial, Victims of Communism Memorial, to the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York, to name the most obvious, memorials and memorialisation have become an important part of contemporary America (Doss 2010, 2). They constitute an important affective mobility paradigm that, on the one hand, speaks to contemporary America’s preoccupation with war and its brutalities, and, on the other hand, points to the ways in which these memorial sites of grief have become not only “places of national affect,” to use John Urry’s words (2007, 254), but also represent an important “mobility turn” that orients the very performance of America’s cultural identity locally and globally (Urry 2007, 265). Urry’s “mobility turn” is particularly seminal to the consideration of contemporary memorial museums and what has been called death tourism. Not only do these places represent sites of “collective witnessing” (Urry 2007, 269), but they also point to America’s preoccupation with affect and with what I have called elsewhere an “ecstatic consumption” of the spectacular, or grief turned spectacle.1 Since the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in April 1993, more than 43 million tourists have flocked to the famous memorial. According to the USHMM Press Kit, the USHMM has over 208,800 Facebook and 260,100 Twitter followers (USHMM 2018). Similarly, the 9/11 Memorial Museum, deemed as “the most expensive memorial in American history” with the construction costs exceeding $1 billion and annual operating costs of $57 million dollars, attracts more than 6 million visitors every year (Doss 2010,

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143). In 2010, Doss described this mania as “an obsession with issues of memory and history and an urgent desire to express and claim those issues in visibly public contexts,” which further speaks to “heightened anxieties about who and what should be remembered in America” (2). Memorials not only contribute to the performance of America’s national, albeit diverse, identity, but they also radicalise affect and hence frequently mobilise (the spectacle and performance of) brutality as compulsive re-imaginings of what Marianne Hirsch calls “postmemory” or the “politics of retrospective witnessing” (2012, 3). Deploying America’s war memorials—be it the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. or the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York City—as sites of monumental but also affective mobilities, this chapter examines how radicalised affect mobilises the ethics (or lack thereof) of retrospective witnessing. Interrogating the ways in which death tourism participates in mobilising affect as a racial and ethnic tokenisation that underpins America’s national identity, this chapter brings the practice of death tourism into dialogic conjunction with literary texts such as Shalom Auslander’s novel, Hope: A Tragedy (2012), Alissa Torres’s graphic novel, American Widow (2008), and Amy Waldman’s novel, The Submission (2011), texts that explore the challenges of postmemory and its affective omissions (and excesses). But it also discusses how contemporary literature challenges the increasing commodification of what Auslander calls “Misery Olympics” (2012, 76), or how Torres addresses the complexity of America’s obsession with visual economics and its appetite for “WE WANT IT RAW” in its treatment of 9/11 victims and their families (Torres 2008, 127). Echoing Auslander’s and Torres’s concern about America’s penchant for affective spectacle, Waldman queries death tourism through her consideration of the racial and cultural politics of 9/11. In broad strokes, this chapter considers the complex relationship between memory, affect, and movement within the context of John Urry’s “mobility turn” as not only part of America’s national(ist) identity project, but also as a “new mobility paradigm” (Urry 2007, 272). This paradigm deploys consumer, performative, and collective witnessing as an uncanny discord of intentionality and unintentionality that are in a “mutual relationship of activation,” to use Yuri Lotman’s terms (1990, 65), of what I call “affective brutality.” This chapter then asserts that affect, associated with death tourism, becomes a form of radicalised affective mobility, a kind of ecstasy of postmemory.

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In what follows, this chapter places Urry’s notion of the “mobilities turn” within the context of monumentalisation—both literal and figurative—by bringing together memorial museums as (multimedial) ­ texts that mobilise affect in experiential, didactic, sacred, but also tourist and consumer ways with literary texts that participate in the re- and de-construction of memory. Simultaneously, it also draws attention to American culture’s fragility and its dependence on memorialising brutalities as a means of (dis)orienting the grief that underpins contemporary America’s plural, but distinct (national) identity. In this comparative reading of monuments and/as literature and literature as/and monuments, the chapter engages with Jan Mukařovský’s notion of artistic and architectural structures as dynamic, but also communicative signs marked by the fluidity and tensions of intentionality and unintentionality (Mukařovský 1978, 115). Last but not least, drawing on the semiotics of Yuri Lotman, this chapter considers memorial texts/bodies as “semiotic systems that are in a state of constant flux” (Lotman 1990, 152), systems that monumentalise but also challenge the intentions of narrative structures imposed by the state or by individuals.

Mobilising Memory as History: Affect and Memorial Monuments as Semiospheres Memory plays a crucial part in cultural systems as an orienting mechanism, but also as a means of actualisation. Considering culture as a dynamic text in constant movement that is simultaneously stalled and mobilised, Yuri Lotman’s Universe of the Mind establishes the notion of a “semiosphere” as a process of continuous translation of and relationship between signs (1990, 3). In Lotman’s words, “the text is not only the generator of new meanings, but also a condenser of cultural memory [actualisation]” (1990, 18). As Lotman emphasises, The sum of the contexts in which a given text acquires interpretation and which are in a way incorporated in it may be termed the text’s memory. This meaning-space created by the text around itself enters into relationships with the cultural memory (tradition) already formed in the consciousness of the audience. As a result, a text acquires semiotic life. (Lotman 1990, 18)

Lotman’s notion of the text acquiring semiotic life is crucial to the analysis of American culture’s contemporary memorial mania, specifically as

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it exposes the dynamic tensions between what Lotman calls the “internal and external space of culture” (1990, 130). As he contends, “Every culture begins by dividing the world into its ‘own’ internal space and ‘their’ external space” (Lotman 1990, 130). It is no news that American national identity is defined by such binarisation of those who can be remembered or belong, and those who must be forgotten or simply do not count. Judith Butler’s recent work on the American government’s and media’s framing of tragedy, war events, and mourning, Frames of War: When Life Is Grievable (2009), aligns this binarising process with the affective structure of American politics, which produces its own precarity, on the one hand, and ecstasy, on the other hand. Butler reminds us that the pain of memory, like grief and mourning, are subject to politics—individual, national, and global. She notes the increasing media management and constructedness of memorialisation, a kind of reproduction of postmemory where omissions relate to and become absent containers of erased memories, texts, and images (Butler 2009, xii). Similarly, as semiotic spaces, memorial museums are well-engineered constructions of affect, tourism, controlled grief, and national patriotism. They are testaments to the dynamic nature of the internal and external spaces of culture as they remind us that “[o]ur affect is never merely our own” (Butler 2009, 50). Just as the state/government is involved in the mandating and building of the memorial museum, so are individual visitors turned tourists engaged in interpreting the affective sensibility of the text/monument and its perception through its very structure and design. Recent affect theory studies by Patricia T. Clough (2010), Patricia T. Clough and Jean Halley (2007), Brian Massumi (2010), Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (2010) are particularly helpful in defining what I call “affective brutality” as a form of new mobility. According to Gregg and Seigworth (2010), affect is a “set of forces or intensities” that “aris[e] in the midst of in-betweenness: in the capacities to act and be acted upon” (1). Similar to Gregg and Seigworth, Brian Massumi (2010), drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, distinguishes affect from emotion, aligning affect with “impersonal intensities” that are outside the subject’s control (52– 70). Sara Ahmed (2004), however, emphasises the importance of seeing emotion and affect as an interrelated continuum and a form of movement which results from “the circulation between objects and signs” (45). Expanding on Ahmed’s notion of affect as circulation, I now turn attention to the ways in which affect not only radicalises, but also mobilises emotion and thus becomes “imbricate[d] in power formations,” to

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use Anderson’s words (2010, 162). In what follows, I combine affect theory with an emergent field of event mobility studies, spearheaded by Kevin Hannam et al. (2016), which outline the complex relationship between events, mobility, and agency. Particularly important to my analysis of affective brutalities and their relationship to the use (and abuse) of memory is the very notion of what Hannam, Mostafaneshad, and Rickly call “[rhetorical] materialities” of heritage and memorial sites (2016, 9). Not only are these sites constructed and managed in the manner that stimulates a call to (collective) memory, but they also guide and control the complex topographies of memory, imbuing it with a sense of recuperative sacredness that sanitises traumatic events and thus often ironically participates in, rather than thwarts, what Lindsey A. Freeman calls “the engineering of forgetting” (2014, 59). As noted above, death tourism (also called thanatourism, grief, dark, or tragic tourism) is imbued with the spectacle of exalted contemplation as it manipulates affect by institutionalising collective remembrance as an imperative to bear witness. As defined by A. V. Seaton in 1996, and further developed by John Lennon and Malcolm Foley in the 1990s, death tourism is a form of tourism to “sites of violent death such as concentration camps, prisons, battlegrounds, killing fields or places of terror attacks and natural disasters” (Sion 2014, 1). Neutralising atrocity by advocating its didactic purpose that “render[s] the experience of death more palatable to the visitor/tourist” (Sharpley and Stone 2009, 113), death tourism purports to fulfil many different functions ranging from a sacred pilgrimage to edutainment and kitschification.2 In “Reclaiming Auschwitz,” Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan Van Pelt (1994, 232–251) further problematise the ethical challenges that the reconstruction of memorial sites like Auschwitz pose: for example, how to represent the past after the event when some of the historical artefacts had been destroyed and can be viewed only through reconstruction. This reconstruction, on the one hand, stimulates what Hirsch (2012) refers to as “postmemory” (i.e., narratives constructed and deconstructed by generations far removed from the historical event), but it also re-enacts the brutality of cultural appropriation and extermination through the commodification of memory as a collective (and socially-constructed) affect. Arguably, postmemory can be viewed as a type of movement that consists of affective assemblages shuttling between the present and the past. Marianne Hirsch (2012) defines postmemory as the “relationship that the ‘generation after’ bears to the personal, collective, and cultural

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trauma of those who came before—the experience they ‘remember’ only by means of the stories, images, and behaviours among which they grew up” (5). Hirsch emphasises that “postmemory’s connection to the past is thus actually mediated not by recall but by imaginative investment, projection, and creation” (2012, 5). In other words, affect combined with imaginative forces drives the performative aspect of memory which is further complemented by the master narrative of tragedy and loss, pain and suffering that are thus mobilised as “embodied performances” (Jensen 2013, 99). Consequently, memory as performance takes on the form of affective mobility that simultaneously strives to bear witness to the brutality of genocidal events while it simultaneously “threaten[s] to cheapen the experience of trauma” (Clark 2014, 24). As Clark emphasises, for example, the formulaic architectural features of memorials, including their “immersive installations” and “giant tomb-like plinths,” play an important role in monumentalising, but also mobilising loss for educational, affective, but also consumer purposes (2014, 25–26). Not surprisingly, historians and mobility studies critics remain divided on the didactic function of memorials. While Clark concedes that death tourism also produces alternative spaces for social activism and resistance (2014, 31), others are concerned with the ways in which death tourism, generally associated with western mobility and privilege, reinforces the affective brutality of the (western) tourist gaze (Sion 2014, 4). The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) epitomises this rite by playing into the tourist gaze. As Marouf Hasian (2004) emphasises, the memorial museum confronts the visitor with its staged collectivity deprived of any individual voice or identity from the very beginning of the tour (70). From the simulated watch towers to the opening “Hall of Witnesses” where the visitors appropriate a tokenised identity card that bears “the name and a picture of an actual Holocaust victim” who never set foot in America (Hasian 2004, 72), the visitors make their way through many exhibits including the third-floor “Final Solution” area with tablets of Zyklon B that are highly depersonalised (79). In its emphasis on simulation that curtails and depersonalises memory, the USHMM inevitably blurs the line between a call to memory and kitsch. Re-packaging historical events and atrocities as a form of ecstatic mobility, the depersonalised simulation risks turning what Mark Pendleton (2014) refers to as “traumascapes” into “both a tourist destination and a site of pilgrimage” (85).

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And yet, these traumascapes also constitute dynamic sites of meaning, or what Lotman calls semiospheres, that participate in the performance of American identity and its complex politics. Carefully designed as semiotic spaces of meaning (but also condensed memory), they constitute “archives of public affect” and become “repositories of feelings and emotions” that communicate a whole range of American culture’s anxieties (Doss 2010, 13). These anxieties—racial, ethnic, religious, and gendered—are simultaneously exposed and contained within the consumer project of tragic tourism and the memorial mania that claims other people’s pain and grief as an intricate part of cultural belonging. The formulaic designs and structures of memorial museums, including their architecture and the experiential quality of their exhibitions, have been well documented and critiqued for their use of architectural and memorial tropes. These tropes play into the increasing consumerism and commodification of affect through often linear and tautological narrativisation, visual manipulation of tragic memory, and a careful organisation of photographs and other artefacts. Consequently, the memorial museums’ increasing ambiguity and dynamism align with Lotman’s semiotic system of what he calls “two consciousnesses” (1990, 36). While “one operates as a discrete system of coding and forming texts which come together like linear chains of linked segments,” the other renders the text fluid or “continuous” and “indeterminate” (Lotman 1990, 36, 44)—evoking the text as perceived and interpreted by the visitor-tourist. For Lotman, these consciousnesses intertwine, creating a concatenation of continuous redoubling. Echoing Lotman, Sodaro (2017) points to the built-in ambiguity of the new commemoration paradigm, where healing and atrocity coexist in a kind of dynamic tension that promises reconciliation and America’s national(ist) resilience (15). Accordingly, the USHMM strives to leverage several, often contradictory agendas as it aspires to serve as a transnational site of mourning and remembrance. However, no matter how much the USHMM panders to the transnational and global memory (for example, through translations and narrativisation in multiple languages), it does not escape its nationalist agenda, nor does it thwart the consumer spectacle that frames it. As Sodaro emphasises, the tourist/visitor proceeds to the “Last Chapter” where the unique American story of liberty and pursuit of happiness through immigration and hard work is celebrated (2017, 47). The intentionality of the affective impact to instruct future generations or to cultivate ethical commitment to democratic values

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inevitably remains occluded. The very structure of the postmemory narrative thus escapes the didactic intentions of the USHMM Council and submits to a more complex architecture of memory that competes with reproductions and experiential simulations that are “carefully designed as any Hollywood set” (Sodaro 2017, 47). Intentionality hence plays an important part in the memorialising process. Most memorial museums engage in an extended planning process during which the committees or juries contemplate how to represent tragic events or atrocities while engaging with the visitors’ emotions through specific memorial tropes and narrative formulas that mobilise the perceivers’/tourists’ gaze and affect. In other words, the memory narrative as represented by these sites is intentionally playing to the emotions of the visitors/tourists. To use Mukařovský’s concept of intentionality, what the memorial museums engage with is the perceiver/ tourist’s perspective. In his words, “intentionality in art can be therefore grasped fully only when we look at it from the perceiver’s standpoint” (Mukařovský 1978, 100). While the intentionality is evoked by the very structure of the memory narrative, it is inevitably dynamic and dependent on what the perceiver brings into the equation. As Mukařovský emphasises, “although the perceiver will always derive his feeling of intentionality and unintentionality from the organization of the work, this organization admits various interpretations in this respect” (1978, 118). To extend Mukařovský’s concept further, the perceiver’s affect, or the death tourist’s affect in this case, is anticipated by the narrative which then mobilises both the anticipated expectation of the tourist’s emotional reaction and the tourist’s gaze in order to evoke a particular feeling and interpretation of the event. In this context, the USHMM’s reproductions and simulations of history not only create and mobilise their own vocabulary of pain, but also inevitably generate their own omissions that elude the mantra of “Never Forget.” Similarly, the 9/11 Memorial Museum draws on the experiential tenor of death tourism while simultaneously striving to honour the “absence” of the victims of the 9/11 attacks and the victims of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Centre. Its monumental design, “Reflecting Absence,” by Michael Arad and the landscape architect firm Paul Walker and Partners, was inspired by Daniel Libeskind’s minimalist Jewish Museum in Berlin and Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, using similar architectural tropes like minimalist style, black granite, tall monoliths, reflecting pools, and walls of names to commemorate the

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victims (Doss 2010, 145). As Doss notes, “today’s minimalist styled memorials are not at all ambiguous but are carefully orchestrated narratives of select traumas aligned with notions of social reconciliation and national redemption” (2010, 131). In other words, their ambiguity dwells primarily in the ways in which they have mobilised other, similar memorial spaces through memorial tropes that speak to the formulaic rather than hyperdynamic nature of their design, which is primarily intended to engage with the visitors’ emotions rather than their knowledge of history. The politics of affect thus shapes the very organisation and telling of the history, but also its interpretation. In Mukařovský’s terms, the politics of intentionality becomes a binding mechanism that “strives toward the resolution of the contradictions and tensions among [the narrative’s/story’s] individual parts and components, thereby giving each of them a specific relation to the others and all of them together a unified meaning” (1978, 96). Mukařovský aligns intentionality with “semantic energy” (1978, 96)3—in other words, with a mobilisation of meaning that depends on the perceiver’s/tourist’s affect and interpretation of the events that they gauge from the very structure of the art work or, in this context, the Memorial Museum’s representation of events. Not surprisingly, the building and operating costs of the Memorial Museum alone have generated much controversy, as has its grandiose design of cascading water, reflecting pools, and American flags honouring the victims. Recordings of individual voices blend with the sombre voices of the visitors, fragmented by images and artwork that frame the “9/11 story.” Contrasting the affective brutality of death tourism are the stories of the artefacts housed in the 9/11 Memorial Museum. As Michael Shulan says, artefacts like the “two huge sections of structural steel that were part of the façade of the North Tower…tell complex and often surprising stories” (2013, 30). These stories connote the complexity of the event by taking on a semiotic life, where they speak to both America’s national resilience but also to its vulnerability, as the steel tortured by fire and the collapse of the buildings is meant to suggest. But what these stories omit to tell, however, is the kind of affective impact the pursuit of the Memorial Museum has had on the families of the survivors like Alissa Torres, for example, who in her graphic memoir, American Widow, bemoans the commercialisation of the 9/11 memories and the public appropriation of the families’ grief as a collective nationalist and nationalising project. While American memorials cannot seem to escape the burden and brutality of their political agenda, contemporary

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American literature mobilises a different approach to bearing witness by engaging rather than controlling the multidimensional consciousnesses or semiospheres of postmemory. In the following section, I turn to the literary texts by Shalom Auslander, Alissa Torres, and Amy Waldman to examine the ways in which literature can affect a “mobility turn” that confronts the tourist gaze through a parodic and ironic rendering of historical truth as fiction and fiction as plural history.

Challenging Affective Brutalities of American Nationalism: Literary Narratives as Living Monuments Contemporary American literature has increasingly questioned the consumer ethics of America’s memorial culture. Shalom Auslander’s Hope: A Tragedy, Alissa Torres’s American Widow, and Amy Waldman’s The Submission all ponder the increasing mobilisation of commemoration as a means of affirming the performance of American cultural identity. Similar to memorial museums, literary texts often respond to historical events and their “mnemonic contexts” (Erll 2011, 194). Drawing on Lotman, Erll states that “cultural memory rests on narrative processes” (2011, 173), but it also “fills a niche in memory culture, because…it is characterised by its ability—and indeed tendency—to refer to the forgotten and repressed as well as the unnoticed, unconscious, and unintentional aspects of the dealings with the past” (2011, 153). The narrative process and the reader/tourist move, so to speak; they are not static but in “a relationship of mutual activation,” as Lotman contends (1990, 65). This activation is crucial to the ways in which affect is mobilised across different contexts. While literary narratives by Auslander, Torres, and Waldman can be described as monuments to memory in that they engage with historical events, their tendency is to disrupt rather than enforce the notion of history as truth. Unlike the USHMM or the 9/11 Memorial Museum, they do not purport to serve a conciliatory function, nor do they promise any kind of healing even though their engagement with historical atrocities can be viewed as such. In other words, their intentionality is quite different. What they bring to the surface is the intertextual quality of history and fiction. While the intention of memorial monuments is to endorse history as an authoritative (and linear) narrative, the literary works as “monuments to memory” of Auslander, Torres, and Waldman question

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the very authority of history and historical narrative by parodying or ­subverting the formulaic. In their employment of irony and parody, they bring to light the uncanny of the narrative process. As such, they can be aligned with Linda Hutcheon’s concept of “historiographic metafiction,” which Hutcheon defines as “a kind of seriously ironic parody that effects both aims” where “the intertexts of history and fiction take on parallel (though not equal) status in the parodic reworking of the textual past of both the ‘world’ and literature” (1989, 4). Hutcheon associates historiographic metafiction with the postmodern emphasis on disrupting linearity and illusions of veracity through narrative, temporal, and spatial superimposition (1989, 4). Accordingly, the novels by Auslander, Torres, and Waldman variously engage with the instability of the historical process as caught up in postmemory’s lacunae, revealing that “narrativised history, like fiction, reshapes any material (in this case, the past) in the light of present issues, and this interpretive process is precisely what this kind of historiographic metafiction calls to our attention” (Hutcheon 1989, 22). Consequently, it can be said that historiographic metafiction deals primarily with the concept of postmemory as a pastiche of fictional, historical, and metafictional; in other words, it emphasises that historical events are subject to narrative processes that engage with various affective, cultural, collective, and individual aspects of memory. Auslander’s Hope: A Tragedy explores contemporary American culture’s obsession with memory and commemoration through the novel’s protagonist, Solomon Kugel, and his family—notably, his mother who, born and raised in the U.S., reinvents herself as a resident expert on the Holocaust. In her desperate desire to instruct her family about the Holocaust atrocities, Kugel’s Mother sets out to take her family history into the realm of the ecstatic. As Judith Butler explains, “to be ec-static means, literally, to be outside oneself, and thus can have several meanings: to be transported beyond oneself by passion, but also to be beside oneself with rage or grief” (2009, 24). Transported by her life’s disappointments, Kugel’s mother displaces her personal grief of having been abandoned by her husband (who, as it turns out, committed suicide) and having to raise her children by herself to the painful history of her people. However, her engagement with the “pain of others,” to use Susan Sontag’s words (2003, 1), becomes an obsession, if not agony turned ecstasy. To her son’s dismay, she sets out to collect a scrapbook for her grandson, Jonah, collating images of her idyllic childhood in Brooklyn and visits to “some well-manicured Catskill resort” with “a news

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photograph of prisoners at Buchenwald, …a collage of Kristallnacht, corpse piles at Dachau, mass graves at Auschwitz until these terrifying images of history’s tragic victims equaled, and soon outnumbered, the photographs of any actual Kugels” (Auslander 2012, 106). From anthropomorphising objects to appropriating others’ pain, Kugel’s mother takes on the role of a memory tourist whose gaze mobilises tragedy as a defence mechanism against pain and suffering. Kugel’s Mother’s notorious mobilisation of memory as an affective economy of sorts echoes John Urry’s concept of the tourist as a “contemporary pilgrim, seeking authenticity in other ‘times’ and other ‘places’” (2007, 9). Her ecstatic collating and mobilising of p ­ ostmemory is inevitably a form of monumentalisation, but also a form of embodied performance that aestheticises history as consumption. As Marianne Hirsch suggests, “postmemorial work…strives to reactivate and re-embody more distant political and cultural memorial structures by re-investing them with resonant individual and familial forms of mediation and aesthetic expression” (2012, 38). Hirsch here speaks to the liminality of memory but also its mobility across affiliative spaces of recall and forgetting, initiated by superimposition and projection of individual and collective histories. Kugel’s Mother generates her family album by a similar juxtaposition and superimposition of images, newspaper clippings, survivors’ memories, and collective history. Furthermore, these superimpositions are juxtaposed with her own rather idyllic childhood in Brooklyn and the consumer idealism of American culture to which she subscribes in her persistent attempt to identify with and appropriate the pain/plight of others as a means of escaping her own traumatic experiences and unresolved grief. Kugel bemoans her “editorializing” (Auslander 2012, 106), suggesting that her scrapbooking of traumascapes might not be the best way of educating her grandson. To dissuade her, Kugel “had appealed, as he often did, to her emotions” since “[r]eason rarely worked with Mother” (Auslander 2012, 107). As Kugel puts it, Mother’s editorialising and preoccupation with images is not so much driven by the visual, but rather by emotions that move. In other words, while Mother’s scrapbooking is a matter of visualising and monumentalising history, the primary driver of her obsession is affect. While Urry and Larsen argue that “the organising sense in tourism is visual” (2011, 18), Auslander reveals that affect and emotional engagement with traumatic events or tragedy, or to put it differently, the ecstasy of postmemory, might be a new form of tourism whereby

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tragedies are re-mobilised and re-purposed for the sake of nostalgic ­worship and a sense of renewal. Auslander’s novel foregrounds this point in the concentration camp scene, when Kugel’s mother takes Solomon to Sachsenhausen to provide an “education” and to awaken him from his “comfortable American life” (Auslander 2012, 175). Before setting out to visit the camp, Mother questions the Berlin Central Train Station concierge about the authenticity of the camp and its death count. When the concierge reassures her that “it’s very disturbing” and that “very many people” died there (Auslander 2012, 175), she boards the train, eager to begin the experiential tour. Auslander’s use of irony and parodic relief allows the reader to contemplate the consumer and affective tenets of death tourism as having multiple and contradictory functions. On the one hand, death tourism serves as a means of re-visioning memory through bearing witness. On the other hand, as exemplified in Kugel’s Mother’s desperate attempt to identify the gas chambers and crematoria so that she can take a picture of Kugel “stand[ing] in front of the oven” (Auslander 2012, 177),4 it is an act of authentication. However, in its emphasis on reconstructing postmemory as an evidentiary narrative, death tourism cannot escape ­ re-inscribing some of the very atrocities it exhibits, becoming an act where history turns into a souvenir and where the tourist/pilgrim worships at the shrine of history’s unconscious. Indicting what Kugel calls sarcastically “this cheap [mass] pseudo-mourning” (Auslander 2012, 207), Auslander challenges the increasing obfuscation of memory via memorial sites that cannot entirely escape participating in the ecstatic mobilisation of affective brutality which they attempt to denounce. Here, Auslander echoes Mukařovský’s notion of intentionality as “the force which binds together individual parts and components of a work into the unity that gives the work its meaning” (1978, 96). Further in this direction, one of the primary functions of memorial museums is to present history in the way that the perceiver/tourist/ visitor is affected in a distinct way and thus bound to a particular kind of interpretation. For example, when the USHMM committee debated the overall structure of the exhibition, the conceptual design was to speak to the importance of “bearing witness to the awesome realities of the Holocaust” (Bernard-Donals 2016, 34). As Bernard-Donals notes, “the interior geography of the museum reflects the choices of the stories to be told [sic] how it creates, in the visitor, not just an intellectual but also a bodily response to the Holocaust” (2016, 27). Furthermore,

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according to Bernard-Donals, “affect is autonomous in that it resists ­closure” (2016, 162): it travels and moves. However, how and/or who is being moved is an important question here. While the memorial museums are increasingly dynamic (rather than static) sites of didactic, artistic, aesthetic, historical, and emotional functions where tourists/visitors are moved by and move memory, historiographic metafictional literature provides a different kind of (more) fluid memorial that mobilises and disrupts the very tropes and commemorative structures upon which memorial museums depend. Both types of texts/monuments, however, reveal the heterogeneity of the semiotic worlds they depict. This heterogeneity can be further extended to the events of 9/11— events that, like the post-Holocaust memory, continue to be subjected to a constant dramatic replay and fetishisation through televised anniversaries, memorialisation, and the 9/11 Memorial Museum tours. However, to many survivor families, the very nature of “walking tours” has become an unwelcome reminder of the media blitz that provided the live coverage of the day, but also of the government’s appropriation of their individual mourning as a public and national event. Alissa Torres, one of the many widows of 9/11, grapples with the affective brutality of the post9/11 zeitgeist in her graphic memoir, American Widow (2008), illustrated by Sungyoon Choi. On the morning of September 11th, Torres, seven and a half months pregnant, loses her husband to the World Trade Center (WTC) terrorist attacks. In American Widow, Torres strives to set the record straight by creating her own “graphic” family album of the event. Exposing the irony of her personal loss being overshadowed by the media frenzy, she documents the ways in which the memorial mania (initiated by the media and framed by the government) has pitted affective fields of the resilient nation against the losses of the not-so-resilient individual/s. Echoing Auslander’s concerns about the affective mobilisation of memory, Torres’s novel/memoir interrogates the commodification of 9/11 as a semiotic event generating its own politics of affect and collective grief: the society’s emphasis on healing and “rebuilding” by erecting an expensive Memorial-Museum at the site where her husband and many other 9/11 victims perished, and where eager tourists now take selfies to mark the tragic occasion. Deliberately using the medium of a graphic novel, American Widow critiques the replay of the image-driven prescription of public mourning as an affect-driven form of national virility and survival in the face of a great American tragedy. By using monochrome

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tones of blue, white, black, and grey to frame her story, Torres strives to write back to the visual theatrics and affective brutality underpinning the media’s framing of the event. The novel then proceeds with an explosion of visual and textual fragments announcing that the World Trade Centre has been hit. At the centre of the opening chapter is the well-known televised image of the “breaking news” and the smoke coming out of the towers. The image is surrounded by statements: “The World Trade Centre was just hit by a plane! Turn on your TV” in several languages (Torres 2008, 5). Echoing the ways in which the media memorialised the event from the moment it unfolded, Torres’s novel treats 9/11 as an ever-unfolding semiotic “text within the text” whose “semiological space is filled with the freely moving fragments of a variety of structures,” to use Lotman’s words (2009, 114). Juxtaposing the textual and visual realms, Torres not only disrupts the master narrative of the 9/11 grieving nation, but also draws attention to the ways in which its collective memory-in-the making intruded into the affective space of the victims’ families. Torres notes how the government’s assistance to the survivors and victims’ families contributed to the immediate framing of the event as a kind of mobile memorial to the American resilience. She writes: “After the towers collapsed, I would have been happy to see the hordes of volunteer therapists straight-jacketed and sedated so that they couldn’t inflict any more harm on us” (Torres 2008, 90). Like Torres, Judith Butler has commented on the government’s immediate attempt to guide and control the nation’s and individuals’ mourning process through the regulation of imagery and narratives surrounding the event (2009, 38). Not only did Bush’s government “wor[k] on the field of perception,” but it also shaped “more generally, [on] the field of representability, in order to control affect—in anticipation of the way affect is not only structured by interpretation, but structures interpretation as well” (Butler 2009, 72). Torres refers to this framing of interpretation in her encounters with volunteer therapists, the Red Cross, or the Feinberg’s scheme and his controversial “economic chart” that “he’d used to calculate our loved ones’ value” (Torres 2008, 135). But her novel also satirises the almost immediate need for building a memorial at the Ground Zero site. Running parallel to the “memorial mania” and its “structur[ing] of public feeling” (Doss 2010, 19) was the dark reality of trucks transporting the WTC remains to Fresh Kills, a former landfill, which was

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approved to be reopened by the New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Governor Pataki (Shaming 2014, 145). Torres depicts the horror of families searching for their loved ones’ remains. Instead of being able to find or locate a body, most were confronted by computerised data from “Mass Disaster Analysis Lab”—fragments of body parts and personal objects (Torres 2008, 164). Noting the surreal worlds in which the families and the rest of the nation co-existed, Torres refers to the “debris… coming in…piled thirty, forty feet high” and the families’ immediate subjection to the government budgets and protocols (Torres 2008, 165). The graphics and the text create a world of perpetual contradictions where the individual and the collective contrast and blend, contributing to the brutality of the event by failing to demarcate and respect the individuation of the personal experience. When analysing the graphic novel as a multimedial genre, Lotmans’s (2004) notion of the dualistic character of the semiotic nature of the artistic text proves particularly useful. Lotman describes this duality as follows: “on the one hand, the text simulates reality, suggesting it has an existence independent of its author, …. On the other hand, it constantly reminds us that it is someone’s creation and that it means something” (2004, 73). The graphic novel allows Torres to create a space where two competing realities can be presented simultaneously and where the individual and state collide yet again in a kind of brutal mobilisation of affect that is (to be) persistently suppressed by the external world. Viewed in this context, Torres’s novel exposes the different kind of mobilities surrounding 9/11: the ways in which grief moved from the individuals to the nation and from the nation to the individuals in a constant relay of emotion that called for reconciliation, but that also inevitably mobilised its own forms of violence, or what I call “affective brutalities.” Throughout the novel, Torres bemoans the postmemory glitz of 9/11 remembrance footage and endless emphasis on rebuilding. Instead, she reveals how the grief was mobilised into a rebuilding of the Ground Zero as a “new world” (Torres 2008, 171). An image from a newspaper dated July 21, 2002, refers to the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation’s vow to “build a new world” (Torres 2008, 171). The newspaper clipping is purposely anonymous, allowing the reader to grasp the emphasis on simulation and constructed nature of the news. Juxtaposing the government’s memorialisation efforts as reducing 9/11 to a “monolithic narrative” (Sodaro 2017, 143) with her own fragmented memories of the event and its emotional impact, Torres’s novel

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draws attention to the rupture that the loss of her husband presents while the public memorialisation of 9/11 focused on representing “absence” over “loss” (Doss 2010, 145). The end of her novel thus marks her loss by her visible absence from the anniversary events as she takes her son to Hawaii to rupture the narrative that does not belong to her. While Torres’s novel problematises the immediate memorialisation of 9/11, Amy Waldman’s The Submission (2011) examines the complex politics surrounding the planning and building of the 9/11 Memorial Museum through Mohammed Khan, a Muslim American architect who submits his design to the jury and wins. Khan’s winning, however, is a Pyrrhic victory at best as his racial and religious background challenges America’s anxieties about race and religion, and, ultimately, American culture’s fear of the other as a potential (terrorist) threat. Waldman’s novel explores this fear by delving into the process of building the 9/11 Memorial Museum as a kind of “security narrative” against “fears of terrorism’s looming threat to self and nation” (Doss 2010, 147). Re-visioning the events surrounding the Memorial Museum’s planning, Waldman sets out to explore the politics of affect as mobilised by the jury’s individual agendas and diverging interests. In contrast to Claire, a 9/11 widow, stands Ariana Montagu’s strong vision of the memorial museum as a “national symbol, a historical signifier” (Waldman 2011, 5). Echoing some of the concerns and debates of the 9/11 memorial jury which included the well-known ­architect-designer of the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial, Maya Lin, the historian James Young, as well as the former director of the USHMM, Alice Greenwald, the novel echoes the complex politics of the decision-making process, exploring how the mobility of affect has played an important part in the very design of the Memorial Museum’s “story.” Just as the 9/11 Memorial Museum jury debated whether the “Garden of Lights,” “Memorial Cloud,” or “Reflecting Absence” designs “addressed some of the jury’s key concerns” (Blais and Rasic 2011, 6), the fictional jury of Waldman’s novel ponders the question of memorialisation by striving to address the call for the nation’s coming together and by simultaneously acknowledging the complexities of individual grief that is also racialised and gendered. Several key concerns arise: first of all, how to build a memorial that is a national symbol of resilience; second, how to ascertain that it acts as a communal space of remembrance; and third, that it also respects and provides space for the individual grieving process of victims’ families. Once again, intentionality becomes the binding mechanism

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of the story the nation presumes to tell. Waldman explores this process through the contrasting visions of Ariana Montagu and Claire Burwell, but also through the terrorist versus the nation binary that is re-enacted through the public’s controversial responses to the winning design of Mohammad Khan. In its persistent challenging and movement of affective boundaries, Lotman’s notion of the semiotic space can once again enrich our understanding of the novel’s engagement with what Sara Ahmed calls “affective politics of fear” and its reliance on moving emotion in a particular direction: that of the “could-be-ness” of a threat (2004, 79). This threat, as Ahmed notes, “allows the restriction on the mobility of those bodies that are read as associated with terrorism: Islam, Arab, Asian, East, and so on” (2004, 79). Fear establishes an “us” versus “them” dynamic, but it also creates a figurative “border between self and other” (Ahmed 2004, 67). Similarly, Lotman’s notion of the boundary sets up a division between the internal and external space (1990, 129). He writes: “The boundary is a mechanism for translating texts of an alien semiotics into ‘our’ language, it is the place where what is ‘external’ is transformed into what is ‘internal’” (1990, 137). In Waldman’s text, the jury represents the boundary between the external and internal, the national and individual interests. This boundary is exemplified by Claire, the 9/11 widow who represents the interests of the victims’ families, and by Ariana, who stands for the external context: the nation. Claire “loathe[s] the Void, the other finalist, Ariana’s favourite, and Claire was sure the other families would, too. …It mimicked the Vietnam Veterans Memorial but, to Claire, missed the point” (Waldman 2011, 5). Ariana, on the other hand, finds Claire’s choice too alien. She says, “gardens aren’t our vernacular. We have parks. Formal gardens aren’t our lineage” (Waldman 2011, 5). When Claire interjects that the families need to find some peace amidst the pain, Ariana strongly objects: “I’m sorry, but a memorial isn’t a graveyard. It’s a national symbol, … a way to make sure anyone who visits—no matter how attenuated their link in time or geography to the attack—understands how it felt, what it meant” (6). Embodying the nation’s vision for the memorial, Ariana sees the void as a marker of absence that “is visceral, angry, dark, [and] raw” (6). Her concern with appealing to a global population echoes the 9/11 planning committee’s intentionality: their concern with the representation of the “story following a controlled path” that would simultaneously serve as a “political legitimation” and reaffirm “experiential tactics” (Sodaro 2017, 148,

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176). Similarly, in Waldman’s novel, the jury’s vision of the memorial design is invested in finding a way to translate the grief of the victims’ families and the nation’s call for resilience into a common language, whereby the unrepresentable will be represented not as a loss, but rather as an absence—a delicate, if not impossible, task. The contrast between Ariana Montagu’s insistence on the void design as more representative of the 9/11 event than Claire Burwell’s preference for a “walled square garden, guided by vigorous geometry” (Waldman 2011, 4), reflecting the families’ grief, introduces the duality of the national and individual interests, but also the duality of movement: the mobility of affect as effected by the internal and external relations. Mohammad Khan, as a Muslim American, whose design speaks to the victims’ families, becomes caught in the liminal space of this duality as a “could-be” terrorist, to echo Ahmed’s words, and as a racial other. The jury’s reaction to the winner’s name is indicative of the post-9/11 Islamophobia. When Wilner, one of the members of the jury, reveals the winner has a Muslim name, the jury responds: “Jesus Fucking Christ! It’s a goddamn Muslim!” while another member of the jury, a historian, cautions: “History makes its own truths, new truths. It cannot be unwritten, we must acknowledge….” (Waldman 2011, 23). Consequently, memorialisation—political, national, individual, architectural, or racial— becomes an important site of boundary-making in the novel. By the end of the novel, Khan’s design submission requires that he submits to the public demand for the memorial that is “American” and that is stripped of any foreign references—in other words, that the memorial translates America’s collective grief into a common (master) language. The emphasis on constructing a particular semiotic system that would highlight affect as a particular mobility, as a mobility of a resilient nation, pervades Waldman’s metafictional critique of the politics surrounding the planning, building, and opening of the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York. As Doss has noted in her study of American culture’s memorial mania, the 9/11 Memorial Museum was designed as a “security narrativ[e]” allaying the fear of terrorism through “design elements and texture references that stress security, stability, and heroism” (2010, 29). Sodaro further points to the ways in which “the chronomania of the museum and its role as a tourist site simplify the complexity of 9/11 in a way that reproduces a Manichean narrative of good and evil in the world today” (2017, 130). As mentioned in the opening paragraphs of this chapter, the narrative of 9/11 submits to a linear chronological telling of

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events. In spite of the cacophony of voices which are intended to ­signify diversity and complexity in the linear retelling of events, the undocumented remain an (un)reflected absence in the “Reflecting Absence” design, with the perpetrators “at the knee level” (Sodaro 2017, 151). As Sodaro notes, “it was clearly a conscious, if awkward decision, to not only morally and politically but also physically ensure that their status in the narrative and displays in the museum is lower than that of victims, survivors, and rescuers” (2017, 151). While the 9/11 Memorial Museum fails to represent the many “uncomfortable omissions” (Sodaro 2017, 151), Waldman’s novel brings to light some of the gaps of history as represented by the memorial museum and its design. As critics have emphasised, the 9/11 Memorial Museum design and building process revealed that, like violence, mourning and its monumentalisation have their own affective politics. Echoing the challenges of the 2003 design competition and Michael Arad’s “Reflecting Absence” design that took years to materialise—the jury received 5201 submissions from all over the world (63 nations participated),5 Waldman’s novel raises questions about who has the right to design the 9/11 memorial, bringing to the surface America’s anxieties about racial, ethnic, and religious difference. In the novel, Waldman exposes the ethical complexities surrounding the racialisation of the memorial mania of 9/11. The novel points to the ways in which the process of memorialising and monumentalising loss has been shaped by national, as well as racialised discourses of public grief that have censored representation and promoted a particular type of remembrance whereby absence has been mobilised through the very nature of the architectural design: in this case, a garden-like enclosure signifying containment and peace, surrounded by water and trees. In The Submission, however, this figure of American pastoralism is hardly a space of inclusion. Instead, it turns into a metaphorical site of cultural, racial, and religious warfare that privileges certain memories and losses over others. Waldman’s novel rebukes the elision that many of the 9/11 victims were of diverse racial, cultural, and religious backgrounds, including illegal immigrants. When viewed in this context, contemporary America’s mobilisation of memory and its inevitable experiential counterpart, death tourism, raise ethical questions about memorialisation and its didactic function, revealing that the how and who of re-telling and mobilising the story of loss matters.

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The Ecstatic Mobility of Affective Brutality: A New Paradigm? While memorial museums represent complex semiospheres, their emphasis on a chronological retelling of atrocities and tragic events often circumvent their intentionality to thwart the consumer ethic through experiential learning and emotional responses. Contemporary American historiographic metafiction, on the other hand, provides more opportunities for opening up the semiotic space to further rupture and fragmentation. Novels by Auslander, Torres, and Waldman strive to shift the “boundary between intentionality and unintentionality,” to use Mukařovský’s words, provoking a sense of unexpected rupture and “aesthetic displeasure” (1978, 119, 126). In this, they echo Linda Hutcheon’s (1989) argument that historiographic metafiction tends to challenge the stability of the binary between history and fiction. Ann Rigney, for instance, suggests that such fiction adopts a “non-linear approach to the evolution of cultural memory” whereby the novel takes on a form of a textual or “portable monument[t]” (2004, 391). This chapter has taken this argument further by exploring contemporary America’s “mobility turn” in relation to the complex politics of affect of contemporary American culture’s ecstasy of postmemory and its ultimate re-mobilisation of the tragic as a form of affective brutality through death tourism that relies on problematic omissions of the tragic and the affective. Death tourism as a multi-million-dollar industry thrives on collective witnessing and mobilisation of emotion; its architecture is highly formulaic, presenting memory in its ecstatic beyond-ness. In John Urry’s words, these “places of death are routinely transformed into places of visitors” who are in a privileged position to bear witness on their own terms (2007, 267). As this chapter has argued, memory is not only a form of mobility, but also an embodied performance that lives on in and through memorials and texts as physical and figurative monuments to the past that are persistently mobilised and on the move. Derived from a combination of affective forces and intensities, past and present memories, texts, and visual mementos that are (re)moved from the atrocity by time and space, p ­ ostmemory and, by extension, death tourism construct and depend on their own formulaic narratives of what Sontag calls a “miracle of survival” that inverts brutality into a positive affect (Sontag 2003, 87).6 While critics like Johanna Hartelius see death tourism as playing an active role in “mediating trauma” and providing education through souvenirs and memorial architecture as a “compelling alternative” to bearing witness (2013, 16),

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this chapter has called for a more in-depth understanding of the complex relationship that memory and the affective politics of memorialisation play in mobilising national and international master narratives and their affective brutalities as new, intentionally unintentional mobilities.

Notes 1. For further details, see Radia (2016, 1–14). 2. Philip R. Stone, for example, suggests that “dark tourism may provide new spaces in which immorality [and brutality are] not only (re)presented for contemporary consumption, but also in which morality is communicated, reconfigured, and revitalized” (2009, 184). See Sharpley and Stone (2009, 167–185). See also John Beech in Sharpley and Stone (2009, 207–223). Laurie Beth Clark and Lindsey A. Freeman remain skeptical about the educational and transformational role of war, genocide, and other memorial sites. See Laurie Beth Clark (2014) and Lindsey A. Freeman (2014). 3. For an intriguing reading of affect, intentionality, and theatre performance, see Yana Meerzon (2014). 4.  It is important to note that Sachsenhausen, 35  km from Berlin, Germany, was initially a prison of war camp (1936). The gas chamber in Sachsenhausen was relatively small, built in 1943. See Memorial and Museum Sachsenhausen at www.stiffung-bg.d.gums/en. Similarly, BergenBelsen was a prisoner of war camp; later an exchange camp. The main extermination camps were not in Germany, but in the east (AuschwitzBirkenau; Treblinka, Majdanek, and Chelmno, with Teresinstadt being a “holding camp”). For more details, see Clark (2014). 5.  For more details, see Shaming (2014). For further details about the 9/11 Memorial-Museum website at www.911memorial.org. The submissions included Israel (34), India (6), and Egypt (5). The winning design, “Reflecting Absence,” was designed by Michael Arad (Israeli-American) and Peter Walker. The design was supported by Maya Lin, the designer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. Also see, the “World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition” at www.wtcsitememorial.org. 6. Sontag (2003, 87).

References 9/11 Memorial. National September 11 Memorial Museum. Last modified 2018. http://www.911memorial.org. Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The Culture of Emotional Politics. New York: Routledge. Anderson, Ben. 2010. “Modulating the Excess of Affect: Morale in a State of ‘Total War.’” In The Affect Theory: A Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg and

110  P. RADIA Gregory J. Seigworth, 161–185. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum. Last modified 2018. http://www. auschwitz.org. Auslander, Shalom. 2012. Hope: A Tragedy. New York: Picador. Beech, John. 2009. “Genocide Tourism.” In The Darker Side of Travel: The Theory and Practice of Dark Tourism, edited by Richard Sharpley and Philip R. Stone, 207–223. Bristol: Channel View Publications. Bernard-Donals, Michael. 2016. Figures of Memory: The Rhetoric of Displacement at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. New York: SUNY. Blais, Allison, and Lynn Rasic. 2011. A Place of Remembrance: Official Book of the September 11 Memorial. New York: National Geographic. Butler, Judith. 2009. Frames of War: When Life Is Grievable. London: Verso. Clark, Laurie Beth. 2014. “Ethical Spaces: Ethics and Propriety in Trauma Tourism.” In Death Tourism: Disaster Sites as Recreational Landscape, edited by Brigitte Sion, 9–35. London: Seagull. Clough, Patricia T. 2010. “The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia, and Bodies.” In The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, 206–228. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Clough, Patricia T., and Jean Halley, eds. 2007. The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Doss, Erica. 2010. Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dwork, Deborah, and Jan Van Pelt. 1994. “Reclaiming Auschwitz.” In Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory, edited by Geoffrey Hartman, 232–251. New York: Blackwell. Erll, Astrid. 2011. Memory in Culture. London: Palgrave. Freeman, Lindsey A. 2014. “The Manhattan Project Time Machine: Atomic Tourism in Dave Ridge, Tennessee.” In Death Tourism: Disaster Sites as Recreational Landscape, edited by Brigitte Sion, 54–74. London: Seagull. Gregg, Melissa, and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds. 2010. The Affect Theory Reader. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Hannam, Kevin, Mary Mostafaneshad, and Jillian Rickly, eds. 2016. Event Mobilities: Politics, Place, and Performance. New York: Routledge. Hartelius, Johanna. 2013. ‘Remember-Signs’: Concentration Camp Souvenirs and the Mediation of Trauma. Culture, Theory, and Critique 54 (1): 1–18. Hasian, Marouf, Jr. 2004. “Remembering and Forgetting the ‘Final Solution’: A Rhetorical Pilgrimage Through the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 21 (1): 64–92. Hirsch, Marianne. 2012. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and the Visual Culture After the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Hutcheon, Linda. 1989. “Historiographic Metafiction: Parody and the Intertextuality of History.” In Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction, edited by Patrick O’Donnell and Robert Con Davis, 3–32. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Jensen, Ole B. 2013. Staging Mobilities. New York: Routledge. Lotman, Yuri M. 1990. Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture. Translated by Ann Shukman. London: I.B. Tauris. Lotman, Juri. 2009. Culture and Explosion, edited by Marina Grishakova. Translated by Wilma Clark. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Massumi, Brian. 2010. “The Future Birth of the Affective Turn: The Political Ontology of Threat.” In The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, 52–70. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Meerzon, Yana. 2014. “Between Intentionality and Affect: On Jan Mukařovský’s Theory of Reception.” Theatralia 17 (2): 24–40. Mukařovský, Jan. 1978. Structure, Sign, and Function: Selected Essays by Jan Mukařovský. Translated and edited by John Burbank and Peter Steiner. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Pendleton, Mark. 2014. “Theme Parks and Station Plaques: Memory, Tourism, and Forgetting in Post-Aum Japan.” In Death Tourism: Disaster Sites as Recreational Landscape, edited by Brigitte Sion, 75–96. London: Seagull. Radia, Pavlina. 2016. Ecstatic Consumption: The Spectacle of Global Dystopia in Contemporary American Literature. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Rigney, Ann. 2004. “Portable Monuments: Literature, Culture, Memory, and the Case of Jeanie Deans.” Poetics Today 25 (2): 361–396. Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum. Last modified 2018. http://www. stiftung-bg.d.gums/en. Shaming, Mark. 2014. “From Evidence to Relic to Artefact: Curating in the Aftermath of 11 September 2001.” In Death Tourism: Disaster Sites as Recreational Landscape, edited by Brigitte Sion, 139–166. London: Seagull. Sharpley, Richard, and Philip R. Stone, eds. 2009. The Darker Side of Tourism: The Theory and Practice of Dark Tourism. Bristol: Channel View Publications. Shulan, Michael. 2013. “Impact Steel: The Force of Violence.” In The Stories They Tell: Artifacts from the National September 11 Memorial Museum, edited by Clifford Chanin and Alice M. Greenwald. New York: Skira Rizzoli. Sion, Brigitte, ed. 2014. Death Tourism: Disaster Sites as Recreational Landscape. London: Seagull. Sodaro, Amy. 2017. Exhibiting Atrocity: Memorial Museums and the Politics of Past Violence. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers. Sontag, Susan. 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador.

112  P. RADIA Stone, Philip R. 2009. “‘It’s a Bloody Guide’: Fun, Fear and a Lighter Side of Dark Tourism at the Dungeon Visitor Attractions, UK.” In The Darker Side of Tourism: The Theory and Practice of Dark Tourism, edited by Richard Sharpley and Philip R. Stone, 167–185. Bristol: Channel View Publications. Torres, Alissa. 2008. American Widow. New York: Villard. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Museum Press Kit. Last Modified 2018. https://www.ushmm.org/information/press/press-kits/ united-states-holocaust-memorial-museum-press-kit/. Urry, John. 2007. Mobilities. London: Polity Press. Urry, John, and Jonas Larsen. 2011. The Tourist Gaze 3.0. London: Sage. Waldman, Amy. 2011. The Submission. New York: Picador.

PART II

Embodied Subjectivities

CHAPTER 5

Mobility, Attentiveness and Sympathy in E. M. Forster’s Howards End Nour Dakkak

The role of the body in human perception and cognition is constantly celebrated in E. M. Forster’s fiction. After more than a decade of the publication of his last novel, Forster, in his renowned essay “What I believe” (1938), explains how bodies are fundamental to the shaping of human identities and values: I believe in aristocracy […] Not an aristocracy of power, based upon rank and influence, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding between them when they meet. […] I do not feel that my aristocrats are a real aristocracy if they thwart their bodies, since bodies are the instruments through which we register and enjoy the world. (Forster 1972, 70–71)

Forster’s interest in the human body is crystallised in the previous passage which makes a strong link between bodily perception and human values that promote sympathy and personal relations. Although it may be

N. Dakkak (*)  Arab Open University, Ardiya, Kuwait © The Author(s) 2019 M. Aguiar et al. (eds.), Mobilities, Literature, Culture, Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27072-8_5

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appealing to associate Forster’s celebration of the human body with his repressed homosexuality, I argue in this chapter that the careful depiction of bodily perception in movement in Howards End (1910) encourages a reading that attends to the role of modern mobilities in changing the quality of human perception and attentiveness in the early twentieth century. The study of the effects of transport technologies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has mostly resorted to modernist literature as creative texts that articulate the anxieties of the human body in the modern world (Kern 1983; Seltzer 1992; Armstrong 1998). Seminal works emphasised the significance of changed mobilities to the culture of that period, but it is not until the turn of the twenty-first century that the experience of space through perception and performance has been attended to in detail (Danius 2002; O’Neill and Hatt 2010; Garrington 2013; Pearce 2016), specifically in the way the changed experience of mobility is integrated in human cognition as well as the aesthetic production of literary texts. Indeed, although earlier Forster criticism observed the depiction of mobility in Howards End by drawing attention to the different images of motoring and railway travel (Page 1993; Jameson 1990; Thacker 2000; Bradshaw 2007), such readings were solely seeking to understand Forster’s complex attitude to modernity through analysing the negative effects of the modern modes of transport on rural environments. Instead of studying the role of transport technology independent from human experience, I argue in what follows that the depiction of mobility in Howards End is best understood through the way it affects the human body and the way people encounter the world. Analysing the portrayal of embodied mobilities reveals the complex relationship between movement, attentiveness and sympathy. In Howards End, the experience of modernity transforms people’s everyday-life temporalities and the quality of their spatial and social interactions in a way that enables attending to other, slower embodied interactions that may have been overlooked previously. Ostensibly, Howards End appears as a novel that corroborates the late twentieth-century philosophies espoused by Jean Baudrillard (2010) and Paul Virilio (2008) which propose that the speed of modern transport not only detaches humans from the materiality of their surroundings, but also “has the potential to deliver a transcendental separation of the mind from the body” (Pearce 2016, 92). The depiction of how speed limits

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perception and changes the extent to which drivers and passengers are isolated from non-human elements of the environment renders motoring (as depicted in Howards End) a deeply troubling activity. Recent research has nonetheless departed from the view, as expressed by Baudrillard and Virilio, that such experiences of speed are necessarily disembodied. For example, Peter Merriman notes how drivers and passengers “have very different embodied engagements with the car and the road, different kinds and levels of practical engagement and attention, and different kinds of spatial, visual and kinaesthetic awareness” (Merriman 2012, 69). For Merriman, motoring facilitates new visual and aesthetic sensibilities which contribute to human identity and how the world is perceived mainly because: [Motoring’s] affective qualities, atmospheres and sensations of auto-­ motive movement exceeded people’s prior embodied experiences, and in some cases altered their sense of being-in-the-world. Motoring not only reworked people’s embodied conceptions of space and time, it reworked the embodied practices through which movement and travel were enacted and sensed, giving rise to an affective regime comprised of a distinctive constellation of materialities, atmospheres, spatialities, feelings, rhythms, forces and emotions. (Merriman 2012, 80)

Motoring is represented here as a way of experiencing and accepting alternative ways of encountering the world’s materiality. Merriman demonstrates how the experience of fast moving vehicles can be understood in a positive sense and as an activity that increases the human sensory apparatus and its ability to experience distinctive sensations. We can find this highlighted in Frederic Jameson’s reading of motoring in Howards End which discovers a similarly positive stance in the novel. Jameson argues that despite motoring’s negative associations with imperialism in the novel, its perception, as a bodily and poetic process, is no longer that, but rather a positive achievement and an enlargement of our sensorium: so that the beauty of the new figure seems oddly unrelated to the social and historical judgement which is its content. (Jameson 1990, 58)

By attending to motoring’s effect on the human body, Jameson’s account treats motoring in the novel differently from other critical readings that highlight its negative associations (Page 1993; Tambling 1995;

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Bradshaw 2007). Andrew Thacker also reads motoring beyond its symbolic meaning as an image of constant mobility, uncertainty and rootlessness. In his article, “E. M. Forster and the Motor Car,” Thacker, like Jameson, associates the different images of mobility with the economic and imperial context of Howards End and suggests that motoring in the novel “is concerned with attempting to understand a variety of new spaces and spatial experiences, attendant upon modernity” (Thacker 2000, 37). He observes that the form of the novel reveals Forster’s struggle to find a way to represent or “contain the fluxus of modern life” (Thacker 2000, 39). Throughout his article, Thacker provides a historical overview of motoring and contrasts the sense of flux that characters experience when they encounter the world through fast vehicles to the sense of space and connectedness which he argues are associated with static places and houses or “fixed symbols and images” (Thacker 2000, 39, 47). Although Merriman’s account may share Thacker’s view of how motoring is a way of engaging with alternative spatial and sensory experiences, he does not juxtapose the experience of speed with that of fixed and static locales as he reasserts in his discussion views put forward by prominent mobilities researchers that there is no absolute immobility (Adey 2010; Bergson 1911; Massey 2005). Contrasting the newly acquired sense of movement which resulted from the speed of modern transportation with the static and fixed locales has nevertheless contributed to the common view that Forster’s dwellings are nostalgic and anti-modern (Tambling 1995, 3; Bradshaw 2007, 168). Motoring is, indeed, expressive of modernity in Howards End but rather than suggesting that mobility is contrasted to static and stationary locales in his texts (Stone 1966; Cavaliero 1986; Thacker 2000; Finch 2011), I argue that it leads both Forster and his characters to pay more attention to micro-mobilities that exist in other forms of embodied movements which are depicted in people’s everyday walks and multi-sensory interactions with their surroundings. In Howards End, movement and speed are not opposite to the static. It is actually the fast-accelerated mobilities that enable slower movements to be acknowledged and fully appreciated. Despite being compared to the mobility and speed of motorcars in the texts, such slower embodied interactions are overlooked in the criticism of Forster’s Howards End and other texts whose depiction of everyday corporeal experiences shows how people become more observant of their surroundings when they are outside vehicles and physically “in touch” with the world. Modernity has offered alternative ways of sensing and

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feeling that make people more aware of how they interact with the world both with and without the mediation of modern technology. Forster’s depiction of different types of mobilities in his writings lends itself to the wide and diverse array of distinctive approaches and methodologies to mobilities studies in the humanities. Merriman and Pearce explain how textual and artistic representations of movement are effective in capturing kinaesthetic ontologies and cultural practices, and how, in the arts and humanities, “expressions and articulations of movement have the potential to trace how particular movements, experiences and sensations may be grounded in very different ontologies, embodied practices, and cultural and historical contexts” (Merriman and Pearce 2017, 497). By observing Howards End as a text that marks modernity not only through the depiction of modern mobilities but also through celebrating other types of movement whose particularity the new technologies have made visible, this chapter contributes to the ongoing research in mobilities and the humanities by focusing on everyday bodily practices. Analysing the articulation of mobility, human attentiveness and sympathy in Howards End and other Forsterian texts demonstrates how their characters’ kinaesthetic interactions with the outside world are expressed through different types of movement. The depiction of various mobilities in the novel emphasises how everyday embodied activities are integral to the characters’ identities, personal relations and sense of belonging. Embodied mobilities shape Forster’s characters who ultimately appear, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes, “caught in the fabric of the world” (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 163).

Losing Sense of Space Motoring is associated with changed corporeal interactions with the outside world. As we have seen, some theorists have noted the “sensory enclosure” of drivers and passengers where sights are reduced to two-­ dimensional views (see Baudrillard 2010; Virilio 2008), whereas others “stress the multi-sensory and kinaesthetic apprehensions mobile subjects have with their surroundings” (Merriman 2012, 12). While, on the surface, the depiction of motoring in Howards End appears to highlight how speed strips characters of having a meaningful relationship with the world around them, the motoring experiences in the novel complicate the relationship between motorcars and the environment by highlighting not only the sensory exclusion but, more importantly, the position of

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passengers as individuals who lack autonomous-mobility.1 We see how, at the beginning of her sightseeing tour with the Wilcoxes, Margaret Schlegel feels distanced from the landscape through which she passes: A motor-drive, a form of felicity detested by Margaret, awaited her. […] But it was not an impressive drive. Perhaps the weather was to blame, being grey and banked high with weary clouds. Perhaps Hertfordshire is scarcely intended for motorists. Did not a gentleman once motor so quickly through Westmorland that he missed it? And if Westmorland can be missed it will fare ill with a county whose delicate structure particularly needs the attentive eye. (Forster 2012, 205–206)

Despite being intended for sightseeing, the motoring expedition fails to leave Margaret with any particular impressions. The passage reveals a detachment between those in the motor and the scenery “out there,” and the latter is only described by its functional properties rather than the aesthetic impact it has on the mobile spectators. In the passage, Margaret partly blames this on the weather—“it was raining steadily. The car came round with the hood up, and again she lost all sense of space” (207)—but this is clearly not the only reason for her sensory deprivation. The depiction of how motorcars shelter motorists and passengers from the rain and weather is presented as a mixed blessing in that it makes travel more comfortable but, along with speed, is responsible for distorting the sightseers’ attentiveness. However, in what follows I want to demonstrate how the feeling of “losing” the “sense of space” that results from this detachment reveals more about the relationship between autonomous-mobility and attentiveness than about speed or physical detachment per se. The expression “sense of space” is used a number of times in Howards End and Forster’s dystopian short story, “The Machine Stops” (1909), to describe the way in which subjects lose touch with the outside world. “Losing” or “gaining” a sense of space occurs when the characters’ movement in Forster’s fiction is no longer self-directed and when their lack of autonomy distorts their attentiveness to their bodies and surroundings. Thacker notes that losing sense of space occurs in Howards End as a result of the increased mobility of the modern world and claims that Margaret only recaptures the sense of space when the “‘flux’ of the car is replaced by the fixities of place, once again in the house” (Thacker 2000, 48). Howards End may well appear to create a disparity

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between images of stability and movement but locating the idea of ­losing or regaining a “sense of space” with Forster’s other texts makes it clearer that what a sense of space means is not dependent upon the fixity of the characters or their rootedness to an immobile place. In “The Machine Stops,” Kuno explains that he regains his sense of space “by walking up and down the platform of the railway outside [his] room” (Forster 1954, 125). Walking, as an alternative type of movement for Kuno, in the world of the “Machine,” suggests not only a newly discovered attentiveness to an overlooked practice but also a recovered sense of autonomy and determination. Similarly, and as I shall expand upon in the final section of this chapter, in Howards End it is only when Margaret adopts another form of mobility and walks through the landscape that she regains the “sense of space” that was lost during motoring (210). A sense of space, then, for Margaret, is not dependent upon fixity or place but is rather something that is restored when she regains control of her mobility and thus her ability to discern the particularities of the world around her. Slowing down and regaining a “sense of space” in Howards End may therefore be seen as a reaction to speed, yet it is not until people inhabit the world “at speed” that slowness becomes a celebrated choice; “an oppositional practice” against the fast-accelerated world (Vannini 2014, 122). Slowing down, as I will show in the last two sections of this chapter, familiarises people with the landscape around them, and thus enables the characters to have a strong sense of belonging. Although the terms “space” and “place” have very different connotations for geographers, Forster uses them interchangeably in his texts.2 One character that we may describe as having a strong sense of space and place in Howards End is Ruth Wilcox. Ruth’s depiction in the novel has often been read as evidence of Forster’s celebration of the traditional values associated with England’s past (Trilling 1964; Tambling 1995; Royle 1999), but her sense of connectivity with the landscape and the natural world is one that is strongly determined by modernity’s impact on human-world relations. Her sense of rootedness and belonging, as I will show in the last section of this chapter, is conveyed, in opposition to the speed of motors, through purposeful slowness. The way Forster’s characters interact with their material surroundings invites a reading that shows how modern transport technologies have contributed to a re-evaluation of everyday embodied mobilities such as walking and a new attentiveness to the mundane, but often meaningful, conditions of everyday existence.

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At this point, it is worth noting that the careful depiction of Margaret’s negative experiences of motoring are focused mainly on the use of motoring for recreation and sight-seeing. We learn throughout the novel that the Wilcoxes are “fond” of motoring; what Charles Wilcox “enjoys most is a motor tour in England” (73), and Mr. Wilcox and Evie go for motoring trips in Yorkshire (74). Motoring for excursions quickly became fashionable in the early twentieth century. As Pearce observes in her book, Drivetime: Literary Excursions in Automotive Consciousness, “touring by motor car began surprisingly soon after the automobile’s invention” (Pearce 2016, 63). Pearce analyses extracts from early motorists such as T. D. Murphy and Edith Wharton which highlight how motorcars introduced a new manner of tourism in that they allowed drivers and passengers to explore previously inaccessible places and gave them the ability “to stop, browse and/or explore at will for as long (or, in Murphy’s case, as speedily) as they wish” (2016, 65). The integration of motoring with sightseeing offered new ways of interacting with landscapes and the outside world from the window of a motorcar. However, Howards End does not depict these “exploratory” opportunities provided by motorcars, focusing instead on the ways in which motoring affects the autonomy of passengers and influences both the drivers’ and passengers’ relationship to their surroundings in movement. In Howards End, we see how Margaret struggles to distinguish her surroundings while being in a motorcar as her attentiveness to the elements outside the vehicle gradually decreases. Her interest in the landscape and scenery is thus quickly destroyed. Mr. Wilcox directs her attention to buildings on the road: “‘There’s a pretty church—oh, you aren’t sharp enough. Well, look out, if the road worries you—right outward at the scenery.’ She looked at the scenery. It heaved and merged like porridge” (206). Margaret is perplexed, and the view confuses her. It has no character or distinction, just like the “porridge” that Forster was served during his trip to London in 1930: a “grey” substance that “eschew[s] pleasure,” and its role is restricted to filling the stomach (Burnett 2004, 207). The massiveness of the scene might fill Margaret’s eyes with attractive sights yet fails to provide her with a sense of particularity or meaningful association. Similarly, later in the drive, Margaret: “lost the sense of space; once more trees, houses, people, animals, hills, merged into one dirtiness” (213). Again, the rapid sequence of sights overwhelms Margaret’s perception without giving her a clear idea of

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their location or significance. All the things that, together, constitute the landscape—such as the houses and hills, trees, people and animals—are fused together in a montage that destroys their individuality. Merriman observes that, in early accounts of motoring: What is striking is the manner in which the senses merge and blur in such accounts of automotive perception, as motorists move-and-sense with vehicle, road, landscape, weather and other road users, and space and time are not positioned as the most important registers through which automotive subjects sense and experience the world. (Merriman 2012, 81)

What such descriptions highlight is that the bodily experience of both driving and passengering becomes inseparable from the body of the motorcar. Whichever way you look at it, the human body’s relationship to the landscape through which it passes is fundamentally changed on account of the complex, accumulated information it absorbs and the difficulty of isolating particular sights and sensations. As shown in the extract from the novel, drivers and passengers in motorcars may be able to view large portions of the landscape in a shorter period of time but they cannot give enough attention to individual objects in the landscape during the drive nor develop a sense of familiarity and understanding of the entities that pass quickly before them. For Margaret, the speed of the vehicle and the loss of personal autonomy affects her sense of direction and turns the practice of being a passenger in a motorcar into an alienating experience. A similar idea is demonstrated at the beginning of the novel when Mrs. Munt takes the train to Howards End, the house. The narrator describes how: The train sped northward, under innumerable tunnels. […] She passed through the South Welwyn Tunnel, saw light for a moment, and entered the North Welwyn Tunnel, of tragic fame. She traversed the immense viaduct whose arches span untroubled meadows and the dreamy flow of Tewin Water. She skirted the parks of politicians. […] Mrs Munt remained equally indifferent; hers but to concentrate on the end of her journey. (13)

Contrasting the verbs that connote rapidity with largely redundant descriptions of the landscape shows the extent to which Mrs. Munt is disengaged with the places that the train is passing through. Although the passage explains at the end that her detachment is the result of her focus on the destination rather than on the journey itself, the mediatory

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function of the train which separates her body from the outside environment and her lack of autonomy over her mobility induce her disinterest. David Bissell explains how, although “the body can sense speed through the movement of passing objects” and other kinaesthetic sensations, the “more passive, disengaged visual experiences obscure a range of other, more attentive ways of seeing that are required in order to travel successfully” (Bissell 2009, 46). Travelling “successfully” here means enjoying the journey and the sights it may offer to the spectator’s senses in a meaningful way. Following this logic, the loss of autonomy that Margaret and Mrs. Munt experience in motorcars and trains causes a passivity that can quickly translate into the inattentiveness and apathy that I discuss in the next section. The loss of autonomy that is caused by certain (auto)mobilities renders the characters’ relationships with the landscape they move in distant and unfamiliar. In Howards End, the emphasis on the lack of attentiveness that results from the mediatory and directing functions of motorcars and trains prompts the reading of alternative and already-existing ways of interacting with the world that celebrate human freedom and autonomy. The depiction of alternative micro-mobilities emphasises, albeit indirectly, the significance of both agency and embodiment in developing the human sensorium and the practice of sympathy. The remaining sections of this chapter will show how Howards End posits a link between mobile agency, attentiveness and sympathy.

Inattentiveness and Apathy Passive travel—especially at speed—in Howards End reveals how the changed relations between subjects and objects promote indifference and lack of connectedness. The swiftness of trains and motorcars may be efficient and functional but the impressions it gives rise to are often cursory rather than meaningful and lasting. Indeed, the notion of “practicality” (at the expense of more complex modes of being) is what Forster explores in “The Machine Stops”; practicality, here, is associated with giving a general idea of people and things. For example, Vashti describes the new modes of communication that have developed as “good enough for all practical purposes” (111), a view that undermines attention to detail and the different effects places, objects and even other people have or leave on human perception.

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As noted in the previous section, Margaret’s unpleasant experience of sightseeing in the motorcar is seen to result from her inability to distinguish the individual details of the passing landscape that Mr. Wilcox finds perfectly acceptable. She does not have an opportunity to explore the view with what the narrator describes as “the attentive eye” (206). In another motoring trip to Shropshire, when “Margaret was all for sightseeing” (219), she still feels she is missing all that is really important in the landscape through which she passes: Shropshire had not the reticence of Hertfordshire. Though robbed of half its magic by swift movement, it still conveyed the sense of hills. […] Having picked up another guest, they turned southward, avoiding the greater mountains, but conscious of an occasional summit, rounded and mild, whose colouring differed in quality from that of the lower earth, and whose contours altered more slowly. Quiet mysteries were in progress behind those tossing horizons: the west, as ever, was retreating with some secret which may not be worth the discovery, but which no practical man will ever discover. (220)

The portrayal of the landscape in the previous passage is revealing. The generic description shows how the motorists only get a “sense” of the hills, and are aware of the different forms, shapes and colours of the landscape rather than engaging with it empirically and sensorially as Ruth and Margaret do, as I will show later in the chapter, through more embodied mobilities such as walking. The passage also refers to “practical” people, a quality associated with the Wilcoxes throughout the novel; Mr. Wilcox is a practical man because “[h]e never bothered over the mysterious or the private” (168). While practicality is not directly criticised in the novel, it is implicated with the decline of compassion and sympathy: the human qualities that Forster celebrates in “What I Believe.” The association between motoring and indifference is emphasised again later in the drive The motor carried them deeper into the hills. Curious these were rather than impressive, for their outlines lacked beauty, and the pink fields on their summits suggested the handkerchiefs of a giant spread out to dry. An occasional outcrop of rock, an occasional wood, an occasional ‘forest’, treeless and brown, all hinted at wildness to follow, but the main colour was an agricultural green. (220–221)

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Hills and fields do not leave a noteworthy impression on the s­ightseers. The landscape may be grand, but it lacks picturesque beauty. Rocks, woods, and forests are scattered rather than harmonious. They have no distinction and are neither given names nor details. Even the fields are only summarised by one colour. The whole landscape suggests regularity, uniformity, and the dullness of a tedious domestic chore. The absence of connectedness between the motorists and passengers with the landscape is, the excerpt suggests, due to their inability to be attentive to its details and also their passivity in relation to it. This causes a loss of interest to what exists outside the human sensorium, and thus the capacity of being affected by it. Because they decrease human autonomy and the passengers are subject to their mediatory functions, modern transport technologies are arguably one of the aspects of modernity which have most overtly impacted on human attentiveness, and this, in turn, has resulted in a profound change in how humans respond to, and interact, with one another. Jonathan Crary’s Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture, a major work in the study of attention and perception in the modern world, concludes that: “[i]t is possible to see one crucial aspect of modernity as an ongoing crisis of attentiveness” (Crary 1999, 13–14). Crary, who frames his study of modern art with the idea of attentiveness, argues that the changes in human attentiveness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are linked to the technological alterations affecting human perception. Attentiveness therefore becomes a fundamentally corporeal experience that is associated with the ways in which people interact with and respond to the material world around them. In Howards End, attentiveness does not only affect people’s encounters with their surrounding environments but is also incorporated in people’s social interactions. The characters in the novel are not oblivious to the ways in which modern transport technologies affect their interpersonal relationships; Margaret’s train trip to view Mr. Wilcox’s house in Ducie Street demonstrates how modern mobilities can devalue place and human communication: [Margaret’s] eyes had been troubling her lately, so that she could not read in the train, and it bored her to look at the landscape, which she had seen but yesterday. At Southampton, she ‘waved’ to Frieda; Frieda was on her way to join them at Swanage, and Mrs Munt had calculated that their trains would cross. But Frieda was looking the other way. (167)

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Being in a train or a motorcar and passing through regular routes and sceneries, one feels compelled to attend to activities inside the vehicle rather than outside. The landscape is constantly changing but it appears the same to the human eye. Margaret tries to connect with her cousin through a wave, though the use of quotation marks highlights the simulated quality of the gesture. Despite her attempt to greet Freida at the “calculated” time, the encounter, to Margaret’s disappointment, does not happen. Losing sense of determination over movement and the degree of physical and multi-sensory interactions humans could have with their surroundings strips both the humanity and materiality from everyday events such as these. The portrayal of motoring in the texts thus shows how such simulated experiences distort people’s attentiveness and makes the distinctions between objects and things not only invisible but unimportant. Encountering the world from the sealed-in world of a speeding car renders human bodies and minds insignificant and creates a delusory sense of human power and control in those driving the vehicles. During one of the motor drives in Howards End, the car suddenly stops, and the ladies are asked to move from one car to another: As it started off again, the door of a cottage opened, and a girl screamed wildly at them. ‘What was it’ the ladies cried. Charles drove them a hundred yards without speaking. Then he said, ‘It’s all right. Your car just touched a dog.’ ‘But stop!’ cried Margaret, horrified. ‘It didn’t hurt him.’ ‘Didn’t really hurt him?’ asked Myra. ‘No.’ ‘Do please stop!’ cried Margaret, leaning forward. She was standing up in the car, the other occupants holding her knees to steady her. ‘I want to go back, please.’ Charles took no notice. […] ‘I want to go back, though, I say!’ repeated Margaret, getting angry. […] ‘Stopping’s no good.’ Drawled Charles. ‘Isn’t it?’ said Margaret, and jumped straight out of the car. She fell on her knees, cut her gloves, shook her hat over her ear. (221–222)

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This emotional incident, and the ensuing argument between Margaret and Charles, shows two opposite reactions to hitting an animal in the road. Charles’s attitude is one that is indifferent, albeit practical, and he uses the word “touch” to describe an incident of not only hitting an animal, but also killing it (as we learn later in the next few paragraphs). He may be softening his language so as not to scare the ladies in the car, but Charles’s attitude is undoubtedly uncaring. Margaret, who may not have witnessed the scene closely or seen the animal, but who was still screamed at by the girl from the cottage, shows more care and compassion. After losing her sense of space earlier in the novel, Margaret does not want to be trapped in the car any longer and demands to go back. Her actions are portrayed here as both irrational and “unpractical” as she both holds up the party and unsettles her relationship with her future step-son. This comic scene nevertheless reveals that her desperate desire to leap out of the car is not only because the vehicle separates her—and the rest of the party—from the incident but because (as a passenger) it has stripped her of all her agency. Although she has been moving swiftly through the countryside she has not been in control of her movement. The indifference to the incident that caused the death of a cherished pet is amplified when Albert Fussell, the Wilcoxes’ friend and the motorist who hits the animal, announces: “‘It’s alright!’ he called. ‘It wasn’t a dog, it was a cat.’ ‘There!’ exclaimed Charles triumphantly. ‘It’s only a rotten cat’” (222). Not knowing the type of animal that the motorcar hit demonstrates how even living entities tend to be insignificant and unworthy of motorists’ attention until they cause disturbance to the swift mobility of their vehicles. This lack of attentiveness may thus be seen as indicative of a more general apathy, and lack of compassion, that Margaret finds repulsive in the Wilcoxes. This absence of sympathy on part of the Wilcoxes in this scene contrasts strongly with Margaret’s powerful emotions and embodied actions that cause her to leap out of the car, cutting her hands and gloves and grazing her knees. However, although Margaret’s fall is a reminder of the fragility, vulnerability and finiteness of the human body, it also demonstrates the possibility—and importance of—autonomous movement. As a passive and “restrained” passenger, Margaret has had no control whatsoever over where she travels or at what speed; through the act of escape she reconnects her body (literally) with the earth and its materiality. It is arguable that the sense of indifference that is associated with the scene of the accident is more significant than the accident itself. The girl

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whose pet is killed “will receive a compensation” for her dead cat, but her reaction to the death of her pet is also described by the drivers as “rude” (223): [Margaret] was led back to the car, and soon the landscape resumed its motion, the lonely cottage disappeared, the castle swelled on its cushion of turf, and they had arrived. No doubt she had disgraced herself. But she felt their whole journey from London had been unreal. They had no part with the earth and its emotions. They were dust, stink, and cosmopolitan chatter, and the girl whose cat had been killed had lived more deeply than they. (223)

The accident provides Margaret with some unflattering new perspectives on the Wilcoxes, but the feeling of disconnection from the landscape she motors through continues. The girl remains nameless, the only adjective used to describe her cottage is “lonely,” and the castle they pass by is unidentified. The motor drive in Howards End thus reduces the landscape, objects, and other nonhuman entities on the road to mere forms without depth or substance. Speed, and the practice of motoring in general, is not only associated with the way it changes how the landscape is perceived but it is also linked with moral apathy; the lack of attentiveness to, and connectedness with the landscape, renders it (to invoke Baudrillard’s terminology) a “simulacrum” disconnected from a material world in which humans are held accountable for the their actions. This implies a profound connection between mobility, perception—the ability to see attentively—compassion, and the subject’s responsibility for their actions. Furthermore, although Charles notionally has more “agency” as the driver of the car, he appears to be as disassociated from the landscape through which he drives as his passengers. Although motoring, as noted above, engages the sensorium in complex ways, Howards End shows that it still serves to disconnect the human body from the world outside the machine, hence increasing the human sense of superiority.

Attentiveness and Sympathy The sensations of disconnectedness and apathy that are associated with the speed and passivity of twentieth-century transport mobilities are contrasted in Howards End with the portrayals of intense embodied mobilities and interactions with the natural landscape that are achieved

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through walking. Because it is slow and self-directed, walking enables the human body to interact closely and sensorially with the environment and exposes the subject to different materialities which determine the body’s relationship to the nonhuman elements of the world in a different way from motoring. Indeed, Margaret’s experience of motoring with the Wilcoxes arguably determines and defines her other embodied interactions with the world. When she leaves the motorcar as they arrive to Howards End, Margaret “recaptured the sense of space which the motor had tried to rob from her” (210). The reconfiguration of human bodily sensations in the modern world allows her to pay attention to things she has not attended to before. The first thing Margaret sees and inspects in the house is the garden. She observes the different trees and objects around her and, as she walks, she “was struck by the fertility of the soil; she had seldom been in a garden where the flowers looked so well, and even the weeds she was idly plucking out of the porch were intensely green” (208). The outside world now occupies a changed position in Margaret’s perception. She is closer to the landscape than she was inside the motorcar and becomes deeply absorbed by the materiality of the landscape around her. Even the weeds catch Margaret’s attention as she wanders around the garden in a meditative trance, both sharply observant of all that she sees and seemingly unaware of what she is doing as she plucks at them. However, it is important to reiterate here that the sense of space which Margaret regains is not one that is the result of being static. She only regains her stability when she walks and is in contact with her material surroundings through the practice of her own “auto-mobility.” Space and place become meaningful to Margaret only when she is in control of her own movement and can observe her surroundings slowly, and through her own body, rather than the mediating mobility of a car or a train. Even at Wickham Place, she “forgot the luggage and the motorcars, and the hurrying men who know so much and connect so little. She recaptured the sense of space, which is the basis for all earthly beauty” (213). Forster makes very clear that, for Margaret, locality is closely linked to a more profound sense of being. Regaining autonomy—including autonomous mobility—and the ability to connect both physically and emotionally with people is what enables her to regain the “centredness” she has lost through her association with the Wilcoxes. In Howards End, walking, and slowness in general develops the characters’ sense of familiarity with their surroundings and thus their sense

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of belonging. In his Philosophy of Walking, Frederic Gros explains how “a slow approach to landscapes […] gradually renders them familiar. Like the regular encounters that deepen friendship” (Gros 2014, 37). In Howards End, Ruth’s habitual walks in her garden are indicative of her close relationship with earth and nature. Unlike the other Wilcoxes, Ruth’s slow movement is contrasted to that of the speed of motorcars. In Chapter 1, she is depicted watching the flowers as she walks: “Trail, trail, went her long dress over the sopping grass, and she came back with her hands full of hay that was cut yesterday […] she kept on smelling it” (2). Ruth appears again in Chapter 3 “trailing noiselessly over the lawn, and there was actually a wisp of hay in her hands” (21). Ruth’s way of walking is meticulously depicted in these two different scenes. The word “trail” suggests heaviness and closeness to the earth surface. Her noiseless walks also convey a harmony that is opposite to the friction which the tyres of the “throbbing” motorcars create when they cut into the earth’s surface (21). This close proximity allows Ruth to appear as at one with nature. The text carefully delineates how the agency of the natural environment influences Ruth’s walk and allows her to be more attentive to nonhuman elements surrounding her. In “Slowness and Deceleration,” Philip Vannini suggests that “understanding slowing down relationally […] can show us that slowing down can be a way of increasing the body’s capacity to cultivate reflexive awareness of self, movement, and sense of place” (Vannini 2014, 122–123). Walking and interacting closely with the world’s materiality is evoked in Howards End not only to acknowledge human connectivity and belonging but also tolerance and sympathy for the non-human. Ruth’s attentiveness to the latter is represented as being continuous with her sympathetic nature towards other characters in the novel.3 While motoring—according to Virilio (2008) and Jameson (1990)—is associated with the illusion of infinity, Gros observes how “walking reminds us constantly of our finiteness: bodies heavy with unmannerly needs, nailed to the definitive ground”; walking also “means reconciling yourself to it through that exposure to the mass of the ground, the fragility of the body, the slow remorseless sinking movement” (Gros 2014, 186–187). Because it requires the body to be in direct contact with the environment through which it passes, walking exposes the human body to the various materialities that constitute the world. It thus makes people’s bodies not only closer but also more receptive and tolerant to the nonhuman elements and textures of the world, and, as I will demonstrate next, to other human beings.

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Instead of being sheltered from the rain like Margaret and the Wilcoxes in their motorcar, Forster’s walkers are in an immediate contact with the world’s materiality. Nevertheless, it is through experiencing the speed of modern transport technologies that the characters are able to fully appreciate the attentiveness which results from the slower, embodied interactions with the world around them. Walking, in these texts, is celebrated not only because of its reliability as far as the human body is concerned but also because it acknowledges the agency of the nonhuman in shaping people’s identities and values. Slow and “heavy” walking binds humans closer to earth, both literally and metaphorically, and thus renders them more susceptible to their surroundings. Forster’s The Longest Journey (1907) shows how the embodied interactions with the materiality of the world shapes the way people move and interact with place. Robert Wonham, a farmer in Mrs. Failing’s country house “walked heavily, lifting his feet as if the carpet was furrowed” (231) when he visits the latter’s drawing-room. Like Ruth’s manner of walking, the sense of heaviness that characterises Robert’s movement suggests a closeness between his body and the earth, for even when he walks indoors, his habit of walking “heavily,” as in the fields, survives and is depicted as incompatible with the setting in Mrs. Failing’s house. Robert’s way of walking is also suggestive of his temperament and social relations. We see how Robert “advanced into love with open eyes, slowly, heavily, just as he had advanced across the drawing-room carpet” (232), indicating an indirect association between everyday embodied performances and human sentiments and inclinations. Robert’s sympathy does not just determine his relations with humans, but also with nonhuman entities: [F]or he knew when the earth was ill. He knew, too, when she was hungry: he spoke of her tantrums—the strange unscientific element in her that will baffle the scientist to the end of time […] As he talked, the earth became a living being—or rather a being with a living skin—and manure no longer dirty stuff, but a symbol for regeneration and of the birth of life from life. (232)

Although Robert’s description of the earth may appear romanticised, his relationship to it is also expressed in very functional, everyday terms. The earth is not a detached object to look at and approve of from a distance but is rather an anthropomorphised entity that influences his body

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and sensibility as much as he influences her’s. Robert speaks of the earth’s different moods and needs, revealing it to be animate rather than inanimate, and sharing many of those qualities we might think of as human. In this way, both Robert and the earth are portrayed as sympathetic equals. The link The Longest Journey draws between Robert’s walks, his relationship with the earth, and his interpersonal relationships also raises questions about the extent to which embodied mobilities and human perception are integrated with human values such as openness, sympathy and tolerance.

Conclusion Because they offered new sensations that have the capacity to increase the illusion of human agency at the expense of the non-human world, modern transport technologies are associated with negative aspects of modernity in most of Forster’s texts. However, these same mobilities also directed critical attention to other, pre-existing forms of mobility such as walking which is rendered as a corporeal activity that increases people’s sensitivity and compassion. Perhaps in recognition of this paradox, Forster has Mr. Wilcox make a surprising “move” in the final chapters of Howards End by deciding to walk rather than motor: “It’s a good half-mile,” said Charles, stepping into the garden […] “You go on as if I didn’t know my own mind,” said Mr. Wilcox fretfully. Charles hardened his mouth. “You young fellows’ one idea is to get into a motor. I tell you, I want to walk: I’m very fond of walking.” […] Charles did not like it; he was uneasy about his father, who did not seem himself this morning. There was a petulant touch about him—more like a woman. Could it be that he was growing old? The Wilcoxes were not lacking in affection; they had it royally, but they did not know how to use it. (346)

Mr. Wilcox’s altered, more feminine, nature is associated here with his preference for walking. This change is of significance because we know of the Wilcoxes’ fondness of motoring. There is, indeed, an emerging link in this passage connecting motoring, walking and emotional development. The suggestion is that the way people move in space can be linked to their sensitivities and emotions, and that the value of slow movement and attentiveness is differential. This is also graphically illustrated in Forster’s posthumously published novel Maurice (1970 [1913–1914]).

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After Maurice and Clive express their love for each other, the two young men jump on to a motor bike and side-car and drive away from Cambridge: They swirled across the bridge and into the Ely road. Maurice said, ‘Now we’ll go to Hell.’ The machine was powerful, he reckless naturally. It leapt forward into the fens and the receding dome of the sky. They became a cloud of dust, a stench, and a roar to the world, but the air they breathed was pure, and all the noise they heard was the long drawn cheer of the wind. They cared for no one, they were outside humanity, and death, had it come, would only have continued their pursuit of a retreating horizon. A tower, a town—it had been Ely—were behind them, in front the same sky, paling at last as though heralding the sea. ‘Right turn,’ again, then ‘left,’ ‘right,’ until all sense of direction was gone. There was a rip, a grate. Maurice took no notice. A noise arose as of a thousand pebbles being shaken together between his legs. No accident occurred, but the machine came to a standstill among the dark black fields. The song of the lark was heard, the trail of dust began to settle behind them. They were alone. (Forster 2005, 64–65)

Maurice’s and Clive’s experience of movement on this machine intensifies their sense of freedom and liberation. Their departure from the traditions and conventions of the time is not just a metaphoric image; it is also a literal expression of their geographical separation from Cambridge. They speed and swerve in the vehicle until they, like Margaret in Howards End, lose all sense of space and direction, and their mad dash ends only when a minor accident forces them to stop. The speed might be symbolic of their intimate feelings and sexual desire, but it is only when the motorbike stops that the two are able to attend fully to their surroundings and catch the sound of the lark which was not perceptible before. People’s attentiveness to the world around them is therefore linked, in Forster’s texts, with the ways they move in and about space. Twentieth-century (auto)mobilities are depicted in Howards End, and briefly in Maurice, as technologies that give rise to human domination and the illusion of autonomy. Yet this supposed technological achievement is, for Forster, clearly at the expense of a more subtle and sensitive mode of being which negotiates the human and the nonhuman, as well as personal agency versus the needs of others. In Howards End and The Longest Journey, the depiction of such intense embodied interactions

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renders human bodies as both more vulnerable and more receptive to the world and to other humans. This, in turn, reminds us that attentiveness, compassion and sympathy are human values that are grounded in, and developed through, people’s everyday encounters with the world. Twentieth-century transport mobilities direct our attention to the role of the human body in perception, cognition, and developing human sensitivities in Forster’s literary texts; the latter also show us the extent to which embodied mobilities, of different kinds, have a direct bearing on moral and ethical behaviour. However, as recognised by the many scholars now working on “slow mobilities” (Adey et al. 2014; Vannini 2014; Popan 2018), it is paradoxically only by travelling at speed, and experiencing the mediation of vehicles, that humans can regain a sense of the crucial role of human agency in establishing a more meaningful relationship with both the human and nonhuman world. The texts’ comparative portrayal of “passive” (auto)mobilities (such as car passengering and train travel) on the one hand, and “agentic” autonomous mobilities (such as walking) on the other, highlights the extent to which Forster’s literary works anticipated twenty-first-century debates in mobilities research.

Notes 1. ‘Driving’ and ‘passengering’: in any discussion of autonomy, agency, and automobility, it is important to distinguish between driving and ‘passengering’ (Laurier et al. 2008). Driving is ostensibly a more agentic and autonomous practice than simply being a passenger in the car; however, recent researchers such as Pearce (2016) have argued for a more complex understanding of both roles. At the time that Forster was writing, many motorcars still came with a personal mechanic, so that even if the owner steered the car s/he did not necessarily have full responsibility for its performance. Forster’s novels tend to focus on the experience of the passenger as opposed to the driver. 2. Tim Cresswell explains that “[s]pace is a more abstract concept than place. When we speak of space, we tend to think of outer-space or the spaces of geometry. Spaces have areas and volumes. Places have spaces between them” (Cresswell 2015, 15). 3. Ruth’s sympathetic nature is emphasised throughout the novel especially towards Margaret when she tells her that her childhood house, Wickham Place, will be demolished soon. Ruth’s sympathy is what leads her to leave Howards End to Margaret in her will.

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References Adey, Peter. 2010. Mobility. Abingdon: Routledge. Adey, Peter, David Bissell, Kevin Hannam, Peter Merriman, Mimi Sheller, eds. 2014. The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities. London: Routledge. Armstrong, Tim. 1998. Modernism, Technology and the Body: A Cultural Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baudrillard, Jean. 2010 [1986]. America. Translated by C. Turner. London and New York: Verso. Bergson, Henry. 1911. Creative Evolution. New York: H. Holt and Company. Bissell, David. 2009. “Visualising Everyday Geographies: Practices of Vision Through Travel Time.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 34 (1): 42–60. Bradshaw, David, ed. 2007. The Cambridge Companion to E. M. Forster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burnett, John. 2004. England Eats Out: A Social History of Eating Out in England from 1830 to the Present. Abingdon: Routledge. Cavaliero, Glen. 1986. A Reading of E. M. Forster. Hampshire and London: Macmillan Press. Crary, Jonathan. 1999. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture. Cambridge: MIT Press. Cresswell, Tim. 2015. Place: An Introduction. Chichester: Wiley. Danius, Sara. 2002. The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception, and Aesthetics. New York: Cornell University Press. Finch, Jason. 2011. E. M. Forster and English Place: A Literary Topography. Åbo: Åbo Akademi University Press. Forster, E. M. 1954. “The Machine Stops.” In E. M. Forster: Collected Short Stories, 109–146. London: Penguin Group. Forster, E. M. 1972. “What I Believe.” In Two Cheers for Democracy, 65–73. London: Edward Arnold. Forster, E. M. 2005. Maurice. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Group. Forster, E. M. 2006. The Longest Journey. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Group. Forster, E. M. 2012. Howards End. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Group. Garrington, Abbie. 2013. Haptic Modernism: Touch and the Tactile in Modernist Writing. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Gros, Frederic. 2014. A Philosophy of Walking. Translated by John Howe. London: Verso. Jameson, Fredric. 1990. “Modernism and Imperialism.” In Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature, edited by Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and Edward W. Said, 43–66. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kern, Stephen. 1983. The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Laurier, Eric, Hayden Lorimer, Barry Brown, Owain Jones, Oskar Juhlin, Allyson Noble, Mark Perry, Daniele Pica, Philippe Sormani, and Ignaz Strebel, et al. 2008. “Driving and ‘Passengering’: Notes on the Ordinary Organisation of Car Travel.” Mobilities 3 (1): 1–23. Massey, Doreen. 2005. For Space. London: Sage. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964. “Eye and Mind.” In The Primacy of Perception, translated by Carleton Dallery, 159–192. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Merriman, Peter. 2012. Mobility, Space, and Culture. London: Routledge. Merriman, Peter, and Lynne Pearce. 2017. “Mobility and the Humanities.” Mobilities 12 (4): 493–508. O’Neill, Morna, and Michael Hatt. 2010. The Edwardian Sense: Art, Design, and Performance in Britain, 1901–1910. New Haven: Yale University Press. Page, Malcolm. 1993. An Introduction of the Variety of Criticism: Howards End. Houndmills: The Macmillan Press LTD. Pearce, Lynne. 2016. Drivetime: Literary Excursions in Automotive Consciousness. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Popan, Ioan-Cosmin. 2018. “Utopias of Slow Cycling. Imagining a Bicycle System.” PhD diss., Lancaster University. Royle, Nicholas. 1999. E. M. Forster. London: Northcote House Publishers. Seltzer, Mark. 1992. Bodies and Machines. London: Routledge. Stone, Wilfred. 1966. The Cave and the Mountain: A Study in E. M. Forster. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Tambling, Jeremy, ed. 1995. E. M. Forster: Contemporary Critical Essays. London: Macmillan Press. Thacker, Andrew. 2000. “E. M. Forster and the Motorcar.” Literature and History 9 (1): 16–37. Trilling, Lionel. 1964. E. M. Forster. New York: New Directions. Vannini, Philip. 2014. “Slowness and Deceleration.” In The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities, edited by Adey et al., 116–124. London: Routledge. Virilio, Paul. 2008 [1984]. Negative Horizon: An Essay in Dromoscopy. London and New York: Continuum.

CHAPTER 6

Narrative Senses of Perspective and Rhythm: Mobilising Subjectivity with Werther and Effi Briest Roman Kabelik

From Discourse to the Experiential Politics of Mobility Assessing the relevance of humanities for mobility studies, Peter Merriman and Lynne Pearce argue that research on aesthetic practices and discourses showcase how movements become meaningful in various ontologies beyond the bare act of physical movement (2017, 497). This stance challenges ideas that mobilities can appear free from cultural constructions and valorisation, like Peter Adey’s cautious description of meaning as “part and parcel of mobility” (2010, 81), which proposes an epistemological and methodological split between a presumed core of mobility studies, observable movement, and its ideologically infused package of culture. John Urry also differentiates between bodies “directly sensing the external world” and “discursively mediated sensescapes that signify social taste and distinction, ideology and meaning”

R. Kabelik (*)  Department of German Studies, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria © The Author(s) 2019 M. Aguiar et al. (eds.), Mobilities, Literature, Culture, Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27072-8_6

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(2007, 48). In that distinction, embodied practices figure as immediate and cultural practices as derivative phenomena. Those following a more discursive approach have sought to disclose the powerful narrative of mobility as freedom that pervades Western culture in various forms of cultural production, from photographs and dances to novels, laws, and films (Cresswell 2006). Drawing from Foucauldian thought, the notion of mobility as regime has been used to account for institutionalised practices and discourses that regulate movements and provide often uneven access to systems of mobility (Baker 2016, 157–158). Regimes also work to materially enable and stabilise specific modes of transportation, such as car-driving (Manderscheid 2014), and continually discipline subjects to comply and act accordingly. While these frameworks are useful for showing how subjectivity is constructed by and within broader systems, George Revill argues that such approaches hardly address “the creative and expressive dimension of mobile experience” (2014, 508). Focusing on how discourse acts through embodiment, Karolina Doughty and Lesley Murray suggest that institutional discourses create distinct “cultures of mobility” (2016, 304) that enact their power on and through bodies but are continually challenged by local and everyday embodied practices (307). Conceiving power as decentralised and continually shifting in various, unpredictable ways, they underscore how discourse and embodiment are co-constitutive and involved in producing knowledge. They follow a view of discourse as practice that works through the feelings and sensations of bodies, from which comes about an “understanding of subjectivity as arising from lived and complex experience within multiple discourses and physical positions” (2016, 305). Just as discourses turn to bodily affects with political implications (Cresswell 2010, 25), so is discursive knowledge articulated through infrastructures and technologies through which everyday embodied practices are enacted (Doughty and Murray 2016, 306). For a similar relational perspective on mediated forms of mobility, Emily Keightley and Anna Reading have stressed how multi-scalar approaches sidestep differentiations between major and minor forms of movement, making the issue of how subjectivities are shaped a matter of larger structural demands and settings, and vice versa (2014, 295). In this intricate model, exertion of power over mobility becomes mobile itself. In Adey’s words, mobilities are, just like power, “relational and experiential” (2006, 83), which echoes Doreen Massey’s argument about space as an open process of interacting relations (2005, 10).

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Discursive forms of mobility are cultural practices that make movements meaningful under systems of power. In that sense, Merriman and Pearce propose that representations provide valid forms of knowledge worth investigating next to empirical research: through their immersive quality of creating worlds, narrative fiction and other textual representations conjure up models and experiences as embodied practices (2017, 502–503). Along the same lines, Revill calls for a more profound enquiry into historical modes of feeling and embodied sense-making by mobilities, though he is less interested in narratives than in infrastructures and how these have been experienced (2014, 507–508). Literary texts are not only historical sources presumably recording assumptions and statements of a past reality, but they also re-create meaningful experiences of movement and other communicative practices. Using literature like other historical textual forms raises the problem of referentiality. Rita Felski polemicises against readings based on an understanding of “things as they really are” for evaluating “the truth claims of the literary work” (2008, 85). Instead, in the ways through which “texts draw us into imagined yet referentially salient worlds,” literature is itself a “form of social knowledge” (Felski 2008, 104). For how these immersions construct subjectivity in interaction with a reader, she elaborates on how reading turns characters into “embedded and embodied agents, mediated yet particular, formed in the flux of semiotic interchange” (2008, 95). Narratives are not mere epiphenomena but actively construct embodied practices, shaping and spreading culturally shared ideas. In recent discussions on form, Caroline Levine draws parallels between aesthetic features and political structures. By arranging spaces and times, forms articulate relations of power and belonging through order and selection of elements (Levine 2015, 3). Thus, asking how aesthetic patterns organise movements helps understand how literary texts can shape subjectivity through structured experiences of mobility. This chapter seeks to contribute to this debate by presenting ways in which literary narratives create senses of experiencing and feeling movements through focalisation and rhythmic patterns. I want to demonstrate how the potential subjectifying experiences invoked through narratives can be framed in terms of mobility. Hence, as I suggest in the title, the experiential dimension of mobilising subjectivity is not a code hidden in the literary texts but produced in interaction with them. As case studies, I look at two popular novels of German literature: Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther, first published in 1774, and Theodor

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Fontane’s realist novel Effi Briest from 1895. Both texts have distinctive stylistic and generic features that invoke different senses of mobility. The former is an influential novel in letters in which the overly sensitive protagonist tells in a solipsistic manner about his erratic search for a place to dwell while his mind wanders around faraway realms he reads about in literature. In the other, a distanced narrator, a generic feature in realist novels of that time, tells about the title character’s anxieties in a remote town and her various struggles for independence, temporarily giving insights into how she experiences and accommodates to social expectations. While I situate the novels in their socio-historical context of their respective times and areas, particularly within systems of transportation and communication in the late Holy Roman Empire and the later German Empire, this chapter attempts to develop a text-based approach as to how literary texts and mobility work as cultural processes and embodied practice (Merriman and Pearce 2017, 499). This is not to disregard historicist analysis as lacking epistemological depth. On the contrary: by showing how transportation and other communicative practices have changed materially and socially over times and spaces, we can more broadly contextualise literary articulations of mobility and, thus, remark on the ways specific forms of movement have been praised, ignored or rendered problematic in discourse. For example, the introduction of the railway has elicited various statements articulating bewilderment and concern about this mode of transport (Schivelbusch 1986, 129–133). Nevertheless, literary texts convey artistically crafted sensations that structure experience also outside their original publication context. Thus, to account for literature’s cultural mobility (Greenblatt 2010, 250–251) as well as its role in constructing cultures of mobility through its aesthetic design, literary studies can benefit from an approach that goes beyond historicist criticism and rather foregrounds what literary texts can do, in Felski’s phrasing, “as coactors that make things happen” (2015, 180). In that sense, texts like Goethe’s Werther and Fontane’s Effi Briest actively inform cultural negotiations of mobility by organising time and space. They convey to their readers structured experiences of mobility, among other aspects, through narrative perspective and rhythm—two basic features of narrative fiction, as every narration is told by a perceiving agent in a specific temporal pattern. The enclosing perspective of Werther, who sits at his desk to communicate by means of letters and literature rather than exploring his surroundings by foot, and Goethe’s tendency to slow down the narration

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when talking about his pastoral habits, together suggest a different way of experiencing mobility than Fontane’s narrator, who distances himself from the characters through ironic comments on their hectic or belated actions within a demanding and strictly scheduled network of transportation and communication. These texts do not only demonstrate the cultural relevance of mobility as a historical reality, but also actively provide sensations and feelings of mobility in its multiple forms and dimensions, be it a liberating practice or a structural necessity that causes unrest. In the next section, I advance a more general argument on how and why perspective and rhythm can be helpful categories for analysing narrative texts regarding their potential to provide experiences of mobility.

Mobilising Affordances, Perspectives, and Rhythms Explaining how aesthetic texts might contribute to forming subjectivity needs to balance out determinism, the belief that any utterance comes from or leads to a specific set of abstract principles (Williams 1977, 83–85), and the postmodern position claiming the unreadability of texts in which meaning is created in an idiosyncratic rather than a social and cultural manner (Felski 2015, 3). Novels, songs, and films do not impose upon their readers, listeners and viewers a unified and fixed model of the world in a duplicating act of reception. On the other hand, texts as cultural objects are potentially open for continual transformation but also shaped by various cultural negotiations, both diachronically and synchronically. While cultural studies have foregrounded how certain conceptions (e.g., ideas of how weekly time is structured to accommodate work and how people live according to the model of the core family) are perpetuated and eventually become dominant (Williams 1977, 121–127), they have equally stressed the cultural dynamics involved in continuous processes, leaving room to account for both change and stabilisations. Aesthetic texts as cultural phenomena are embedded in relatively open and interactive structures of meaning-production. The same text can elicit different sensations, conceptions, and feelings for different persons; but instead of overemphasising the peculiarities of a singular receptive position, a culturally informed reading regards these subjectifying experiences as shared in their potential multiplicities: not as results of enclosed interpretative communities but as culturally interactive, mobile, and transformative.

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Discursive forms of mobility are not merely instructive or functional but evoke multiple forms of knowledge. In that sense, representations of emancipated women travelling the world or glorified actions of warfare infused with nationalist imagery can be met with both awe and disdain, depending on who reads or watches them; literary and cultural studies, if confining themselves to textual analysis rather than criticism (Felski 2015), can describe how these meaningful reactions come about based on what texts can do. Discourses work through textual forms that enable multiple and even conflicting types of knowledge and experience. In mobility studies, social sciences have referred to the fundamental multiplicities in which knowledge and embodied practices emerge (Doughty and Murray 2016, 308). Similarly, literary texts provide knowledge of their own (Felski 2008). In her book on literary forms, Levine illustrates how these forms as culturally meaningful practices have social and political implications, as they create distinct spatio-temporal patterns (2015, 3). She uses the notion of “affordance” to account for “the particular constraints and possibilities” of stylistic features, enabling us to ask “what potentialities lie latent—though not always obvious—in aesthetic and social arrangements” (ibid., 6–7). The affordances of literary forms provide a framework for dealing with the culturally meaningful and contingent practices of literature and the ways they embody experiences. Surveying appropriate methods for studying mobilities, Urry also resorts to this notion to account for both objective and subjective dimensions that are relevant when movements come into being as material structure and experience (2007, 50–51). As affordances, formal features of literary texts can be described using conventionalised terminology, but the possible responses and often multiple effects they embody become accountable as well. Literary texts operate with various overlapping and intersecting forms, so an analysis that is aware of formal techniques and narrative strategies needs to take these multiplicities seriously without forcibly harmonising them (Levine 2015, 8). In a similar approach to space, Massey challenges the conventional notion of representation as spatialisation to argue that space affords a “multiplicity of durations” (2005, 24) rather than enclosing structures. With multiple forms affording multiple spatio-­ temporal arrangements come various and often contradictory ways as to how subjectivity can be constructed. In this respect, the form of stating precise dates and locations of arrivals and departures at the beginning of most chapters in Effi Briest, for example, affords knowledge of

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a technologically-induced concept of predictability and punctuality that allows greater spatial flexibility but also demands greater dutifulness. Nevertheless, the novel also provides insights from several characters and their reactions to these constraints, a form of articulating subjectivity that affords different sets of knowledge and experiences in relation to social conventions of timekeeping and restricted ranges of mobility. In that sense, Brian Tucker (2007) is right to see the tedious narrative style of Effi Briest as a performative act of boredom to illustrate different practices of dealing with and responding to temporal constraints. Over the course of narrative, forms may change or collide with each other, so we need to consider their multiplicities and relationalities. For this, a clear understanding of the analytical terms we use to account for narrative forms and their respective affordances is crucial. The first formal concept I discuss here is perspective, which is regarded as a key feature of narrative (Genette 1980, 185–189). As a highly contested staple in narratology, perspective describes how narrators are positioned in relation to the world they are telling about, either as part of it or not, and to the extent to which they have access to the minds of characters. The term “focalisation” has been introduced by Genette (1980, 189–194) and further developed by Mieke Bal (2009, 145–165) for the ways in which narrative voice perceives and articulates the story-world not only through themselves but also by means of other characters. For Genette, focalisation is a specific narrative mode of temporarily handing over the perception to a character who is not narrating (1980, 189– 190). In this sense, focalisation is part of an information-based model and marks uneven levels of knowledge between character and narrator. Genette’s model avoids any reification and spatialisation of his parameters; hence his non-spatial use of distance, which he understands as the grade of narrative mediation for both telling of words and of events. Distance grows with the extent to which happenings and dialogues are told and transformed by the narrator (1980, 171)—in that sense, distance equals the grade of mediation. Ergo, representation of direct speech is the closest form of narrative. This rather abstract use of distance says nothing about the implicit place-making experiences that come about through narrative perspective. For Bal, in contrast, focalisation refers to the “relations between the elements presented and the vision through which they are presented” (2009, 145). This relationship mainly consists of an agent that perceives, the focaliser (Bal 2009, 147), and the focalised object (153).

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Bal’s differentiation is helpful to inquire into the ways focalisation affords senses of overcoming or creating distance by means of various kinds of mobility, be they physical, imaginative or virtual. While narrators can be located outside the story-world, focalisation captures a subjective impression of the world (Bal 2009, 145) that invokes senses of distances and over-coming or increasing them through mobile focalisers. Likewise, the narratological trope of the omniscient narrator, which Bal critiques harshly (72), can be reframed as a highly mobile focaliser often affording much more dynamic senses of place and time by means of shifting settings and time-spans; more so than focalisers that coincide with narrators, i.e., first-person narrators like Werther. Such a mobilised view on narrative perspective can be brought into a dialogue with the modes of managing, maintaining, and overcoming distances (Larsen 2014, 125) by everyday practices of mobilities and communications (Morley 2011, 743–744). From this view, letter-writing, such as the narrator-character Werther, creates a complex focalisation (Bal 2009, 160–163) in which a focaliser addresses its focalised object directly, affording experiences of communicative proximity. Next to perspective, rhythm is an interesting formal feature of narrative, though so far still underdeveloped in literary studies. The notion has gained more attention in mobility studies in recent years, particularly in relation to Henri Lefebvre’s project of “rhythmanalysis,” in which he conceives rhythm in very general terms as the “interaction of time, place, and the expenditure of energy” (2004, 15). These interactions lead to repetitive patterns, amplitudes, and interferences (2004, 15). Focusing on the ways these interconnected events build various regularities in everyday life, most notoriously in commuting, rhythm provides a frame to analyse “the multiple temporalities of places and forms of mobility” (Edensor 2014, 163). A pervasive form affording temporal order through regulating and according numerous movements of everyday life and bodies, rhythms seem both naturalised and routinised constraints (Levine 2015, 49) that can eventually become “sedimented in bodies” (Edensor 2014). Regarding bodies as active and polyrhythmic themselves rather than passive sites impressed by regular patterns of movement, Lefebvre insists that the body and its many rhythmic patterns are always entangled and affected by other rhythms, which can be harmonious, in case of eurhythmia, or, in the case of arrhythmia, pathological (2004, 67). For narratives, Michail Bakhtin’s notion of chronotope can be regarded a prominent precursor of interrelating time and space in

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literary studies, though his analyses tend to abstract temporal and spatial patterns as characteristics of genres (1981, 84–85). Instead, rhythm as a form organising multiple spatio-temporalities, particularly in their relations to one another, can account for the affordances of telling mobility. Bal refers to rhythm as the “speed of representation” (2009, 98), which coincides with Genette’s term “duration” (1981, 95). Accordingly, the rhythm in narrative increases the more events, such as change of places, are told in the same amount of time as the narration (not the story) lasts (Bal 2009, 100). By relating narrative temporalities to practices of mobility and place-making, rhythm can be a useful category to distinguish how rhythmic forms work and afford experiences, particularly when rhythms collide (Levine 2015, 65). In a related manner, the rhythmic form of city-hopping, visiting many cities in a short period, affords different subjectifying experiences of space and time than most other forms of travel. Whereas rides in trains, cars, and planes might have been extraordinary at some point and worth telling of in detail, they become “mundane practices” (Edensor 2014, 163) and often only return into the limelight the moment their rhythm breaks down. Thus, focusing on the affordances of rhythmic patterns in narrative can point out which practices of mobility are made meaningful and which ones have become unnoticeable. For example, when the narrator tells of Effi’s honeymoon trip to Italy and her return to Prussia, the narration of the “mundane” train ride is told in one sentence (Fontane 2015, 32) and leaves hardly any impression. In contrast, the rather long narration of Effi’s ride on horseback next to Major Campras (107–113), with whom she has a short affair later in the novel, suggests that this embodied practice of mobility is a more meaningful form that affords experiences of intimacy. After these general considerations on narrative perspective and rhythm, I discuss the two novels in more detail in the following section. I want to show how their formal features afford distinctive senses of mobility as culturally meaningful practices.

Looking Afar, Staying Nearby: Goethe’s Werther One can hardly overestimate the impact of The Sorrows of Young Werther, a text regarded by some as the beginning of modern German literature (Vellusig 2012, 129–130). Goethe’s first novel, first published in 1774, is considered a key text in the history of modern subjectivity because it

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emphatically articulates individuality and its multiple failures to accommodate a world becoming increasingly contingent, flexible, and mobile (von Petersdorff 2006, 67–73). It was written at a time when an intellectual public sphere developed around the many courts within the decentralised, multi-territorial Holy Roman Empire (Whaley 2012, 528) along with an ever-growing market for books and journals in addition to a well-established postal system (Whaley 2012, 458–465). As part of the 1770s Sturm und Drang movement, which challenged aesthetic conventions, dogmatic forms of rationalism, and governmental authority (Whaley 2012, 462), Werther was written at a time of ongoing fundamental reforms, including the implementation of civil rights in relation to free passage, movement, and property with the Neues Teutsches Staatsrecht in 1769 (Whaley 2012, 489). The novel follows eighteenth-century poetics of authenticity and uses the then popular epistolary form that affords impressions of immediate presence, bridging spatial, temporal, and social distances (Paulin 2007, 23). But in contrast to other epistolary novels, Goethe’s is monological, showing only Werther’s letters; the novel’s lack of resonance, as Vellusig remarks (2012, 142), was the reason for the novel’s cultural resonance, because this form affords expressions of subjectivity as individualised, rather than as part of sociabilities. Trying to find his position in a world that deems, as the philosopher Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi put it 1773, commerce as “the real true blood of society” (quoted in Whaley 2012, 457), Werther’s articulated wish to dwell and make himself comfortable in pastoral sceneries (Sullivan 2015, 119) seem as sedentary forms affording ideas of stabilised places and belongings. The novel’s perspectives and rhythms afford, as I argue in this part of my essay, experiences of physical immobility that allow for intense perception and insight, creating movements of an affective type. These aesthetic forms construct subjectivity around the idea that a static centre and temporal permanence are necessary for personal integrity, while mobilities of emotions and imaginations appear as fundamental for private communication. In various scenes of the novel, Werther writes about his frequent strolls and sensations. In the letter from 18 August, he contemplates his weary state and looks at his surroundings. By this, the wandering view of the focalisation articulates a landscape by focusing on various points around the focaliser, who stands on “the rocks” and studies several points around him: from “hills” and “mountains” over a “valley” and “woods” to a nearby “river” and the “birds” around him, until his view

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finally rests on “the ground and the moss” (Goethe 2012, 44–45). This seemingly linear form of articulating a landscape is done in a specific order, beginning with the point farthest away and ending with the place of the focaliser himself. Instead of sketching the horizon, the focalisation continually shortens its distance between subject and object within one period. Additionally, the sensual modes become more varied as the focalisation narrows down; the focaliser first only sees the hills and mountains before feeling and hearing the “evening breeze” and the singing “birds.” Throughout this scene, the focaliser rests on a firm spot from which its environment is “surveyed […] in its fruitfulness” (ibid., 44). This narrative form affords a sense of place that works through widest outreach and leads back to a fixed centre, relating a holistic image of nature’s “inner life” to the “I” of Werther. The sensual riches are not experienced by foot but through acute ways of perception, from remote places to the moss beneath one’s feet. Though limited in his physical range of mobility, this perspective affords a sense of intensely experiencing the world through bodily stasis, not despite it. Such a form of fixing place and time has raised some concern. For Bakhtin, Werther is a prime example of an idyllic chronotope, in which a harmonious life is rendered without any spatio-temporal depth or possibility for change (Bakhtin 1981, 226–227). Sullivan has contested this view, foregrounding the novel’s transformative character: though it might begin with pastoral imagery, it changes to a “dark pastoral,” in which the interests of man and nature are not reconcilable any more (2015, 119–120). Still, many scenes, especially those about Werther’s favourite location in the first part of the book, evoke a sense of idyllic cosiness. When Werther first tells Wilhelm about Wahlheim and the “path up from the village” from where “you can encompass the whole valley in one view,” he finds it a “congenial and homely” place (Goethe 2012, 11). The narrator shares his perspective by instructing his addressee (“if you follow”) on how to reach the point where one finds peace. Here, Werther can enjoy the simple things of life: “I have my table and chair fetched out from the house, and there I drink my coffee and read my Homer” (12). Reading is repeatedly mentioned as a largely immobile but imaginatively highly engaging practice, seemingly well suited for dealing with social constraints. When Werther is insulted and excluded from the court at the beginning of the second part, he finds comfort in the fictional world of literature:

150  R. KABELIK I slipped quietly out of that respectable company, departed, and drove in a cabriolet to M. and from the hill watched the sun go down and read in my Homer the glorious episode in which Odysseus is given hospitality by the excellent swineherd. Then all was well. (Goethe 2012, 61)

While the ride in the cabriolet is not further specified, Werther’s imaginative travels during his readings are focalised in detail, even to the point where they take over the narration, as Werther’s recitation of Ossian later in the novel demonstrates. The metaphorically moving force of emotions through such communicative practices is also reflected in contemporary philosophical debates about sympathy, which Miranda Burgess links to contemporary conditions of mobility in the eighteenth century (2011, 303). Similarly, while physical mobility hardly matters, the novel’s focalisation affords movement in sensual and imaginative ways. The places of solitude that Werther constructs through his narration are idyllic in the sense of allowing for artistic and relaxing activities, whereas his isolating loneliness, as Kathrin Wittler argues (2013, 215–216), articulates a sense of being alone as an existential threat. Being by oneself as a creative and productive endeavour is also afforded by the novel’s perspective. As Werther writes and narrates himself, he is bound to his desk; thus, going away from that place leads to erasure of his vision and voice: Because, between you and me, since I began writing I have three times been on the point of laying down my pen, having my horse saddled, and riding out. And yet I vowed this morning that I wouldn’t ride out, and every minute I go to the window to see how high the sun is still. — — — I couldn’t help myself, I had to go and see her. And here I am back again, Wilhelm, and I’ll eat my supper and write to you. (Goethe 2012, 16)

At the table, narrative voice and focaliser converge. Werther as narrator also becomes the focaliser who perceives himself in the process of narration. In similar moments, Werther sits at his desk and looks through his window “at the distant hill” to “the morning sun” that “illuminates the quiet meadows of the valley floor and the soft river serpent towards” him (76). Again, the perspective mobilises the focalisation by stabilising the position of the focaliser, affording a wandering view without anyone actually going anywhere. When Werther eventually becomes mobile in a physical and geographical sense, he reflects on the futility of doing so.

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While he repeatedly looks at the scenery around him, like the “wood there” or a “mountain-top” from where he can “survey the whole wide country,” heading towards these points only results in a state of emptiness: “when we hurry after it, when There becomes Here, all is as it was and we stand in our poverty, in our narrowness” (24). Werther recursively tells about his strollings and continually shifts the focalisation to another point far away. This far-sightedness affords the feeling of overcoming distance but without any emotional reverberation, as the narrator’s remarks demonstrate. On the other hand, a too proximate relationship is equally dangerous, as Werther’s desperation regarding his love for Lotte and his precarious social position show. Managing a well-balanced distance between focaliser and its object is not solved through endless, undirected movements but through a change of perspective directed towards oneself. Along with a precarious focalisation that tends to lose its focus in itself, the novel’s rhythm also affords a sense of uncertainty. With the spatio-temporal frame of the letter-form, the narrative voice positions itself between recent past and imminent future. Werther’s first letter is exactly located at the point between departure and arrival. He tells his friend, whom he has left, how “glad” he is “to be away,” and promises to “cease forever chewing over the small evils that Fate puts in our path” and to “enjoy the present” (5) and leaving behind his past. While celebrating the present, the letter-writer’s rhetoric also works through temporalities of memories, apologies, promises, and anticipations; in this form of sliding time frames, anything but the present moment becomes highly uncertain. References to futures or pasts appear as contingent and subject to change, just as Werther remarks to Wilhelm later about the tentativeness of his plans and actions: “I must go. I thank you, Wilhelm, for deciding me as I wavered. For two weeks I have been living with the thought of leaving” (48). At another point, Werther reflects on the unstable temporal flows with which he narrates his actions and thoughts. Although he tries to refrain from visiting Lotte too often, as she is already engaged to Albert, he is not able to stick to his intentions and goes away to see her (35–36). Creating an everyday rhythm of his own, one that only follows his wish to be with his love-interest, Werther’s narrative translates unlimited communication into a language of excessive love, disregarding social considerations altogether. At this point, his unexpected movements are to be expected.

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Counteracting the contingency that Werther’s restless rhythms afford, he recounts his daily routines at Wahlheim in a slow, stretched manner, taking some time to relate each action he performs there regularly: When at sunrise every morning I walk out to my Wahlheim and there in the landlady’s garden pick my own sugar peas, sit down and trim them, reading in my Homer the while; and then in the little kitchen choose a pan, take a knob of butter, put the peas on the flame, cover them, sit by to stir them now and then […]. Nothing fills me more completely with warm and true feelings than do such details of patriarchal life which I, thank God, can weave without any affection into my own way of living. (Goethe 2012, 24–25)

With the iterative way of telling of his pastoral life-style, Werther’s rhythm is not only slowed down but also affords a sense of timelessness. Hence, von Petersdorff (2006, 76) argues that these idyllic scenes are not ironic but that they articulate an idealised sense of temporal stabilisation for Werther. This idyllic form arranges slowed-down rhythms with immobile, stabilised place-making practices. Conversely, when Werther goes out to look at familiar settings only several days before his suicide, the narrative rhythm is faster and conforms to his present state: [L]ooking down mournfully on a spot where I once rested under a willow with Lotte, walking on a hot day—that too was flooded and I scarcely even recognized the willow. Oh Wilhelm—and I thought, her meadows and around the hunting lodge and around our bower, I thought how discomposed it will all be now by the river in its spate. (Goethe 2012, 89)

In his distress, Werther focalises on beloved and now “discomposed” places, and himself in different temporal states. Unable to finish his sentences, the high-paced rhythm creates the impression of an exalted and overwhelming dynamism. Washed away by the current, the narrator’s interrupted speech differs considerably from the consistent and gentle pace of his earlier letters. The rhythm’s speed increases even further after the protagonist shoots himself. In the novel’s last passage, told by a fictional editor (83) and focalised through Werther’s servant, the narrator conveys only the barest information about what had happened after the shot was heard: “He found his master on the floor, the pistol, blood. He shouted, he grasped him—no answer” (111). The paratactic and asyndetic structure’s fast-paced rhythm affords a feeling of extreme tension

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during Werther’s last moments—we might even speak of a s­hocking experience that this narration of suicide evokes (Felski 2008, 105). While the protagonist is lying on the floor, the narrative arranges multiple events and movements that happen within the last few pages. At this point, Werther is physically immobilised, but the narration moves its readers considerably on an affective level through a rhythm and a perspective that focuses on the various reactions and quick movements of those close to Werther. Through its formal features, the text affords an immediacy of affect that constructs subjectivity mainly around experiential qualities of talking, writing, reading, and talking. Although these embodied practices of communication are somewhat physically immobile, they evoke a circulation of intense feelings through contemplation, imagination, and personal interaction. With its greater spatio-temporal distance to its characters and places, Theodor Fontane’s realist novel Effi Briest affords different sets of experiences of everyday movements. While Effi also writes letters to overcome distances, she also takes trains and rides horses, conveying other sensations of her surroundings and feelings of liberation unknown to Werther. Instead of a seemingly immediate narration, the perspective of Fontane’s novel places the actions and feelings of the main character within a social system of spatio-temporal organisation to which she has to adapt.

Out of Step: Fontane’s Effi Briest Considered a “high-point of the bourgeois novel” (Woodford 2007, 83), Theodor Fontane’s late novel Effi Briest was first published as a book in 1895. It tells the story of young aristocratic Effi von Briest marrying Geert von Innstetten, who takes his much younger wife to his home in fictional Kessin, a provincial yet somewhat cosmopolitan town in the Eastern part of the German Empire. Often (unfavourably) compared to Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary because of its main motif (von Graevenitz 2014, 623), adultery and its consequences for women, Fontane’s novel confronts Prussian aristocracy and rural society with imminent modernisation (Darby 2013, 160–161). Since the mid nineteenth century, the areas that later formed the Empire underwent great socio-economic change, particularly with booming industrialisation during the Gründerzeit, for which infrastructure and transportation provided necessary capacities (Hochstadt 1999, 107). Political unification

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into a single empire, though with relatively strong federalist mechanisms, was accompanied by an expansion of the Prussian railway network, whose range quintupled within the last three decades of the nineteenth century, connecting cities nationwide (Mitchell 2000, 213). “German mobility was […] rising in the middle of the nineteenth century” (Hochstadt 1999, 107), but instead of emigrating, people from poorly developed regions began to move more frequently to urban centres of the newly formed nation (Hochstadt 1999, 109). Although railways were efficient, a third of the population remained badly connected (Blackbourn 1997, 356), polarising cultural differences between city and countryside. Landed elites in charge of rural areas often promoted anti-liberal, anti-Semitic, and anti-Catholic resentments, especially in the Eastern parts of Prussia (Clark 2007, 562–575). Massive rural flight was met with anti-urbanism, framing human mobility as a threat to the German nation’s integrity (Hochstadt 1999, 107). Conversely, as more people moved to cities, Berlin became the setting for many novels of that time (Jeffries 2003, 129). Increasing centralisation also built the backdrop for negotiating periphery and its living conditions; in his Atlas of the European Novel, Franco Moretti lists Effi Briest as one of numerous late-nineteenth-century novels in which “provincial boredom and the slightly corrupt charm of the capital” are contrasted (1998, 166). Accordingly, the novel follows topical conventions in its representation of an unhappily married woman who is bound to her provincial home and finds temporary excitement in travelling (Ambrose 2016, 139–143). However, the text also demonstrates the strict moral codes of its time by showing “how the adulteress could be socially and emotionally broken” (Blackbourn 1997, 370). To illustrate both social expectations next to individual rebellion, Fontane uses irony to create distance from his characters—a style for which he is still highly praised (Jeffries 2003, 130). Through the novel’s perspective, oscillating between external and internal view, the borders between subject and society are blurred; characters’ desires and social expectations become indistinguishable (Woodford 2007, 97). These values and yearnings are also articulated through the narration of embodied practices of mobility, such as walking, riding, and taking carriages or trains. In the following, I discuss how these representations along with the novel’s formal features afford ideas of appropriate time use, intimate communication, and physical health. Although the narration uses characters as focalisers, mostly Effi or her husband, the novel predominantly uses an external narrator for

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focalisation. This form not only allows for a greater distance between perceiving subject and perceived object, but it also encompasses a narrative use of large time-spans and vast spaces. After their honeymoon trip to Italy in “the middle of November” (Fontane 2015, 32), the narrator tells about their journey to Geert’s home and refers to precise dates and times of arrivals and departures of trains, carriages, and boats. This focalisation affords a stable and meticulously calculated timetable in which characters must act and manage their mobilities accordingly. The external focaliser highlights Geert’s punctuality and reproduces his sense for order by enumerating the information and resources necessary for a timely homecoming. Leaving out impressions gained during their travel from Italy to Germany, including a panorama the newlyweds visit in Berlin, the external focalisation foregrounds the extent to which industrialised mobility-systems determine everyday practices. In fact, many chapters of the novel open with references to expected and realised comings and goings, such as “It was well past eleven, but Gieshübler had still not arrived” (45) or “In less than quarter of an hour they were at the house” (90). This pattern repeated throughout the novel is not merely a precise abstraction articulated as social convention but also “produce[s] a sense of constriction” (Youngman et al. 2016, 7). Effi is continuously contrasted to this strict order imposed on her. After her first night at her new home in Kessin, the focalisation rests on Effi: “It was already bright daylight when Effi woke the next morning” (Fontane 2015, 39). The narrator not only tells about her waking up but also subtly comments (“already”) on her oversleeping. In the next sentences, she temporarily becomes the focaliser, only to highlight her disorientation: “Where was she? Of course, in Kessin, in the house of the Landrat, von Innstetten, and she was his wife, Baroness Innstetten” (39). The novel’s perspective changes swiftly between outside and inside views; the external perspective is not neutral but affords a tightly controlled spatio-temporal order—a form of spatio-temporal patterning that collides repeatedly with those of the characters, particularly with Effi’s form of living. These character focalisations mainly afford subjectified temporalities that are incompatible with the realist order set up by the external narrator. Effi’s focalisations often articulate nostalgic drawbacks, while the external focalisation keeps moving forward, both spatially and temporally. For example, when Effi finally leaves Kessin with her husband on a boat, the trajectories of the two kinds of focalisation differ considerably:

156  R. KABELIK The boat, a light sailing-boat (the steamboats only ran in the summer), left at twelve. Effi and Innstetten were already on board a quarter of an hour before that […]. She stayed in the rather stuffy room until they had left the river and emerged into the broad estuary of the Breitling. Then Innstetten came and called her to come back on deck to enjoy the splendid view. […] Effi thought back to the day, exactly fifteen months ago now, on which she had driven in an open carriage along the bank of the Breitling. Such a short period of time, her life often so quiet and lonely. And yet how much had happened since then! (Fontane 2015, 152–153)

The external focalisation is not bound to the spatio-temporal coordinates of the main characters but rather provides information that is practically irrelevant to them at that moment. Consequently, this perspective positions the characters and their actions only in relation to the schedules of transportation and communication. Effi, however, focalises differently and affords a spatio-temporal order of her own through her thoughts and memories of former movements. Other instances of internal focalisations are Effi’s letters, whose aesthetic form affords a greater sense of sincerity. Being often on her own and bored in her house in Kessin, she writes a long letter to her mother, narrated in full (78), in which she discloses her concerns she cannot share with her husband. After some more months of tediousness and loneliness, Effi “was now frequently writing to Hohen-Cremmen” (82). Spatially rather locked down in the badly connected periphery of the German Empire, Effi’s physical mobility is somewhat restrained; but via mediated communications (Larsen 2014, 125–126), she overcomes distances to her family and friends, hence creating proximity and familiarity at a place she fears and from which she feels distanced. The life of a baroness in the Western Pomeranian province also demands a sharp rhythm governing one’s options for being mobile. In this role, visitations are matters of courtesy and business, not friendship: [T]hen the visits in the town had to begin […]. Once they were completed, it was the turn of the gentry in the surrounding countryside. That took longer since, given the distances, mostly only a single visit could be made on any one day. First they went to the Borckes in Rothenmoor, then to Morgnitz, Dabergotz, and Kroschentin, where they made dutycalls on the Ahlemanns, Jatzkows, and Grasenabbs. A few further visits came later, including one to old Baron Güldenklee in Papenhagen. (Fontane 2015, 50)

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The narrator tells of the daily visits to the neighbouring families in a short, staccato-like manner without any detailed description, as none of these visits is important to Effi. Bored by these meetings of “mediocre people, mostly of dubious friendliness” (50), the perky focalisation through Effi’s view on the landed aristocracy affords a different, more liberal rhythm that collides with the socially expected one. Confronted by this “dressage” (Lefebvre 2004, 38–43), her narratively articulated set of embodied practices of moving on her own challenge her status as a complying trophy wife of an ambitious district councillor. Right at the beginning, Effi’s mother remarks on her daughter’s fondness for sports and gymnastics: “You really ought to have been a circus artiste, Effi. Always on the trapeze, always flying through the air” (Fontane 2015, 4). On several occasions in the novel, Effi resists the everyday rhythm she is assigned to as a mother of a young child. While Geert is away on rides with Major Crampas, Effi, who has no friends in town she could visit, stays at home, reads magazines or goes out for a walk with her child and her housekeeper. As it happens more than once, this tedious routine is told iteratively and partly in a slowed-down pace by mentioning even the minutest details, such as “chestnuts scattered over the ground” (100). Fed up with the monotonous rhythm of infantilising activities, Effi interrupts this spatio-temporal pattern and “suddenly expressed the wish to go out riding” with her husband and his friend (101). Consequently, when the “whole cavalcade set off for the first time” (101), the narrator refers to their ride as a singular event to underscore its meaningfulness for Effi. Later, when “their rides continued into November” (103), the narration gives much space to one of her trips and her conversation with Major Crampas along their way. Events of everyday routines related to transportation are summarised or completely omitted, as the narration hardly mentions most rides in trains and carriages and rather foregrounds the spatio-temporal circumstances of departures and arrivals. For example, when the train to Berlin “set off,” Effi appears one sentence later already among the crowd at “Friedrichstrasse Station” (153), giving no account of the train ride itself. Curiously, Effi is fond of watching trains, which she does with “heartfelt yearning” (70); even near the novel’s ending, she observes comings and goings of trains and other happenings “on the railway embankment” (235) near her parents’ home. Thus, while transport hardly matters in the act of narration, the narrative rhythm slows down

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whenever Effi engages in communicative practices that are meaningful to her. By giving more space to these instances, riding through the landscape for pleasure or walking in a park, the narrative also affords its readers a heightened understanding through recognition (Felski 2008, 25) of what these practices entail as cultural phenomena. Moreover, the text also directly relates these everyday practices to forms of embodiments: after Effi breaks with her daughter and experiences depression, she is diagnosed with “feverishness” and “nervous disorder” (Fontane 2015, 222). Not bound by social expectations any more, she then “spent the whole day out in the park, because she needed fresh air” (227). At that point, Effi’s body cannot cope with the arrhythmic form afforded by her single life as a divorced woman and social outcast in urban Berlin. Even the strict spatio-temporal order, so prevalent during major parts of the novel, is somewhat loosened after Effi’s and Geert’s divorce: “It was three or four days after this conversation that Innstetten went to his study an hour earlier as usual” (229). While the narrator keeps progressing in time—“May was beautiful, June even more so” (234), “It was a month later, and September was coming to an end” (238)—Effi’s own rhythm abruptly ends, but not on a sour note; in her last moments, a “feeling of liberation came over her” (238). Her profoundly healthy state and the mental well-being she regained at her parents’ house also afford a subjectifying idea of what an ideal rhythm as embodiment could look like for women: not being restricted to housekeeping and child rearing but independently going outside, riding horses, and travelling, among other things. Thus, while the narrative closes with Effi’s death, the narrative’s form affords various experiences of female well-being and happiness through narration of embodied practices, some of which, e.g., gymnastics, only emerged at that time (von Graevenitz 2014, 594–604). The novel’s ironic and complex form affords this sense of conditioned agency under s­pecific constraints: an external narrator whose formal techniques (over-) emphasise a realist paradigm of plannable time and space, and the ­perspective of a young woman who tries to regain her liberties. The aesthetic collision of these forms affords a recognition of Effi’s numerous pleasures against the backdrop of her struggle against her social environment. Even the narration of seemingly mundane mobilities that structure Effi’s perspective and rhythms affords its readers a relatable set of experiences, highlighting the subjectifying potential of embodied practices.

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Conclusion: The Multiple Forms of Mobilities Mobilities as embodied practices come in various ontologies and medialities, from geographical dislocation to virtual augmentation (Sheller 2013). For narrative fiction and other aesthetic texts and practices to provide relevant data for mobility studies, they should not be limited to their function as historically localised discourse, working for or against power set-ups and regimes. While such approaches provide valuable and stimulating knowledge for understanding multi-scalar and multi-modal workings of and through mobilities, they also level out textual specificities that might explain how the texts in question structure experiences and, thus, construct subjectivity through aesthetic practices of reading and writing. By looking at formal features, as I have proposed here in relation to narrative, we can inquire into the ways movement becomes culturally meaningful through specific aesthetic processes. Developing such an approach within literary studies, I have outlined two formal features, perspective and rhythm, and shown how these afford senses of various modes and forms of mobility in Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther and Fontane’s Effi Briest. While Werther follows pastoral ideas of dwelling and settling, the narrative’s localising perspective and shifting rhythm articulate an intensively sensual and imaginative mobility in relation to practices of viewing and reading. In Effi Briest, the ironic narrator reiterates formally strict frames that schedule the mobilities of characters, whose rhythms, for most of them, accommodate to social expectations and become exhausting or boring routines. Through their aesthetic qualities, the novels contribute to subjectifying processes, albeit not as orders or commands but by the immersive practice of reading (Felski 2008, 26). Considering perspective in terms of creating distances and proximities and rhythm as a spatio-temporal regulation of narrative flows and attentiveness, these concepts might not only be useful for mobility-informed readings of other literary texts but also for formal examinations of films, architecture or everyday practices of mobility. As culturally meaningful and embodied practices, the multiple forms of movement by which people communicate (Morley 2011) are performed and sensed in multi-modal situations. Thus, ­ enquiring into their diverse aesthetic dimensions is a necessary endeavour for future interdisciplinary research, in which the humanities can provide and develop new analytic categories for examining how mobilities are perceived and experienced.

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References Adey, Peter. 2006. “If Mobility Is Everything, Then It Is Nothing: Towards a Relational Politics of (Im)mobilities.” Mobilities 1 (1): 75–94. Adey, Peter. 2010. Mobility. London: Routledge. Ambrose, Kathryn. 2016. The Woman Question in Nineteenth-Century English, German and Russian Literature: (En)gendering Barriers. Leiden: Brill. Baker, Beth. 2016. “Regime.” In Keywords of Mobility: Critical Entanglements, edited by Noel B. Salazar and Kiran Jayaram, 152–170. New York: Berghahn. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bal, Mieke. 2009. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Toronto: Toronto University Press. Blackbourn, David. 1997. The Fontana History of Germany, 1780–1918: The Long Nineteenth Century. London: Fontana. Burgess, Miranda. 2011. “On Being Moved: Sympathy, Mobility, and Narrative Form.” Poetics Today 32 (2): 289–321. Clark, Christopher. 2007. Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947. London: Penguin. Cresswell, Tim. 2006. On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World. New York: Routledge. Cresswell, Tim. 2010. “Towards a Politics of Mobility.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28: 17–31. Darby, David. 2013. “Theodor Fontane und die Vernetzung der Welt. Die Mark Brandenburg zwischen Vormoderne und Moderne.” In Metropole, Provinz und Welt: Raum und Mobilität in der Literatur des Realismus, edited by Roland Berbig and Dirk Göttsche, 145–162. Berlin: de Gruyter. Doughty, Karolina, and Lesley Murray. 2016. “Discourses of Mobility: Institutions, Everyday Lives and Embodiment.” Mobilities 11 (2): 303–322. Edensor, Tim. 2014. “Rhythm and Arrhythmia.” In The Routledge Handbook for Mobilities, edited by Peter Adey, David Bissell, Kevin Hannam, Peter Merriman, and Mimi Sheller, 163–171. London: Routledge. Felski, Rita. 2008. The Uses of Literature. Oxford: Blackwell. Felski, Rita. 2015. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Fontane, Theodor. 2015. Effi Briest. Translated by Mike Mitchell. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Genette, Gérard. 1980. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. 2012. The Sorrows of Young Werther. Translated by David Constantine. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Greenblatt, Stephen. 2010. “A Mobility Studies Manifesto.” In Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto, edited by Stephen Greenblatt, Ines G. Županov,

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Reinhard Meyer-Kalkus, Heike Paul, Pál Nyíri, and Friederike Pannewick, 250–253. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hochstadt, Steve. 1999. Mobility and Modernity: Migration in Germany, 1820– 1914. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Jeffries, Matthew. 2003. Imperial Culture in Germany, 1871–1918. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Keightley, Emily, and Anna Reading. 2014. “Mediated Mobilities.” Media, Culture & Society 36 (3): 285–301. Larsen, Jonas. 2014. “Distance and Proximity.” In The Routledge Handbook for Mobilities, edited by Peter Adey, David Bissell, Kevin Hannam, Peter Merriman, and Mimi Sheller, 125–133. London: Routledge. Lefebvre, Henri. 2004. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. Translated by Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore. London: Continuum. Levine, Caroline. 2015. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Manderscheid, Katharina. 2014. “The Movement Problem, the Car and Future Mobility Regimes: Automobility as Dispositif and Mode of Regulation.” Mobilities 9 (4): 604–626. Massey, Doreen. 2005. For Space. Los Angeles: SAGE. Merriman, Peter, and Lynne Pearce. 2017. “Mobility and the Humanities.” Mobilities 12 (4): 493–508. Mitchell, Allan. 2000. The Great Train Race: Railways and the Franco-German Rivalry, 1815–1914. New York: Berghahn. Moretti, Franco. 1998. Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900. London: Verso. Morley, David. 2011. “Communications and Transport: The Mobility of Information, People, and Commodities.” Media, Culture & Society 33 (5): 743–759. Paulin, Roger. 2007. Goethe, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers. In Landmarks in the German Novel, edited by Peter Hutchinson, 15–30. Oxford: Lang. Revill, George. 2014. “Histories.” In The Routledge Handbook for Mobilities, edited by Peter Adey, David Bissell, Kevin Hannam, Peter Merriman, and Mimi Sheller, 506–516. London: Routledge. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. 1986. The Railway Journey. The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century. Oakland: University of California Press. Sheller, Mimi. 2013. “Mobile Mediality: Location, Dislocation, Augmentation.” In New Mobilities Regimes in Arts and Social Sciences, edited by Susanne Witzgall, Gerlinde Vogl, and Sven Kesselring, 309–326. Farnham: Ashgate. Sullivan, Heather I. 2015. “Nature and the ‘Dark Pastoral’ in Goethe’s Werther.” Goethe Yearbook 22: 115–132. Tucker, Brian. 2007. “Performing Boredom in Effi Briest: On the Effects of Narrative Speed.” The German Quarterly 80 (2): 185–200. Urry, John. 2007. Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity Press.

162  R. KABELIK Vellusig, Robert. 2012. “‘Werther muss—muss seyn!’ Der Briefroman als Bewusstseinsroman.” In Poetik des Briefromans: Wissens- und mediengeschichtliche Studien, edited by Gideon Stiening and Robert Vellusig, 129–166. Berlin: de Gruyter. von Graevenitz, Gerhart. 2014. Theodor Fontane: Ängstliche Moderne. Über das Imaginäre. Paderborn: Konstanz University Press. von Petersdorff, Dirk. 2006. “‘Ich soll nicht zu mir selbst kommen.’ Werther, Goethe und die Formung moderner Subjektivität.” Goethe-Jahrbuch 123: 67–85. Whaley, Joachim. 2012. Germany and the Holy Roman Empire, Volume 2: From the Peace of Westphalia to the Dissolution of the Reich 1648–1806. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wittler, Kathrin. 2013. “Einsamkeit: Ein literarisches Gefühl im 18. Jahrhundert.” Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 87 (2): 186–216. Woodford, Charlotte. 2007. “Fontane, Effi Briest.” In Landmarks in the German Novel (1), edited by Peter Hutchinson, 83–98. Oxford: Peter Lang. Youngman, Paul, Gabrielle Tremo, Lenny Enkhbold, and Lizzy Stanton. 2016. “Visualizing the Railway Space in Fontane’s Effi Briest.” TRANSIT 10 (2). Online journal article: http://transit.berkeley.edu/2016/youngman-et-al/.

CHAPTER 7

Running (in) Your City Kai Syng Tan

Starting Points Giving Walking a Run for Its Money Mobilities are embodied, involving fragile, aged, gendered, racialised ­bodies. Such bodies encounter other bodies, objects and the physical world multisensuously. […] Bodies sense and make sense of the world as they move bodily in and through it, creating discursively mediated sensescapes that ­signify social taste and distinction, ideology and meaning. (Büscher 2010, 8)

Drawing from philosopher Maurice Merleau Ponty and sociologist Tim Dant, sociologist Monika Büscher talks about how the body “senses as it moves.” It does so through “kinaesthetic skill, merging sensory experience that informs one what the body is doing in space through the sensations of movement registered in joints, muscles, tendon and so on with intentions and bodily memory” (2010, 8). Artists ­mobilise the body in motion in all sorts of ways to create discursively mediated sensescapes of the physical world. Of these, walking is a p ­ opular and well-documented process. Forerunners include the Situationist K. S. Tan (*)  King’s College London, London, UK © The Author(s) 2019 M. Aguiar et al. (eds.), Mobilities, Literature, Culture, Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27072-8_7

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International (1950s), Teh-Ching Hsieh (1981–1982), Janet Cardiff (such as 1999) and Francis Alÿs (such as 2004). Contemporary UK practitioners include Rosanna Cade (since 2011) and members of the Walking Artists Network (since 2007). Within the field of mobilities, key artists include Jen Southern and Mike Collier (both since at least 2010). Live art, participatory art, audio walks, film, maps, drawings, installations are just a few of the approaches that these artists mobilise to show how different bodies sense, make sense of, and engage creatively and critically with the urban world. What if we up the speed? What happens if an artist and/or their p­ articipant move at a speed faster than walking, with one or both feet off the ground at any one time—which is the basic, dictionary definition of “running” (Simpson and Weiner 1989, 250)? If this running body is fragile, aged, gendered and racialised, what happens when it encounters other bodies that are not running, and that are not subject to or aware of fragility, ageing, gender and racialisation? How does moving at speed transform how the body sees and feels about, reads and interprets the city and the objects that it runs into? What and how does it sense and make sense of the urban condition? What sorts of sensescapes can it create? What does it signify? How is it seen, read and understood or misunderstood? Can we up the game, and consider “running” not only as a means to sense and make sense of the city, but as a poetic, urban intervention that can enable the individual to feel empowered as they produce their own discursively mediated sensescapes, today? In other words, as you run in and run through the city, can you also metaphorically “run” it? At the Junction of Mobilities, Visual Art and Running Running has been surprisingly under-researched as an expression of embodied subjectivities within visual art, mobilities studies and their intersections. Separately, there are sporadic or inconsistent p ­ recedents. Within what they call “forms of mobile art practice,” artists Jen Southern, Emma Rose and Linda O’Keefe talk about the different ways in which art and mobilities collide and run hand in hand (2017, 2–4). They include: “vision in motion as method”: “making on the move, by recording and gathering materials on the move, or through ­performative travels”; “art as visual representation” and “experience”; the artist as a “mobile maker” travelling the terrain that they research; ­ “artworks as forms of expression and insight,” as “significant modalities for

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configuring and conveying ideas.” “By finding and inhabiting mobile situations artists become engaged with the problems they investigate, and draw our attention to the specific situations in which global mobilities are enacted,” they argue (Southern et al. 2017, 2–4). In other words, such practices open new insights to issues and features associated with the places that they draw on, while also revealing the larger system of how people, ideas and power flow. Running yields yet other new insights not revealed by walking—or driving (for instance McGowan 2018), flying (as Southern also does) and other mobilities. Yet entanglements between mobilities and running, and between walking and running, remain obscured. Since at least the 1960s, running has been a global, mass fitness practice (Latham 2015, 103). The annual London Marathon has seen 1,003,473 finishers since its ­inception in 1981 (Virgin Money London Marathon 2017), and Palestine held its first marathon, aptly named Right To Movement, in 2013 (Palestine Marathon 2013). In recent decades, fields beyond sport sciences or biomechanics are beginning to study or use running. They include philosophy, sociology and neuroscience (Austin 2007; Bale 2002; Mattson 2012). There are novels that feature running as theme or motif (Sillitoe 2010 [1959]) and non-fiction work that discuss how running relates to the writing process (Murakami 2008; Oates 1999). Yet, in visual art, well-known examples that mobilise running as motif, methodology or metaphor are few (Creed 2008; Nguyen-Hatsushiba 2009), while visual practices that use running in an urban setting are fewer still (Blast Theory 2001; Geoffroy 2012). There are studies on running in urban contexts (including Latham and McCormack 2004; Cook et al. 2016), how the running body sensually interacts with place (such as Lorimer 2012; Allen-Collinson and Hockey 2011) and entanglements between running and mobilities (Cook 2013). However, much more can be done to explore running as a creative process to sense and make sense of the city. Non-western literature and lived experiences of “fragile, aged, gendered, racialised bodies” remain under-represented. The bodies of interest, and the bodies (and thoughts) that examine these bodies, remain largely white, male, privileged and able, and it is assumed that all other bodies are as white, male, privileged and able, or that they do not matter. At This Juncture, Today As sociologist John Urry famously declares, it “sometimes seems as if all the world is on the move” (2007, 3). For the “early retired, international

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students, terrorists, members of diasporas, holidaymakers, business people, slaves, sports stars, asylum seekers, refugees, backpackers, commuters, young mobile professionals, prostitutes,” amongst others, the “contemporary world is their oyster or at least their destiny (Urry 2007, 3).” Like the asylum seekers and slaves of the quotation, bodies that are fragile, aged, gendered and racialised seem destined to be moved, in the passive form, rather than always having the agency or choice to move. For these actors, the world can often be an oyster that is rancid, if not ridden with traps and barriers. With the sudden and “shocking” turn of events in Summer 2016, barriers, physical and invisible, are rapidly being “erected, boundaries hardened and our movement as runners, migrants, travellers and women restricted, and minds closed as we fear the other” (Tan 2018). Brexit, May, Trump, anti-Muslim travel ban, right-wing populism in Austria, Italy and France, the Windrush fiasco, acid racist attacks, #MeToo and #TimesUp are just a few indicators that ours is a world that is not just in motion. It seems to be moving faster, and more frenetically, as if in a nauseating “commotion” (Tan 2017). Isn’t it thus even more important to consider everyday interventions that different bodies may require to engage creatively and critically with the city? Already complex sites of human activity and interactivity, cities are reflecting, playing out, staging, instigating these troubles. Bodies that are fragile, aged, gendered and racialised that are acting in and moving about the urban arena are in an even more fragile and precarious situation than before. Equally, cities have proven to be powerful sites for its inhabitants to heal and find strength—and many of these efforts are non-art, such as the pussyhat project and public vigils for the Manchester arena attack in the UK. Shouldn’t art practice all the more step in and step up its game to focus our attention on the city, through which to provoke us to consider the issues of world around us? As Southern and her colleagues argue, it is the “inherent practice of problematising and reflectivity, inherent in art research, that gives it a central role in the field of mobilities” (Southern et al. 2017). Writing for the same art catalogue, Büscher describes our moment as a “crisis of democracy” (2017, 12–13), and refers to artworks as “strong minded acts of imagination to sidestep collapse.” In fact, in a handwritten letter to me, Büscher reveals that she “took my cue from your […] provocation,” and is picking up running (Büscher 2018). “I’ve just done my second run this year, both inspired by you—I usually walk.” Like the artworks that she was referring to, Büscher states that “running art-fully can enable new response-abilities,” a term she coins to cluster experiments (2017, 13).

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At this juncture, thus, for our tumultuous times, I want to share my response-abilities, with the city as my site of operation. Getting There In this chapter, I lay down these response-abilities in the form of an art manifesto as well as a “how to” guide. It outlines four tactics that draw from the physical and poetic processes of running. Urban dwellers can activate and/or adapt them as everyday creative interventions and produce discursively mediated landscapes, so as also to “run” it and feel a sense of ownership. The tactics are personal, political, practical yet playful. Indeed, a child-like sense of playfulness is at the heart of my approach. After all, we ran about when we were children—until our parents and teachers reprimanded us: “Walk, don’t run!” (Tan 2017, 65). Producing your own discursively mediated sensescapes, you feel in place, undefeated, not collapsed but empowered. The tactics are examples of vision in method—and metaphor. They step in to fill some of the gaps in the junctions of mobilities, visual art and running. They can also step in and step up as strong minded acts of imagination for you to sense and make sense of the city. They acknowledge and celebrate how there are different bodies, and show how running draws attention to the precarious, fragile situations these bodies are in and reveal how global mobilities are enacted, and recommend new ways forward. Apart from the work of researchers and artists in mobilities, in particular that of Büscher and Southern, I draw on a concepts and practices from the Situationist International and the Chinese tradition of Daoism (Taoism), amongst others. My tactics would have no legs if they only existed on paper or in the mind. Each draws on or is interrogated by my art practice. Three bodies of work are particularly relevant. The first is the ANTI Adult RUN! RUN! RUN! School children (aged 7–14) took over the middle of a market square in Kupio, Finland, and ran “masterclasses” for adults (top age 82) on how to be playful (again) through running (Tan 2015). The second is Hand-In-Hand, which was commissioned for a street festival marking the beginning of the French Revolution in Grenoble, France (Tan 2017). Drawing on how disabled runners run while tethered to their seeing guides, I tethered runners together with a specially-designed ribbon. The third is my curated programme, the RUN! RUN! RUN! Biennale 2016, which showcased the work of

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women artists and activists (Tan 2018). Their work explores fragility (McCall 2014) ageing (Grove-White 2014), homelessness in London (A Mile in Her Shoes 2016) as well as power, war and conflict (Free To Run 2016) (Fig. 7.1). However, I will only focus on 5 digital images from the Kaidie’s 1000-Day Trans-Run 12.12.2009–09.09.2012 here. This is a large body of work with different strands. Outputs include drawings, photographs, film, installations, blog posts, performance-lectures and critical texts. This was my first major work that used running. In fact, this was a 1000-day or roughly 3-year process through which I took up running as an exercise in order to research it. I framed this process of learning and embodying as a durational performance or live art. “Kaidie” was the name I used to refer to myself during this period. I conceptualised the heroine—or, more accurately, anti-heroine—as someone who used running to challenge and transgress the world around her—hence “trans-run” (2014). The city was one of my sites of intervention, and in my work this was called “Nondon,” which referred to London. Thus, another way to look at the tactics is that they have an element of autobiography, and/or draw on my first-hand experience using running as an everyday intervention. My being and brain may not be typical or neurotypical. I have described myself as a “migrant, woman, academic, artist, teacher and someone neurologically-wired differently (with ADHD, dyspraxia and dyslexia)” (Tan 2016, 98). It was through playing “Kaidie” that I became a “runner.” For this chapter, I will not use the term “trans-run” or refer to “Nondon.” Instead, I will introduce ideas from mobilities to interact with the work, by for instance running with Büscher and mobilising the term “run art-fully.” I am also keen to use this as an opportunity to reassess this work ten years on, to see how conditions have or haven’t changed, and to address readers who, I will assume, do not run or do not use running in their work. So as to enact and reinforce the playfulness of running, I will also mobilise running-related expressions as well as a swift, light-footed approach in my writing. I will also activate “I,” “we,” and “you” to convey the subjectivity and everyday essence of this endeavour. Each section begins and ends in italics, directly addressing the reader, “you.” Are you ready to run art-fully? Let’s get moving.

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Fig. 7.1  “ANTI Adult RUN! RUN! RUN! Masterclass #antiadultrun,” Kai Syng Tan (2015). Local children teaching adults the principals of unadulterated fun. Collaborator: Alan Latham. Participatory art commissioned by ANTI— Contemporary Art Festival 2015, Kuopio, Finland (Photo Pekka Mäkinen)

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Activate the Speed-Play-Drift Wander around the city. Move at a speed faster than walking, such that one or both legs are off the ground at any one time. Jog at a comfortable pace to the nearest lamp post. Then turn left, and dash, until you run out of breath. Now Slow right down, as if walking. Meander off the beaten track. Let your nose guide you. What is that smell? Pick up speed again. Get side tracked. Touch something gross. Run at moderate pace. Encircle an unsuspecting pedestrian. Suddenly sprint again. Reach a next building with a ramp and jog on the spot. What does that feel like? What do you see differently? What do you hear and smell? (Fig. 7.2). Swedish for “speed play,” “fartlek” is a form of training for distance runners that emphasises playfulness and variety (Benyo and Henderson 2001, 111). Examples include sprinting from one telephone post to another, and running to the next at a near-walking speed, and so on. Yet,

Fig. 7.2  “Kaidie’s 1000-day Trans-Run: Speed-play-drift” (Kai Syng Tan [2013]. Digital art)

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running experts insist that the best part of fartlek is that it is “so much fun to say and write,” such that “the regular walking-around world” people must find that it sounds “gross” (2001, 111). Guy Debord and his colleagues at the Situationist International had a puerile sense of fun too. This is where dérive comes into play. For Debord, the dérive, or drift, is a mode of “playful-constructive behaviour” (cited in Sadler 1994, 77). Producing “transient passages through varied ambiences” (cited in Ford 2005, 34), the drifter creates narratives that are “open, contingent, and shifting” (Sadler 1999, 98–99). Cutting “freely across urban space,” the body gains a “revolutionary perception of the city” (Ford 2005, 93), and brings about “a revolution of everyday life” (Debord 1955). Two thousand years before the Situationists, there was another group of playful radicals who also conceived the body in motion as a powerful mechanism through which it senses and makes sense of the world. For Chinese philosopher Lao Zi (500BCE) and his disciples who called themselves Daoists, the world is the body, and the body is the world (Kohn 1993, 102). Every part of the body is mapped with nature, society and the state in an “analogical, spatial way” (Miller 2003, 34–60), and vice versa. Unlike the sinful, shameful or inferior body as rendered in Cartesian and Abrahamic paradigms, the Daoist body is creative and dynamic, the “pre-eminent space in which Daoism operates” (Miller 2003, 34–60). While we are “influenced and moulded” by the environment, the “flow of influence” can be “reversed” so that we are not “simply the product” of our environment, but are able to “dominate and transform” it (Schipper 1994, 103–190). Indeed, motion is critical in this discussion, as exemplified in Daoism’s root word, “dao,” which consists of the radical of the human head and the motion verb of the feet and footprints (Keelan 1967, 22). While dao as a noun refers to road, way, course, and line, its figurative definitions includes methodology, doctrine and discourse (Hansen 1996). Echoing the “world as body, body as world” dynamic, this draws out Daoism’s central philosophy that connects the concrete with the abstract, exterior with interior, micro with the macro, the personal and subjective with the world. Yet, rather than running with taiji (taichi) and other Daoist practices, and tired of walking, I needed something less exotic to interpret, update, play with and interrogate these ideas. This was how I turned to running. Running is my embodied subjectivity, and subjective embodiment.

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Play out a “fartlek-dérive.” Let your joints, muscles and tendons learn what the Situationists and Daoists have taught their own bodies. Follow in their footsteps but also update your system, move with the times. Make transient passages through varied ambiences by picking up and playing with your speed. As you run into other bodies that are not running, the sight, smell and/or (accidental) touching of your sweaty body will make them feel “gross.” The buildings, road, ground, sky and crowds come in view, then out, then in again, as your body, too, goes alternately in and out of view to the bypassers and bystanders. With the city unfolding itself in a rich repertoire of rhythms as your body traverses through it, the narratives you are producing through the speed-play-drift remain open, contingent, and shifting. You are not just a product of the city but can dominate and transform it. The city is your body, your body is the city.

Play Hide and Seek Big brother has always been watching us. In the past decades, he has planted Closed Circuit Television Cameras everywhere. When you spot one, sprint past it. Let your body register as a blur, and register your opposition to bureaucratic control. Don’t forget to say “fartlek” (Fig. 7.3). When the prefect of the Seine Department of France Georges-Eugène Haussmann renovated Paris in the nineteenth century, he ensured that the layout made it easy for Emperor Napoleon III’s troops to run down delinquent inhabitants. More than one hundred years later, Debord proclaimed Haussmann an “idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” (cited in Sadler 1999, 16)—with much sound and fury himself. The fiery Frenchman recommended lively ways of subverting the authorities’ schemes and scheming, by, for instance, “slipping by night into houses undergoing demolition” and “wandering in catacombs forbidden to public” (cited in Sadler, 93). To détourn or subvert these grand designs, other farcical antics include wandering the streets with the wrong map, or reading a map the wrong way up. While walking may have sufficed as a means to move about the boulevards of Paris two generations ago, the high-impact action of running may be a more forceful comeback metaphorically, vis-à-vis our more aggressive conditions now. Today, cities are populated by densely-packed skyscrapers, many of which have been rigged by bureaucrats with surveillance cameras. London is closely-watched by at least 10,000 Closed

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Fig. 7.3  “Kaidie’s 1000-day Trans-Run: Blasting Big Brother. Can You See Me Now?” (Kai Syng Tan [2013]. Digital art)

Circuit Televisions (Davenport 2007) and the Chinese state media proudly declares “every corner” of Beijing is watched (Zeng 2015). And running is intrinsically transgressive. As soon as we could walk as toddlers, we ran, but stopped to obey figures of authority. For her second

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run, Büscher ran to investigate a building that looked like a “spy HQ” (2018). The American author and runner Joyce Carol Oates notes that she “never saw a ‘No Trespassing’ sign that wasn’t a summons to my rebellious blood” (1999). Such signs, dutifully posted on trees and fence railings, might as well cry, ‘Come Right In!’” That was written when she was sixty-one—an old child. Lao Zi—literally “Old Child”—who described himself as a “child” who is “ignorant,” “stupid,” “foolish” and “crude” (translation from the Chinese by Kai Syng Tan, with reference to Lao Tzu and Lau 1963, ch. 20), would have approved. Lao Zi would also have been pleased with the understatement of running. In contrast to the Situationist International’s “often macho, chest-beating rhetoric with another brand of anarchism” (Tan 2016, 102), Lao Zi and his disciples lived by a brand of anarchism that was “gentle” (Hansen 1996). This is guided by his philosophy of “wuwei,” an “opposition to authority, government, coercion, and even to normal socialisation in values” that is characterised by “distinct ambivalence, indirect, non-argumentative style, use of poetry and parable.” At its best, wuwei is “a new spirit of naturalness” which should “inform and transform everything we do,” to enable us to “realise the need for a fundamental change in the way we live,” and bring about a “radical reorientation of the way we do things,” explains another sinologist Cheuk Yin Lee (Tan 2016, 102). And running is as “natural” as it gets. Neither illegal (as graffiti is), extreme (as base jumping is, in which people jump off skyscrapers) nor technically-complex (as parkour or free climbing is), it does not require extraneous equipment (as skateboarding does) either. Even shoes are optional, as robust barefoot running communities worldwide attest. Mundane and everyday, it can be activated beyond an exercise or sport. You do not have to “go for a run,” you can run for the bus. That it is an indirect expression of defiance prevents the runner from having a “run in” with the police. While acts like self- immolation, topless demonstrations and hunger strikes may be more spectacular, they can be short-lived—and literally so. The ubiquity and banality of running also means that it has the versatility to look unassuming and hence escape the radar of the authorities. In regimes in which sit-ins, walk-outs or other forms of protests are illegal, such as in Singapore, running art-fully may be a playful alternative. As a gently-anarchic act that can be directly operated by the protester (since it is our own body), and which can appear unassuming and “go with the flow,” the authorities have no grounds to censor or arrest us.

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Be a gentle anarchist. Play hide and seek with the Big Brother. Zip past the cameras so that he can’t read you. Do so with a puerile glee. Be an old child. The city is your playground. It is a place to play in, tumble about, go right into places with “No Trespass” signs, and have unadulterated fun, not run away from, stand stiff in fear, or to fear.

Don’t Hide, Be Seen: Your Running Body as a Sight and Site of Protest As the running body détourns the gaze of the authorities as it moves in and through the streets, could it also détourn the male gaze? Instead of hiding, can this running body show and show off the gendered body, and make them see you anew? (Fig.  7.4). Running is surviving. 2.6 million years ago, before we had weapons, our ancestors ran after animals in order to run them down (Bramble and Lieberman 2004). In the practice known as endurance or persistence hunting, the Homo erectus exploited the body’s unique ability to sweat and lose heat, to gradually and eventually run down even animals— including sprinters like the kudu antelope—under the hot sun. In fact, human beings are “born to run,” being endowed with “running equipment” (Bramble and Lieberman cited in Chen 2006) including

Fig. 7.4  “Kaidie’s 1000-day Trans-Run: Unbound Chinese Feet” (Kai Syng Tan [2013]. Digital art)

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long tendons and a large posterior that play no part in the locomotion of walking whatsoever. It is our biological advantage, alongside a unique persistence or “long range vision” cultivated from distance running (Heinrich 2002, 175) that have allowed us to defeat starvation and death. If it is assumed that the hunters were male, women are proving to be the stronger sex when it comes to distance running, particularly at distances beyond 26.2 miles (Kell 2015). Women have the ability to burn a higher percentage of fat than men (and are thus less likely to hit “the wall” where glycogen in the body becomes depleted), a larger surface area-to-mass ratio (and the ability of dispelling more heat), the lack of testosterone (which allows women to pace themselves better than men), as well as a greater mental resilience (McDougall 2009, 79). One Kathrine Switzer knows all about resilience when she became the first woman in history to officially complete a 26.2 miles marathon race, the Boston Marathon, as a gender-neutral “KV Switzer.” This was as recent as 1967. Fifty years on, #MeToo and #TimesUp are exposing how women’s bodies, minds and mobility are still being policed. Within this renewed public consciousness about misogyny and institutional abuse of power, the running body can be a powerful site and sight of defiance and protest. Running creates a physical impact on the runner, and with this their actions are larger, they take up more space, and register a strong visual impact for those who see them. Consistent with the basic definition of running compared with walking, both feet are off the ground more often: up to 80% compared to 30% for walking. Running requires a higher peak vertical force, too: 2–3 mg compared to 1 mg in walking (Cross 1999). Running—especially by a body that is fragile, aged, gendered and racialised—thus presents a more urgent, forceful and compelling physical, visual and metaphorical comeback vis-à-vis our troubled times today. Running, the female runner also sticks two fingers and ten toes up at the historical, canonical imagery of the walker who is often “white, male, important (and sometimes self-important and drugged-out)” (Tan 2016, 99). Think Walter Benjamin’s archetypal flâneur walking his tortoise, Caspar David Friedrich’s protagonist in Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, Charles Baudelaire while On Wine and Hashish, Richard Long and his A Line Made By Walking, Iain Sinclair around the M25, Will Self everywhere as a self-proclaimed twenty-first century flâneur. Tall, well-dressed,

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erect, not breaking a sweat and not looking like they have laboured (all associations intended), they are a contrast to our runner. Run in the streets. Take up space. Evoke the kinaesthetic skill and memory of our male and female running ancestors registered in our joints, muscles, tendons and so on. Embody the long range vision of the persistence hunters and pioneering women runners. Bring to life these powerful heritages and narratives. Stick two fingers (and ten toes) up at the bystanders watching from the sidelines. Play. Laugh. Sweat. Pant. Spit. Kick your legs high. Take big strides. Look the part. Let every step declare, “Look at me! I am active and in action, not passive, submissive or domesticated. I am in charge not only of my own body, but of my own fate (have you seen my battle scars?).” Running artfully, you are mobilising your body as the most rudimentary and yet ultimate medium of protest, to reclaim control of your city. Being visible, being seen, you are a mobile demonstration of your autonomy, showing others similar to you how they can also be seen, and showing those who aren’t like you new insights that they have neglected, ignored, forgotten or been short-sighted to. Run, and run the city.

Transcending the Spectacle Run, artfully, and sidestep the collapse of reality into streams of images, products and activities sanctioned by business and bureaucracy. Ditch your fancy running kit and gear. Follow in the footsteps of our running ancestors and go barefoot, or, dress up in your best work clothes and run. Either way, invite disdain and double takes. Every step you take shouts, I’m not buying into your business ideas and ideals (Fig. 7.5). For Guy Debord, the urban spectacle represents the “collapse of reality into streams of images, products and activities sanctioned by business and bureaucracy” (cited in Sadler 1999, 15). Over the years, his ideas have been developed and interrogated by scholars of mobility (see for instance various essays in Salazar et al. 2016; Squire 2010; Burgin et al. 2013). What is interesting is how Debord’s notions like the “temple of frenetic consumption” and “giant shopping centers created ex nihilo” “surrounded by acres of parking space,” (1995, 123) and “repulsive petit-bourgeois landscape” (cited in Sadler 1999, 92) seem the norm today in many cities, and how running artfully, as did the drift, could “call everything into question” and function as a “revolt against the spectacle” as argued by his colleague, philosopher Raoul Veneigem (cited in Ford 2005, 113).

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Fig. 7.5  “Kaidie’s 1000-day Trans-Run: Running with the cranes (that re-claim land to build all-in-one “integrated resorts” of shopping malls and casinos) (Kai Syng Tan [2013]. Digital art)

An extreme example can be seen in the tiny city-state of Singapore. The island is famed for its development “from third world to first” within a single generation (Lee 2000). Its successes and excesses are laid bare in its many miles of shopping and related facilities that seem disproportionate to its overall size of 278.6 square miles. Buying, selling, spending and, since 2010, gambling, are not just within the central districts but everywhere imaginable—and unimaginable. Sites include residential vicinities and terminals in the “world’s best airport” (Skytrax 2018). Then, there are wholesome-sounding “integrated resorts” standing on reclaimed lands built from soil excavated from neighbouring countries (Ministry of Trade and Industry Singapore 2012). There are also yet smaller islands, including one which now has an official tagline of “the State of Fun” (Sentosa Development Corporation 2014), and which used to also house a political prisoner, the story of which led science-fiction writer William Gibson to term the country “Disneyland with Death Penalty” (1993). The case of Singapore is revealing for our situation today because many cities worldwide, older and newer, seem relentlessly determined to physically build their cities and metaphorically (re-) build their reputations as temples of frenetic consumption. The United

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Arab Emirates’ Dubai sits at one end, then comes somewhere like Leeds in the United Kingdom which exemplifies an aspiring, “wannabe” city that is keen to reinvent itself—in this case, from a leading mill town during the Industrial Revolution, to a “principal regional shopping centre […] offering a spend of £1.93 billion annually,” with a total of “1,000 retail stores, with a combined floorspace of 3,660,000 square feet” (Leeds List 2017). Against the mise-en-scène of ever-shinier and larger temples of frenetic consumption, larger-than-life shopping centres and acres of parking space, the visceral action of running arguably makes it a stronger visual statement of human protest than that of walking. In reference to Singapore’s rule, Gibson also notes that any political rebel must either have “balls the size of durian fruit, or else be flat-out suicidal, or possibly both” (1993). Outside of claustrophobic regimes, Gibson’s advice seems handy. It complements Debord’s recommendation, which is the necessity to bear a “relentlessly critical state of mind to confront all hegemonic powers, whatever hegemonic cultural forms, whatever their origin, domestic or foreign, left or right, Eastern or Western” (cited in Sadler 1999, 43). Running art-fully also seems a clever technique when it comes to sites in which any public gathering of five or more people—unless with a police permit—is rendered illegal (Attorney-General’s Chambers 2008), or where demonstrations are banned—because they are judged by a previous ruler as a “sad” way to solve problems and things simply work differently in “this part of the world” (cited in Sesser 1994, 64), and where basic human rights are ignored—because they cannot be proven to be “universal” (cited in Sesser 1994, 48). What to do in the face of such a ludicrous line of reasoning, but to run, art-fully, pungently, foolhardily, smiling to ourselves in the knowledge that this is how we show that we do not toe the party line? And a degree of pungent, foolhardiness and humour can keep us sane vis-à-vis our current times, because it allows us to acknowledge the paradox of our own place as players and actors with-in the “system.” It ­recognises that consumerism is, literally, all consuming; that all spheres of life—including running and subgroups that claim to be “purer” like the so-called barefoot running communities, and including any critique or intervention—are necessarily embedded within the larger commercial system and global mobilities, and that we are all the more responsible for creating and co-creating acts of imagination that are relentlessly critical, strong minded, self-aware and playful, to respond to, negotiate, reflect on and détourn the way things are.

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If the running body teams up with other runners, there are yet other response-abilities to explore. Runners can refer to the Critical Mass, which are street demonstrations by large groups of cyclists that highlight cyclist’s rights. Another—non-activist and moneyed—reference could be large-scale marathons. Running in nine races as “Kaidie,” including the London Marathon and the Bath Half, made me think of the processes as contemporary, urban proxies of the traditional village fete, street theatre or other rituals. Large, spectacular, colourful, dramatic, noisy, they stop traffic, force re-routes and wrench hearts (Fig. 7.6). Run, art-fully, with balls the size of the durian fruit. Cut through the concrete jungle littered with malls, offices and casinos. Demonstrate that you are neither consuming, literally or metaphorically, nor gambling, nor making money—even if it is only for the duration of the run. Declare your refusal to yield to the urban or (inter)national way of life of shopping. Transform the repulsive petit-bourgeois landscape into your own discursively mediated sensescapes. Call everything into question, including your own processes and habits as a runner. Team up with allies to stage a revolt against the spectacle. En masse, become a visual spectacle yourselves. Take over the streets, stop traffic, force re-routes, wrench hearts, create an end of the world show and move people to tears. Gross shoppers out with your

Fig. 7.6  “Kaidie’s 1000-day Trans-Run: the runners are revolting” (Kai Syng Tan [2013]. Digital art)

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glistening sweat and bodies that are not white, not male, not able or not young. Like unruly children, taunting the bureaucrats, bourgeoisie and intellectuals who do not run, who watch, who spectate from a safe, critical distance. Make a scene. Run riot. Run against the authorities so that it does not run you or run you down.

Let Your Imagination Run Riot This chapter outlines four playful, strong minded acts of imagination. Drawing on running as a methodology and metaphor, they show individuals how to sense and make sense of the world by running “art-fully” in and through the city, to create sensescapes, and to feel a sense of ownership of the city. The tactics are also creative processes of intervention. As examples of vision in method and metaphor, they extend existing discourse on walking as a mobile method, by introducing running in the intersection of mobilities and visual art practice. Apart from the work of colleagues in mobilities, in particular that of Büscher and Southern, I draw on concepts and practices from the Situationist International and the Chinese tradition of Daoism (Taoism), among others (Fig. 7.7). A key point about the tactics is that they acknowledge and celebrate how there are bodies other than white, male, privileged and able ones. The tactics draw on my first-hand experience as an artist who picks up running, and who is non-white, female and non-neurotypical. My body plays the multiple roles as sensor, medium, barometer, map, and weapon as it interfaces, interacts with and creates interventions in the city. My tactics are peculiar to myself. Through this very peculiarity, they may open new insights for other bodies that are different to mine. At the same time, the tactics are provocations for others to take on, adapt, interrogate, hack into, adapt and/or improve on. I have only outlined four, and through that I want to catalyse and invite people from all walks of life—artists, non-­artists, runners, non-runners—to create yet other tactics and response-abilities. Today, perhaps more than ever before, we need more art processes to problematise and reflect on the crisis of democracy, and to celebrate autonomy and difference and to mock and knock those who uphold the status quo. Running is no panacea, but nothing is; collectively, with our different mobile approaches, we can help to move things forward. Let’s create other strong-minded acts of imagination. Let your imagination run riot. Let’s run in the city and run it.

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Fig. 7.7  “Kaidie’s 1000-day Trans-Run: Lines of Nondon” (Kai Syng Tan [2013]. Based on GPS mappings of my runs in London. Digital art)

References A Mile in Her Shoes. 2016. http://www.amileinhershoes.org.uk. Allen-Collinson, Jacquelyn, and John Hockey. 2011. “Feeling the Way: Notes Toward a Haptic Phenomenology of Scuba Diving and Distance Running.” International Review for the Sociology of Sport 46 (3): 330–345. Alys, Francis. 2004. “The Green Line.” Francis Alys. http://francisalys.com/ the-green-line/. Austin, Michael, ed. 2007. Running and Philosophy: A Marathon for the Mind. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell. Bale, John. 2002. Sports Geography. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge. Benyo, Richard, and Joe Henderson. 2001. Running Encyclopedia: The Ultimate Source for Today’s Runner. Champaign: Human Kinetics Publishers. Blast Theory and Mixed Reality Lab, University of Nottingham. 2001. Can You See Me Now? b.tv Festival Sheffield. https://www.blasttheory.co.uk/projects/ can-you-see-me-now/. Bramble, Dennis M., and Daniel E. Lieberman. 2004. “Endurance Running and the Evolution of Homo.” Nature 432 (7015): 345–352. https://doi. org/10.1038/nature03052.

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Burgin, Victor, Stephen Bann, and Michael Lent. 2013. Mobility and Fantasy in Visual Culture. 1st ed. Edited by Lewis Johnson. New York: Routledge. Büscher, Monika, ed. 2010. Mobile Methods. 1st ed. Abingdon, Oxon, and New York, NY: Routledge. Büscher, Monika. 2017. “The Mobile Utopia Experiment.” In Mobile Utopia: Art and Experiments—An Exhibition, curated by Jen Southern, Emma Rose, Linda O Keefe, November 2–5. Lancaster, UK: Lancaster House Hotel. Büscher, Monika. 2018. “Monika’s Handwritten Personal Letter to Kai,” January 5. Cardiff, Janet. 1999. The Missing Voice (Case Study B). Walk. https://www. artangel.org.uk/project/the-missing-voice-case-study-b/. Chen, Ingfei. 2006. “Human Evolution: Born to Run.” Discover Magazine, May. http://discovermagazine.com/2006/may/tramps-like-us. Cook, Simon. 2013. “Jography: Exploring the Mobilities of Road-Running.” BA Geography (unpublished). Plymouth University. Cook, Simon, Jon Shaw, and Paul Simpson. 2016. “Running Order: Urban Public Space, Everyday Citizenship and Sporting Subjectivities.” In Critical Geographies of Sport: Space, Power and Sport in Global Perspective, edited by Natalie Koch, 157–172. London and New York: Routledge. Creed, Martin. 2008. Work No. 850. http://www.martincreed.com/site/works/ work-no-850. Cross, Rod. 1999. “Standing, Walking, Running, and Jumping on a Force Plate.” American Journal of Physics 67 (4): 304–309. Davenport, Justin. 2007. “Tens of Thousands of CCTV Cameras, yet 80% of Crime Unsolved | News.” London Evening Standard, September 19. http:// www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23412867-tens-of-thousands-of-cctvcameras-yet-80-of-crime-unsolved.do. Debord, Guy-Ernest. 1955. “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography.” The Situationist International Text Library. http://library.nothingness.org/ articles/SI/en/display/2. Debord, Guy-Ernest. 1995. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books. Ford, Simon. 2005. The Situationist International: A User’s Guide. London: Black Dog Publishing. Free To Run. 2016. Our Mission. http://www.freetorun.org/our-mission/. Geoffroy, Thierry. 2012. Critical Run. http://www.emergencyrooms.org/criticalrun.html. Gibson, William. 1993. “Disneyland with the Death Penalty.” Wired, October. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive//1.04/gibson_pr.html. Grove-White, Annie. 2014. Breath/Mind/Muscle. Video. Hansen, Chad. 1996. An Analysis of Dao (Tao). http://www0.hku.hk/philodep/ch/Dao.html.

184  K. S. TAN Heinrich, Bernd. 2002. Why We Run: A Natural History. Reprint. New York: Harper Perennial. Hsieh, Teh-Ching. 1981. One Year Performance (Outdoor Piece 1981–1982). Performance, Photograph, Film. http://www.one-year-performance.com/. Keelan, F.X. 1967. Chinese Characters Explained. Taichung, Taiwan: Kuangchi Press. Kell, Lena. 2015. “Can Women Ever Beat Men at Marathon Running?” Newitts. com, May 15. https://www.newitts.com/blog/can-women-ever-beat-menat-marathon-running. Kohn, Livia. 1993. The Taoist Experience: An Anthology. Later Printing. New York: State University of New York Press. Latham, Alan. 2015. “The History of a Habit: Jogging as a Palliative to Sedentariness in 1960s America.” Cultural Geographies 22 (1): 103–126. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474013491927. Latham, Alan, and Derek P. McCormack. 2004. “Moving Cities: Rethinking the Materialities of Urban Geographies.” Progress in Human Geography 28 (6): 701–724. https://doi.org/10.1191/0309132504ph515oa. Lee, Kuan Yew. 2000. From Third World to First, the Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Third-World-First-Singapore-Story/ dp/9812049843/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1525597996&sr=1-5&keywords=lee+kuan+yew. Leeds List. 2017. “Shopping Centres in Leeds.” Leeds-List, December 14. https://leeds-list.com/style/shopping-centres-in-leeds/. Lorimer, Hayden. 2012. “Surfaces and Slopes.” Performance Research 17 (2): 83–86. https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2012.671080. Mattson, Mark P. 2012. “Evolutionary Aspects of Human Exercise—Born to Run Purposefully.” Ageing Research Reviews 11 (3): 347–352. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.arr.2012.01.007. McCall, Carali. 2014. “A Line Is a Brea(d)thless Length: Introducing the Physical Act of Running as a Form of Drawing.” PhD diss., University of the Arts London. http://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/6511/. McDougall, Christopher. 2009. Born to Run: The Hidden Tribe, the UltraRunners, and the Greatest Race the World has Never Seen. Profile Books. McGowan, Mark. 2018. “Artist Taxi Driver @chunkymark.” Twitter. https:// twitter.com/chunkymark?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor. Miller, James. 2003. Daoism: A Short Introduction. London: Oneworld Publications. Ministry of Trade and Industry Singapore. 2012. Integrated Resorts. https:// www.mti.gov.sg/MTIInsights/Pages/Integrated%20Resorts.aspx. Murakami, Haruki. 2008. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. London: Harvill Secker.

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Nguyen-Hatsushiba, Jun. 2009. Art News | Refugee Memorial Project Runs Diameter of Earth at ASU Art Museum. http://www.artknowledgenews. com/Jun_Nguyen_Hatsushiba.html. Oates, Carol Joyce. 1999. “Writers on Writing.” The New York Times. http:// www.scribd.com/doc/7391268/Writers-on-Writing. Sadler, Simon. 1999. The Situationist City. New edition. MIT Press. Salazar, Noel B., Christiane Timmerman, Johan Wets, Luana Gama Gato, and Sarah Van den Broucke, eds. 2016. Mega-Event Mobilities: A Critical Analysis. 1st ed. London and New York: Routledge. Schipper, Kristofer. 1994. The Taoist Body. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sentosa Development Corporation. 2014. Best Place to Go in Singapore | Sentosa. https://www.sentosa.com.sg/. Sesser, Stan. 1994. The Lands of Charm and Cruelty: Travels in Southeast Asia. Picador. Sillitoe, Alan. 2010 [1959]. The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. London: Vintage. Simpson, John, and Edmund Weiner, eds. 1989. The Oxford English Dictionary: Second Edition. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Skytrax. 2018. World Airport Awards. http://www.worldairportawards.com/. Southern, Jen, Emma Rose, and Linda O’Keefe. 2017. “Art as a Strategy for Living with Utopias in Ruins.” In Mobile Utopia: Art and Experiments— An Exhibition, curated by Jen Southern, Emma Rose, and Linda O’Keefe, November 2–5. Lancaster, UK: Lancaster House Hotel. Squire, Vicki, ed. 2010. The Contested Politics of Mobility: Borderzones and Irregularity. London and New York: Routledge. Tan, Kai Syng. 2013. Kaidie’s 1000-day Trans-Run: Speed-play-drift. Tan, Kai Syng. 2014. “The Physical and Poetic Processes of Running: A PracticeRelated Fine Art Discourse About a Playful Way to Transform Your World Today.” Doctoral Thesis, University College London. http://discovery.ucl. ac.uk/1420270/1/Tan_Kai_Syng_Thesis_Redacted.pdf. Tan, Kai Syng. 2015. “ANTI-Adult RUN! RUN! RUN! Masterclass.” RUN!RUN!RUN! International Body for Research, December. http://kaisyngtan.com/portfolio/antiadultrun/. Tan, Kai Syng. 2016. “Kai Syng Tan (October 2016).” In Performing Borders: A Study Room Guide on Physical and Conceptual Borders Within Live Art— Catalogue, edited by Alessandra Cianetti, 92–108. Live Art Development Agency Study Guide P3043. Live Art Development Agency. http://www. thisisliveart.co.uk/resources/catalogue/performing-borders-a-study-roomguide-on-physical-and-conceptual-borders-wi. Tan, Kai Syng. 2017. “Hand-In-Hand: Activating the Body in Motion to Re-Connect with Ourselves and Others Amidst a World in Motion and

186  K. S. TAN Commotion.” In Chronotopics: Readings and Writings on a World in Movement (Chronotopies: Lecture et écriture des mondes en mouvement), edited by Guillaume Drevon, Luc Gwiazdzinski, and Olivier Klein, 59–69. Grenoble: Elya Editions. Tan, Kai Syng. 2018. “An Exploration of Running as Metaphor, Methodology, Material Through the RUN! RUN! RUN! Biennale #r3fest 2016.” Sport in Society, February, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/17430437.2018.1430488. Tzu, Lao, and D.C. Lau. 1963. Tao Te Ching. Middlesex: Penguin Classics. Urry, John. 2007. Mobilities. 1st edition. Cambridge: Polity. Zeng, Vivienne. 2015. “‘Every Corner’ of Beijing Covered by Surveillance Cameras, State Media Proudly Announce.” Hong Kong Free Press, October 5. https://www.hongkongfp.com/2015/10/05/every-corner-of-beijing-coveredby-surveillance-cameras-state-media-proudly-announce/.

PART III

Geopolitics of Migration

CHAPTER 8

Migrant Labour, Immobility and Invisibility in Literature on the Arab Gulf States Nadeen Dakkak

Introduction In Benyamin’s bestselling novel, Goat Days, the protagonist Najeeb describes his experience of working on a goat farm in Saudi Arabia as follows: Thus, in my life, summer came, winter came, wind came, dust storm came, rain came now and then, trucks came once a week. Everything came. Everything left. Only my goats and I stayed in the masara without leaving. (Benyamin 2012, 176)

Najeeb is an unskilled migrant labourer who, after travelling hundreds of miles, first from his hometown in Kerala to Bombay, then to Riyadh, finds himself stuck in the Saudi Arabian desert with no means of escape. His subordination to the material environment in which he is forced to live and work as well as his inability to leave the farm because of its remoteness from urban Saudi Arabia put him in a state of immobility that starkly contrasts with the journey he initially undertakes. Like N. Dakkak (*)  Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK © The Author(s) 2019 M. Aguiar et al. (eds.), Mobilities, Literature, Culture, Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27072-8_8

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Najeeb, thousands of unskilled migrants work temporarily in Saudi Arabia and its neighboring Gulf States (Kuwait, Qatar, UAE, Bahrain, Oman) where they are subject to living and working conditions that affect, if not determine, their physical mobility and their interactions with the new places they encounter. As transnational migrant labour, it is the capacity of their bodies to move across borders, back and forth between their countries of origin and destination, that makes them convenient and thus exploitable. Yet this mobility does not necessarily characterise their daily existence in their host countries, where restrictions on movement may be one tool of guaranteeing their temporariness and their eventual return to their home countries. The detailed narrative depicting Najeeb’s plight in Saudi Arabia may offer a rare, albeit fictional, account of the experience of working in the Gulf where the stories of thousands of migrants remain almost invisible.1 Yet this fictional narrative with all the elements of exaggeration that it may contain is also a reflection of the discriminatory labour and residency policies that shape migrants’ mobilities and relationships with place in the Gulf. Even though migration to the Gulf had existed since the early development of the oil industry, it was particularly after the 1973 and 1979 oil booms that migration flows increased and became more diverse, with South Asian migrants joining the Egyptians, Palestinians and other nonGulf Arabs that have traditionally formed the non-citizen communities in these Gulf States (Rahman 2010, 16–17). Because of the need to build new infrastructures and develop health and educational institutions, the Gulf became an attractive destination, offering thousands of job opportunities for both skilled and unskilled migrants. Conversely, these migrants, particularly low-class unskilled workers, also came to be perceived as a quick and easy solution to the lack in labour force. “Non-nationals can be brought in quickly—and in most cases cheaply—to meet labor needs as and when required on a project-by-project basis. They can also be easily released and sent back to their countries of origin when no longer needed” (Babar 2013, 123). The perception of migrant workers’ bodies as mobile and lacking in agency makes them attractive in the eyes of both the institutions that import them and the local agencies that facilitate this process in the sending countries. The continuity of migration flows to the Gulf despite the exploitation and deception to which many migrants like Najeeb are vulnerable can thus be explained by understanding these flows to be part of “a migration industry” which, according to Andrew Gardner, “is not only geared to aggrandizing profit from the

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labor of foreign migrants, but also capable of deriving profit from the migration process itself” (2012, 44). Gulf States may be seen as “contributing to labor mobility-driven development in the poorer states of Asia and Africa” (Babar 2013, 134), but this is a process in which the bodies of migrant labourers become commodified and, in many cases, even powerless in the face of the structures and policies that affect their physical daily mobilities, as suggested by both Benyamin’s Goat Days and Taleb Alrefai’s The Shadow of the Sun (Ẓill Al-Shams) (1998), the second novel this chapter analyses.2 Through their depiction of migrant characters’ mobilities/immobilities in Gulf spaces, these two texts offer a critique of this “migration industry” (Gardner 2012, 44), making the characters’ subjugation more palpable by representing it spatially. But before turning to migrants’ mobilities/immobilities and to the socio-spatial organisation of places in the particular context of the Gulf, I want briefly to expand on what John Urry identifies as the new mobilities paradigm, and on the perspective by which this chapter is going to approach Benyamin’s and Alrefai’s novels.

Migration, Mobility, Immobility Migrating from one place to another for economic, political, or social reasons may seem to be an ultimately mobile act from a macro perspective, but it does not necessarily entail mobility on a daily basis. Exploring the relationship between these macro and micro scales of movement “requires emphasis on the intertwining of mobility and emplacement” (Collins 2011, 319). This can be done by examining the everyday spatial practices of migrants in order to decide the extent to which their temporary status as migrants either allows them or prevents them from interacting with and impacting places in their host countries. In his work on migration in the Asia-Pacific, Francis Leo Collins is “concerned with the manner in which transnationally mobile bodies come to inhabit particular urban spaces and in the process contribute to the material and immaterial making of such spaces” (2011, 320). This focus on everyday spatial practices challenges the perception of transnational mobility as offering freedom because of the tendency to associate it “with highly mobile elite migrants” (2011, 328). Indeed one of the traps into which a celebration of mobility in an age of globalisation may risk falling is essentialising this mobility without paying enough attention to the power dynamics with which it is entangled and to the many inequalities that it may

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generate. One of the central features that Urry identifies in his work on the new mobilities paradigm is the “mobility-systems” that vary in each society and that “have the effect of producing substantial inequalities between places and between people in terms of their location and access to these mobility-systems” (2007, 51). Different migrants have different relationships with mobility-systems depending on the social and spatial structures of the society to which they migrate and, accordingly, on “the economics of production and consumption of the objects relevant to mobility,” as well as other factors determining those structures (Urry 2007, 51). As we shall see, the negative Gulf experiences of Najeeb in Goat Days and Hilmi, the Egyptian protagonist in The Shadow of the Sun, are primarily affected by the lack of, or limited, access to mobilitysystems. Therefore, accessibility or inaccessibility, determined by “economic, physical, organizational, and temporal” components (Urry 2007, 191), affect an individual migrant’s spatial practices and experience of place. This notion of “access” that Urry dwells on can be understood as both spatial and social, which means that a mobilities approach would not privilege the former over the latter. A mobilities research approach may be “spatial and performative,” yet it nonetheless “account[s] for displacement geographically and socially, attentive to social progress and categorical advancement within ‘power geometrics’ composed through class, race, ethnicity and gender” (Adey et al. 2014, 4). In its attempt to understand how an individual subject’s physical mobility both impacts and is impacted by these integral identity-shaping aspects, such an approach begins to “represent the lives of mobile subjects who have been marginalised, excluded and displaced” (Adey et al. 2014, 13), such as the low-class unskilled migrant labourers whose precarious existence in the Gulf States and whose complex status of mobility/immobility has only recently begun to merit the academic attention it deserves (Gardner and Nagy 2008). Such displacement and marginalisation, when contrasted with rootedness and stability, and when studied alongside other more relatively privileged movements and migrations, result in the “recognition that mobilities are always multiple and differentiated” (Adey et al. 2014, 14). From this line of argument emerges the necessity of the focus on immobilities as well. For example, Anne-Marie Fortier, in a chapter that draws the connection between migration studies and mobilities research, criticises both disciplines’ neglect of immobile subjects (2014, 66). Following Peter Adey’s emphasis on the relationship

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between mobilities and immobilities “as directly involved in social life and the production of space” (Adey 2006, 77), she is similarly concerned with “the extent to which ‘migration’ and/or ‘staying put’ are entangled rather than mutually exclusive in the contemporary world” (Fortier 2014, 66). Hence, it is not only that people do not migrate under similar circumstances, but that many of them remain settled, either in the places from where migration flows, or in the countries that receive these flows. More relevant to the focus of this chapter, however, is the concept of immobility in the narrow sphere of everyday spatial practices and which Adey explains in more detail by building on Doreen Massey’s and Tim Cresswell’s work on the uneven access to mobility. Massey’s argument that time-space compression is not experienced or even accessed equally (Adey 2017, 117), and Cresswell’s similar point on how “mobilities are differentially accessed” (Adey 2017, 106) lead us to the conclusion that “[u]nequal social relations reproduce themselves through mobility and thus reinforce their differences, whilst mobilities further enable and perform social relations” (2017, 123). Migrants’ mobilities or immobilities are therefore a reflection of “already existent social differences and hierarchies” (Adey 2017, 118). In the context of the Gulf, the mobility or immobility of unskilled migrant workers is dependent upon their being positioned at the bottom of the social hierarchy. To begin with, all migrants in the Gulf States are treated as temporary non-citizens because they are only given legal residency permits by acquiring job contracts from a company or an individual citizen who then become their sponsor or kafīl. Because this sponsorship or kafāla system makes residency in the country dependent upon the renewal of job contracts, it therefore “exist[s] to control and manage the large numbers of migrant workers essential to the regional labor market … [and] to ensure that these flows of foreign labor remain temporary in nature, and that pathways to permanent settlement are almost non-existent” (Babar 2013, 132). Indeed, with only few exceptions, naturalisation is almost impossible, even if a migrant ends up residing in the country for decades, and even in the cases of second- and third-generation migrants who are born in the Gulf. In the case of most unskilled migrants who come from their countries having purchased temporary job contracts and whose accommodation is also managed by the employer, control by the sponsor can take many forms, including the inability to decide the place or conditions of residence and the inability to transfer one’s residency to another kafīl, or even to travel without the

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approval of the employer (Babar 2013, 123–124). Giving the citizen/ kafīl power over the non-citizen/migrant worker not only produces an unequal and divided society, but also facilitates the “structural violence” that shapes migrants’ experiences in their host countries (Gardner 2010, 54). Jill Crystal even understands the kafāla to be a privatised system of “control and surveillance” that “facilitate[s] criminality among sponsors” (2005, 168–170). These restrictions then mean that the kafīl ­“maintain[s] control over a worker’s mobility for the duration of his or her stay in the Gulf” (Babar 2013, 123), making this policing system an integral part of the “migration industry” that deprives migrants of their agency and mobility (Gardner 2012, 44). Yet what further supplements the kafāla’s impact on migrants’ mobility is the spatial organisation that enacts social divisions between citizens and non-citizens, and between unskilled male migrant workers and the rest of the population. Spatial organisation and housing patterns from the 1970s onwards began to reflect the perception of the increasing migrant population as a cultural and socioeconomic threat (Dresch 2006, 204), but the fact that unskilled workers are positioned at the bottom of the social hierarchy results in more extreme forms of socio-spatial marginalisation. Regardless of whether they are married back in their home countries, and because their working permits and low salaries do not allow them to bring their families to the Gulf, low-class male workers typically reside in gender-segregated hostels, either in the so-called “bachelor” residences in run-down urban areas, or in labour camps on the margins of urban life. “Segregation facilitates control and surveillance of what is considered a ‘deviant’ population” (Kathiravelu 2016, 158), and guarantees that the contaminating sexual and cultural threat of these low-class male migrants remains outside the spheres of the ­family and of “authentic” culture (Mohammad and Sidaway 2016, 1405). Not only are migrants’ mobilities curtailed because of their powerlessness in the face of discriminatory residency and labour policies, but even their physical movement and spatial practices are shaped by the segregation that constantly aims “to ensure the body of the (classed and raced) Other is kept invisible and separate” (Kathiravelu 2016, 165). In a biopolitical approach that understands the Gulf’s migrant workers through Giorgio Agamben’s concept of “bare life” (quoted in Kanna 2012, 160), Ahmed Kanna argues that these invisible workers become visible both in “public debates about threats to national culture” and in “incidents [of abuse] which call upon the authorities to reassert state sovereignty” (2012, 160).

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It is in these instances that the large population of unskilled workers with their precarious status is brought into attention, either as a threat to be countered, or as a socioeconomic problem to be solved. I would argue that literature, and cultural productions more generally, also represent a space in which migrant workers may become visible. Benyamin’s Goat Days and Alrefai’s The Shadow of the Sun are two examples of fictional representations in which migrant characters’ mobilities/immobilities are both a reflection of, and contribute to, their subordination to the systematic exclusion imposed upon them. This chapter brings together two migratory experiences that may not typically appear together in an ethnographic study that aims to deduce conclusions with regard to a certain migrant community. After all, the movements of Najeeb from Kerala to Saudi Arabia and of Hilmi from Egypt to Kuwait can be traced to two different migration flows, each with its own history and particularities. Each character attaches different values to the act of migration and hence does not experience new places in the same way. By bringing together these two experiences through both a literary and a mobilities approach, this chapter therefore emphasises the role that mobilities/immobilities play in shaping migrants’ experiences of the Gulf and argues that the characters’ lack of authority over their physical movement and their subordination to the material environment in which they live and work are a reflection of their marginality and their status vis-àvis the Gulf and its policies. Marginality, however, does not necessarily deprive migrants of their agency. Ethnographic and urban research on migration to the Gulf provides us with a number of instances in which migrant labourers’ marginality may allow them to develop socio-spatial practices that reshape the geography of the Gulf by employing urban spaces differently. When low-class migrants walk or cycle, for example, because of their lack of access to other means of transportation, they develop “spatial authorship” that “could disrupt spatial policies of controlled mobility in the Gulf region” (Kendall 2012, 52). Even though walking could “be conceived as a powerless act in areas designed to be accessed only by cars,” it also gives unskilled migrant workers “the freedom to avoid traffic congestion and form paths and interventions in the landscape” (Kendall 2012, 47). These workers’ “invisibility allows their social activities to be over-looked or tolerated by the authorities” (Kendall 2012, 47), and the result could be a form of mobility that challenges the urban structure or even the sponsorship system that expects them to be immobile. Similarly, their social gatherings in spaces that are

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not designed for such purposes also allow them to retrieve their agency and potentially challenge the policies that seek to make them invisible by making visible changes to the urban structures in which they perform their deviant social activities (Elsheshtawy 2010; Alissa 2009). In this sense, spatial marginalisation and social exclusion do not necessarily deprive migrant workers of their agency by reducing them to the labour that they perform and can, on the contrary, give these migrants the space to challenge systematic exclusion in the Gulf by staking a claim to the places they inhabit. However, as my following analysis shows, and as I argue at the end of the chapter, this does not occur in Benyamin’s and Alrefai’s novels, where the characters’ mobilities/immobilities are not depicted as empowering, but rather conform to the stereotypical image of the powerless migrant worker.

Deception, Social Exclusion, Immobility Kuwaiti writer Taleb Alrefai’s The Shadow of the Sun is the story of a young Egyptian teacher who sees Kuwait as the only possible solution to his financial and personal problems. Hilmi joins the flow of thousands of other Egyptians who started migrating to Kuwait and the Gulf particularly from the 1970s onwards in response to a number of political and socioeconomic circumstances (Ibrahim 1982, 69) that made temporary migration necessary for Egyptians to “establish themselves,” an expression which, according to Galal Amin, means “accumulating enough savings to enable them to lead what they considered to be a decent life in Egypt” (2005, 97). Hilmi’s low salary, his inability to fulfil the needs of his wife and son, and his subordination to his father in whose house he has to live all lead him to imagine the “Kuwait of petrol and money” as the land where he can achieve his dreams of a better life (Alrefai 2012, 57). This mythical image is also constructed for him by Mutwalli, the man who arranges the visa and job contract for him and who, after asking for large sums of money in return, tells Hilmi not to worry because “there is so much money in Kuwait, money in crazy amounts waiting to be collected” (42). Hilmi’s dreams, however, do not materialise. Not only is he deceived by Mutwalli who does not actually secure him any job contract, but he is also overwhelmed by the amount of money he has to pay for the sponsoring company in order to be issued work and residency permits before being able to work legally. The Abu Ajaj Company for General Trade and Contracting, also the subject of a short

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story collection by Alrefai, deceives low-class migrants by illegally selling them residency permits for large sums of money without offering them job contracts, and is therefore, alongside Mutwalli the agent, part of the “migration industry” by which Hilmi is deceived (Gardner 2012, 44).3 During the first months of his stay in Kuwait, Hilmi’s inability to work, make money and repay his debts, in addition to the impossibility of having social life and activities because of his financial situation, result in his powerlessness in the face of the overarching structures that determine his existence as a migrant in Kuwait, most importantly the kafāla system that facilitates his deception and exploitation. Yet, as I show below, lack of agency and the inability to navigate the circumstances are embodied in the text through Hilmi’s physical immobility. Hilmi spends his first months in Kuwait stranded in the small room that he shares with a number of other unskilled Egyptian workers. The room is located in an old “bachelor” residence in Kheitan, an area that houses a large number of male workers who do not have spouses in Kuwait and are thus perceived as undesirable in neighbourhoods occupied by families. Hilmi is confounded upon finding out that he is now perceived as a “bachelor” and that this will be his place of residence (69–70). Because he is not familiar with Kuwait and has no money to even pay for his transportation, the rectangular room with its dirty yellowish walls and its repulsive smell of sweat, dust and cooking becomes his abode (70–71). The three months of waiting for his legal documents to be issued are filled with frustration and disappointment, but the wait is made even more unbearable by his immobility and lack of access to anything outside this “claustrophobic room” in which he is surrounded by nothingness (65). Hilmi narrates how every single morning he is left alone after his roommates go to work. “I have considered going out a few times, but to where? To where should I turn my face? I tried once sitting in the nearby Asyut cafe and I never did it again. A cup of tea is for 150 Fils—one pound fifty. I was surrounded by many eyes, mostly Egyptian workers, scanning me with evident curiosity” (93–94). Economic reasons and the sense of failure and inferiority in the eyes of society converge here to immobilise Hilmi and to construct invisible barriers that restrict him to the small space of his room, and these, he says, are the grocery store and its owner. They “constituted my boundaries. I stand in front of the grocery store and send my gaze far away, noticing the line of old bachelor buildings on my right … the main Kheitan road separating it from the family apartment buildings on my left … I read

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what’s on the billboards from my spot—this is the Kuwait that I came for!” (109). It is important to note here how the spatial organisation of Kheitan and the segregation of bachelor buildings from family residences become another factor that immobilises Hilmi and makes the act of leaving the space assigned for male migrant workers transgressive, regardless of the economic and personal limitations that also restrict his mobility. As Laavanya Kathiravelu shows in her chapter on gated communities and everyday mobilities in Dubai, “The rituals of physical segregation largely mirror and reify existing political and social segregations within the resident population,” meaning that spatial organisation “creates, and additionally, recreates divisions in the city” (2016, 134–135). Therefore, Hilmi’s immobility can be read as a result of both his socioeconomic status as an exploited low-class migrant worker, and the spatial organisation of Kuwait that literally stands in the way of his physical mobility. This spatial organisation, in its turn, both results from and reaffirms, if not contributes, to the social exclusion that marginalises unskilled migrant workers. What emerges in this situation is a “material landscape … that normalises inequality and segregation, reducing encounters with different Others, particularly Others of a different class” (Kathiravelu 2016, 141). Indeed, even after Hilmi finally starts working on a construction site, he sees nothing of the Kuwait that his imagination pursued prior to his arrival from Egypt. The construction site, part of the huge Al-Qurain residential project, is just as segregated as his Kheitan residence from the rest of Kuwait. “During my work on the site,” he narrates, “I had never met a single Kuwaiti laborer. Kuwaitis do not work as laborers. The company imported an army of men, a jungle of faces and languages: a mixture of Arabs, Indians, Sri Lankans, Afghans, Chinese, Filipinos, and Pakistanis” (135). After three months in the prison-like room in Kheitan, Hilmi becomes part of a new geographical locale that, nonetheless, gives him no access to a different kind of space, nor to any possibility of social interactions outside the low-class migrant labour sphere to which he is restricted. Five months of working on the site teach him that “a laborer works like an ox-driven sāqiya (water-wheel), constantly turning the wheel” with no day off (135). This analogy significantly emphasises Hilmi’s persistent state of immobility despite the change in the material circumstances. The ox that pulls the water-wheel is blindfolded and made to walk continuously for hours, but it does not traverse any distances or go anywhere. It works constantly on the spot, and this ironically makes its physical labour a form of immobility.

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The urbanised setting in which Hilmi lives in Kuwait contrasts with the Saudi Arabian desert in which Najeeb in Goat Days is forced to live and work. In The Shadow of the Sun, what obstructs Hilmi’s mobility is a room with walls and material boundaries as well as the s­ocio-spatial segregation of Kuwait’s residences, and yet, despite the seemingly unbounded openness of the desert, Najeeb is just as immobile. Since “places are not fixed, given or unchanging but depend in part upon the practices within them” (Urry 2007, 254), we can argue that it is not just the geography of the place that either facilitates or prevents a migrant character’s mobility, but the social relations that make it either hostile or welcoming to this character at a particular point in time. In Alrefai’s and Benyamin’s novels, urbanised Kuwait and the Saudi Arabian desert are dominated by exploitative relations and by discriminatory and exclusionary policies that determine the way they are experienced by the two low-class migrant characters. Najeeb’s migration experience differs from Hilmi’s in many respects, but both of them are victims of the deception and exploitation that are facilitated by the kafāla system, and this is how they share a relatively common experience of immobility despite the completely different Gulf spaces in which they find themselves. Najeeb decides to join the flow of migrants from Kerala to earn his share of wealth from the Gulf only to realise, just like Hilmi, that the real Saudi Arabia he encounters does not conform to the mythical image with which he begins his journey. During his wait for the visa approval, Najeeb “dreamt a host of dreams. Perhaps the same stock dreams that the 1.4 million Malayalis in the Gulf had when they were in Kerala” (38). But despite the long history of Keralite migration to the Gulf and the latter’s strong presence in the imaginary of Keralite people (Osella and Osella 2008), Najeeb arrives to Riyadh without any knowledge about the place he will be working in, and the linguistic barrier additionally makes any initial communication between him and Saudis, including his kafīl, impossible. After a long wait in the airport, Najeeb is finally picked up by his Saudi kafīl whom he naively describes as the “custodian of all my dreams, the visible god who would fulfil all my ambitions” (48), a description that ironically contrasts with what this kafīl turns out to be later. Rather than taking him to the construction company where he was told he will be working, Najeeb’s kafīl drives him for hours into the desert where he is to become the sole shepherd in a goat farm isolated from urban life. His job is to feed, milk and herd the hundreds of goats owned by his kafīl, whom he calls arbab (Persian word meaning

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boss or master), without any payment in return, not even a shelter from the heat and cold of the desert, since he is not allowed to enter the tent where his arbab stays and so spends his days and nights with the goats, the only beings he is allowed any communication with. Surrounded by sand dunes and nothingness, Najeeb simply becomes immobile because he cannot escape out of fear of getting lost in the desert. “I did not know anything about this country,” he says, “not even about the area I was in. In which direction—east, south, west or north—should I run to find a way out?” (140–141). Even before reaching the farm and succumbing to the reality of the situation, any attempt to escape from his arbab’s control during the long desert drive seemed impossible because of Najeeb’s unfamiliarity with the surrounding environment. “Yearning to run, yet refusing to move, I remained seated at the back of the vehicle” (57). Najeeb’s immobility then starts from the moment in which he becomes a sponsored migrant worker, under the direct control of the Saudi kafīl. His arbab performs this role and immobilises Najeeb literally through the power of surveillance that is emphasised throughout the novel and represented as integral to maintaining control over lowclass migrant workers. Soon after Najeeb’s arrival at the farm, his arbab brings him into the tent, asks him to look through a pair of binoculars in order to prove the extent of his surveillance, then finally shows him a gun and again demonstrates his control by shooting dead a flying bird— an act that makes sure Najeeb does his job of herding the goats in the open space of the desert but without daring to go beyond its invisible boundaries (72–73). The irony here is that goat herding is a job that tends to be associated with images of movement, freedom and independence. More ironic is what Najeeb confesses in the middle of his narrative: “Would you believe me if I told you that my childhood ambition was to become a goatherd? … To wander about from one land to another. To saunter with flocks of goats through meadows and hillsides. To pitch one’s tent every day in a new place” (124–125). In the Saudi Arabian context, however, where the alienating and hostile desert and where the control of the kafīl make such dreams impossible, an inherently mobile activity such as goat herding becomes immobilising for Najeeb, in the same way that physical labour on the construction site also results in Hilmi’s social exclusion and immobility in The Shadow of the Sun. The connection that the two novels draw between these two characters’ physical labour and their mobilities reveals a contradiction that is characteristic of migrants’ perceived status as mere economic agents in the Gulf.

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They are transnationally mobile because their labour is needed in the Gulf, but they lose this mobility once they become sponsored workers, incapable of making completely free decisions regarding their place of work and residence, or their visits to their home countries. My reading of Goat Days and The Shadow of the Sun has so far also traced another contradiction in the small sphere of Najeeb’s and Hilmi’s everyday mobilities and practices. The performance of physical labour that may even require a form of mobility seems to be necessarily accompanied by an immobility that is imposed upon Najeeb and Hilmi by the policies that prevent them from transgressing the space of this labour, and hence from going beyond their status as economic migrant workers. During their stay in the Gulf—almost three and a half years for Najeeb and less than one year for Hilmi—neither of them ceases to become a migrant worker or manages to go outside the space of labour that defines them as such, and their physical immobility is, I argue, a reflection of this state. However, going back to the idea introduced earlier on how “mobilities [and immobilities] are always multiple and differentiated” (Adey et al. 2014, 14), I also want to suggest that there is no straightforward approach to these two characters’ experiences of mobility/immobility in the Gulf. The next and final section of this chapter argues that this complexity can be attributed to the fact that their mobilities as unskilled migrant workers cannot be understood in isolation from the other forms of mobilities that exist alongside theirs, especially mobilities practised by the Saudi or Kuwaiti “other.”

Self vs. Other Mobilities According to Urry, “the richer the society, the greater the range of mobility-systems that will be present, and the more complex the intersections between such systems” (2007, 51). They involve “structured routeways through which people, objects and information are circulated” (2007, 52), but going back to the notion of access introduced earlier, they additionally produce “substantial inequalities between places and between people” (2007, 51). The social and economic subjugation of Najeeb in Goat Days and Hilmi in The Shadow of the Sun immobilises them physically and prevents them from transgressing the space to which low-class male migrant labourers are restricted. Yet, a comparison between their state and the different mobilities that exist alongside theirs reveals that, even in situations where these two characters are mobile in

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the Gulf, the value of their mobilities varies because of its dependency upon the mobilities of the more powerful “other” to whom they are subordinated. The power dynamics defining relationships between the “self” and the “other” thus contribute to the complexity of the intersections between mobility-systems and to the way they are practised and viewed in a certain society. In Goat Days, the most obvious form of mobility to which Najeeb’s can be compared is that of his arbab, the bedouin Saudi Arabian who picks him up from the airport and who has his vehicle parked next to the tent where he spends his days. The vehicle in this context is a powerful tool that allows the arbab to have control over Najeeb. It allows him not only to traverse long distances but also to conquer the material desert conditions that represent an important barrier to Najeeb’s potential escape—the harsh weather, the difficulty of walking on sand, the danger of snakes, etc. Combined with surveillance, the vehicle represents the kafīl’s almost absolute control over the helpless migrant worker. Najeeb’s arbab, he narrates, “observed me from the top of his vehicle whenever I went out, and drove around me when he felt that I had gone too far” (100). When, in a rash moment, thinking that he is “outside the binoculars’ range,” Najeeb suddenly decides to escape by running as fast as he could, he is amazed to hear “the roar of a vehicle behind” him (147). His arbab can easily follow him with the car, reducing all the distance that Najeeb has run to nothing. So it is not that Najeeb is simply immobile, but rather, that his form of mobility, walking or running, loses its value and becomes inadequate in comparison to the form of mobility that his arbab has access to. The unequal access to mobility-systems and its affirmation of already existent social hierarchies is more evident in the long journey of escape through the desert, when Najeeb and two other migrant workers from the nearby goat farm decide to run away on the only night in which their arbabs are away from the farms to attend a wedding. They run and run as fast as they can in order to reach as far away as possible before their escape is discovered in the morning. “Despite all that running, a feeling that we had not reached far enough, a panic that someone was after us, constantly followed us. We feared that every sound and whirr of the wind was that of the arbab’s vehicle” (191–192). The irony is their dependency upon the sandy roads made by vehicles in order to find their way, for they have to run beside these traces in the hope of finally reaching the highway. Stopping a car to pick them up is their only means of survival, but then there is also the

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fear of it belonging either to the arbab or to an acquaintance who would return them to the farm rather than rescue them (192). This dilemma results from their alienation in a terrain that does not welcome their form of mobility and is hence hostile to the movement of their bodies across it. The desert, as well as roads in the post-oil Saudi Arabia that these characters experience, are only traversable by vehicles. Walking is an unacceptable form of mobility that puts Najeeb and his companions in a miserable journey and threatens to take their lives. Indeed it is only Najeeb who makes it to the end and is rescued by strangers, while one of his companions dies of thirst and the other disappears. Marginalisation because of the lack of access to certain forms of mobility is a common issue in the Gulf where post-oil development resulted in an urbanisation that privileges the car as a mode of transport and leaves little or no space for pedestrians. For example, in his photographic essay on the mobilities of South Asian labourers in Dubai, David Kendall points out how “roads are instrumental in maintaining and encouraging a spatial and social culture of ‘controlled mobility’,” creating an infrastructure in which “walking is discouraged” (Kendall 2012, 46). For the low-class migrant workers who may not afford to have access to cars, “[r]oads become walls, boundaries and lines to be navigated, alienating pedestrians” (Kendall 2012, 46). Despite his marginalisation in rural Saudi Arabia, away from the modern urbanised center that he tries to imagine before his arrival in Riyadh, Najeeb’s mobility is nonetheless rejected by the Saudi Arabian environment, making his dramatic, almost unbelievable, story of escape through walking for days in the desert a reflection of the general situation in which migrant workers’ subordination to their kafīls and to the Gulf’s policies deprives them of having authority over their surroundings. His struggle of escaping through the desert can, therefore, be understood as another version of migrant workers’ immobilities, or marginalised mobilities, in Gulf spaces. A similar situation exists in Alrefai’s The Shadow of the Sun where Hilmi, like Najeeb, is also not completely immobile, but on the few occasions in which he actually leaves his room, his immobility is ironically accentuated when contrasted with the form of mobility that he, as a lowclass migrant worker, has no access to. More evident in this novel is the way the “other” is perceived and the impact that this has on Hilmi’s own perception of himself as a migrant worker. In the only time in which one of his roommates offers to take him to a nearby shopping district, his

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roommate tells him while they walk in the dusty streets that “Kuwaitis do not use their legs to walk. Every Kuwaiti has a car. Every house has as many cars parked next to it as the number of people who live inside. Four or five cars. Look, every car has only one person” (110). There is a sense of jealousy and frustration in these words. Even though Hilmi and his companion are able to reach their destination by walking, to them it is a restrictive activity, a form of mobility that becomes unappreciated when compared to the privilege of driving a car. When he does use public transportation for the first time in order to get to the sponsoring Abu Ajaj company, Hilmi is incapable of not noticing the distinctive appearance of the migrant workers who almost exclusively dominate the bus, turning it into a non-Kuwaiti space. “I was surprised upon seeing the burnt faces of the Afghans, Indians and Pakistanis, their skinny bodies … their oily hair … It was my first time seeing them. For a second, I thought I was in India rather than in Kuwait” (74). Public transportation which tends to be used almost exclusively by low-class migrant workers in Kuwait (Khalaf 2006, 259) offers Hilmi a different form of mobility that nonetheless reminds him of his low status. The tired bodies of the passengers and the miserable looks on their faces make him regret his decision of migrating to Kuwait, where discriminatory policies and non-stop work are likely to turn him into one of those migrants. Hilmi, however, only realises the extent of his spatial and social marginalisation when he goes to Al-Nuzha, the Kuwaiti area where he is to give private Arabic lessons to the sister of his roommate’s Kuwaiti manager. From the window of the car, he says, “I saw streets and neighborhoods I haven’t seen before. Different streets, less crowded by cars” (99). He decides that Kheitan, with “its old bachelor residences, its dusty streets, its grocery stores … and its Upper Egyptians,” is not in Kuwait (99). Al-Nuzha, in contrast, “is the Kuwait that my heart has dreamt of … and that I wished for before even seeing” (99). It is as if Kheitan, like the desert in Goat Days, is a space that is immobilising for Hilmi because of the relations of labour, deception and exploitation that affect the way it is experienced. “Places entail various kinds of performances” (Urry 2007, 254), and the spatial and social marginalisation of low-class migrants is one such performance that results in Kheitan and the bachelor residences being experienced as places of physical immobility. But neither is Al-Nuzha a welcoming space that embraces Hilmi or allows him to be more mobile. The drive through Al-Nuzha may give Hilmi temporary access to a different kind of space, but he is ultimately an outsider there

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as subsequent events in the narrative show. After being deceived by the contractor who gives Hilmi and his fellow construction workers no salaries for five months of labour, Hilmi’s despair and need of money drive him to continue his private lessons in Al-Nuzha despite his discomfort with the sexual insinuations of his teenage female student. Hilmi is eventually wrongly accused of raping a minor girl and sentenced to fifteen years in prison, a fate that ironically represents the epitome of his immobility in Kuwait. Following months of exploitation and invisibility, Hilmi suddenly becomes visible to the law that seeks to establish its authority and punish him for transgressing the space assigned to him as a migrant worker.

Conclusion A “car-oriented urbanscape,” negative perceptions of bachelor residences, and “underdeveloped” public transportation “that is associated with low-status, low-paid Asian and Arab migrants” are some of the features that Sulayman Khalaf identifies as characteristic of the Gulf city in the age of oil and globalisation (2006, 258–259). What these features reveal are socio-spatial divisions that impact housing patterns, unskilled migrant workers’ access to mobility-systems, and social relationships across lines of ethnicity and class. Najeeb’s and Hilmi’s experiences of spatial marginalisation and physical immobility are, therefore, a reflection of their status in relation to this social structure. Their inability to transgress spatial divisions and their physical subordination to their surroundings at the scale of everyday practices and activities represent their lack of agency in the face of the Gulf States’ systematic marginalisation of migrant workers through discriminatory labour and residency policies. As I have suggested earlier, however, marginality, whether social or spatial, does not always have to be read in this way. Because of the freedom that it could offer to individuals from social and other kinds of restraints, “marginality could be an enabling condition” and “the margin could be an arena where entrenched social rules are suspended … [or] a space of experimentation and possibility that is highly responsive to factors of change, including emerging opportunity” (Saad 2012, 109). This chapter’s reading of Benyamin’s and Alrefai’s novels shows that such disruptions do not happen in the case of Najeeb and Hilmi. In Goat Days, when Najeeb finally escapes from the desert and decides with another Indian escapee he meets in Riyadh that the best solution to their case is

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to get arrested so that they could be taken to prison and deported back to India, getting the attention of police officers does not turn out to be easy. “It was as if we were invisible to them,” he says (3). “How many days did we walk through the vegetable market, the fish market and busy streets hoping to get arrested? … Many a policeman came across us, none checked us. … [N]o one noticed us. One day, I even deliberately tripped on a policeman’s foot. Instead of questioning me, he lifted me up, apologised profusely in the name of Allah and sent me away” (4–5). Even when the characters do manage to escape their subjugation to the surroundings that restrict their movement, if only temporarily, their mobility is unacknowledged and their existence is invisible. It is exactly this invisibility, particularly to the Kuwaiti other, that frustrates Hilmi and leads him to associate the failure of his experience in Kuwait with the distance that separates him from Kuwaiti people and Kuwaiti places. “Where is the Kuwait that I have dreamt of? Eight months without experiencing the Kuwait of wealth or interacting with any Kuwaitis. I only watched them from a distance. I walk alone in Al-Farwaniyya souk and they walk alone in their dishdasha, ghutra and iqal, carrying their mobile phones, the latest model” (164–165). Hilmi has an image of Kuwait as a place that belongs exclusively to Kuwaitis and that necessarily reflects the “Kuwaiti lifestyle” that he associates with wealth and the consumption of luxuries. As a result, his lack of access to this exclusive sphere intensifies his sense of immobility and socio-­spatial marginality that are initially caused by the kafāla system’s discrimination against migrant workers. In other words, because Hilmi understands Kheitan and all the other places to which he is restricted as outside the Kuwait of Kuwaitis, he perceives himself to be invisible. While Najeeb’s invisibility is a condition that accompanies him throughout his stay in Saudi Arabia as a low-class worker, Hilmi’s seems to be more determined by his perception of himself in relation to the Kuwaiti “other” upon whom his pre-arrival image of Kuwait is based. What I want to argue here, however, is that both Alrefai’s and Benyamin’s novels do not challenge the sponsorship laws that make migrants immobile, nor do they present us with possibilities in which migrants’ mobilities, though invisible, may challenge urban structures in the Gulf.4 Such possibilities may exist and are thus worth exploring in other literary depictions of migrant experiences in the Gulf. These two novels’ aim seems primarily to expose the alienation, deception and exploitation to which low-class migrant workers in the Gulf are vulnerable because of policies such as the kafāla.

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Whether they are mobile or immobile, these migrants are invisible, not only because they work in marginalised places or because their movement is unremarkable, but also because they are deliberately made invisible by the social structures that refuse to see them and acknowledge their existence. Migrant characters’ invisibility and physical immobility in the novels of Benyamin and Alrefai are, therefore, a reflection of their lack of agency in the face of the structural exploitation that is facilitated by the Gulf States’ hostile policies towards migrants. On the one hand, these narratives counter the stories of economic success that contribute to shaping the mythical image of the Gulf in the imaginary of faraway communities by making visible other stories of immobilisation and subjugation (Gardner 2012, 53–55). On the other hand, however, they could be seen as uncritically conforming to stereotypical accounts of exploitation that deprive migrants of their agency and reduce them to the status of labourers with mere economic aspirations. Neha Vora and Natalie Koch critique such research approaches, arguing that “an exclusion-focused lens to Gulf studies tends to frame non-citizens as perennial outsiders, economic agents, and passive subjects of repressive power—those whose presence in the Gulf does not include joy, pleasure, or fulfilment, but rather empty exploitation or wealth accumulation” (2015, 541–542). Attiya Ahmad makes a similar critique and argues that “other forms of activity that are elided by our focus on labor need to be accounted for” (2012, 40). The choice of depicting migrant characters’ passivity in Goat Days and The Shadow of the Sun and the seeming impossibility of any form of subversion leaves no space in these narratives for other types of activities or practices in which migrants could be involved alongside, or despite, their daily labour. From this perspective, these literary productions become just as passive as the migrant characters whose passivity they depict. Nonetheless, following Kanna’s point on the necessity of avoiding “victim narratives” that essentialise migrant workers “while at the same time acknowledging the often horrendous working conditions under which many if not most [of them] toil in the Gulf” (2012, 158), Goat Days and The Shadow of the Sun could be read as examples of such acknowledgment. The space that these narratives dedicate to the depiction of characters’ physical mobilities or immobilities rightly reflects the important role that spatial divisions and the “intersections” between “mobility-systems” (Urry 2007, 51) play in determining migrant workers’ experiences in the Gulf States of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Attention

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to the depiction of characters’ mobilities/immobilities in fiction additionally encourages future readings that explore the connections between the socioeconomic factors conditioning migrant workers’ status and their embodied relationships with the places they work in and inhabit.

Notes 1. An author’s note at the end proclaims the novel to be based upon a true story which the author heard from Najeeb. 2. I will be using Joseph Koyippally’s 2012 English translation of Goat Days from Malayalam. Quotations from Alrefai’s The Shadow of the Sun (Ẓill AlShams) will be my own translation from the Arabic. 3. Alrefai, Taleb. 1992. Abū ʿAjāj Ṭāl ʿUmrak (Abu Ajaj, May God Give You Long Life!). Beirut: Al-Adab. 4. Though outside the scope of this chapter, the relationship between Hilmi’s lack of agency and Alrefai’s subject position as a Kuwaiti writing about the migrant “other” is worthy of exploration.

References Adey, Peter. 2006. “If Mobility is Everything Then it is Nothing: Towards a Relational Politics of (Im)mobilities.” Mobilities 1 (1): 75–94. Adey, Peter. 2017. Mobility, 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Adey, Peter, David Bissel, Kevin Hannam, Peter Merriman, and Mimi Sheller. 2014. “Introduction.” In The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities, edited by Peter Adey, et al., 1–20. London: Routledge. Ahmad, Attiya. 2012. “Beyond Labor: Foreign Residents in the Persian Gulf States.” In Migrant Labor in the Persian Gulf, edited by Mehran Kamrava and Zahra Babar, 21–40. London: Hurst. Alissa, Reem. 2009. “Modernizing Kuwait: Nation-Building and Unplanned Spatial Practices.” Berkeley Planning Journal 22 (1): 84–91. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1rs0x68j. Alrefai, Taleb. 1992. Abū ʿAjāj Ṭāl ʿUmrak [Abu Ajaj, May God Give You Long Life!]. Beirut: Al-Adab. Alrefai, Taleb. 2012. Ẓill al-Shams [The Shadow of the Sun]. Cairo: Al-Shorouk. Amin, Galal. 2005. Whatever Happened to the Egyptians? Changes in Egyptian Society from 1950 to the Present. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press. Babar, Zahra. 2013. “Migration Policy and Governance in the GCC: A Regional Perspective.” In Labor Mobility: An Enabler for Sustainable Development, edited by Ali Rashid Al-Noaimi and Irena Omelaniuk, 121–142. Abu Dhabi and Cambridge: The Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research and Cambridge University Press.

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Benyamin. 2012. Goat Days. Translated by Joseph Koyippally. Haryana: Penguin India. Collins, Francis Leo. 2011. “Transnational Mobilities and Urban Spatialities: Notes from the Asia-Pacific.” Progress in Human Geography 36 (3): 316–335. Crystal, Jill. 2005. “Public Order and Authority: Policing Kuwait.” In Monarchies and Nations: Globalisation and Identity in the Arab States of the Gulf, edited by Paul Dresch and James Piscatori, 158–181. London: I.B. Tauris. Dresch, Paul. 2006. “Foreign Matter: The Place of Strangers in Gulf Society.” In Globalization and the Gulf, edited by John W. Fox, Nada Mourtada-Sabbah, and Mohammed al-Mutawa, 200–222. New York: Routledge. Elsheshtawy, Yasser. 2010. “Little Space, Big Space: Everyday Urbanism in Dubai.” Brown Journal of World Affairs 17 (1): 53–71. Fortier, Anne-Marie. 2014. “Migration Studies.” In The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities, edited by Peter Adey, et al., 64–73. London: Routledge. Gardner, Andrew M. 2010. City of Strangers: Gulf Migration and the Indian Community in Bahrain. New York: Cornell University Press. Gardner, Andrew M. 2012. “Why Do They Keep Coming? Labor Migrants in the Persian Gulf States.” In Migrant Labor in the Persian Gulf, edited by Mehran Kamrava and Zahra Babar, 41–58. London: Hurst. Gardner, Andrew M., and Sharon Nagy. 2008. “Introduction: New Ethnographic Fieldwork Among Migrants, Residents and Citizens in the Arab States of the Gulf.” City and Society 20 (1): 1–4. Ibrahim, Saad Eddin. 1982. The New Arab Social Order: A Study of the Social Impact of Oil Wealth. Colorado: Westview. Kanna, Ahmed. 2012. “A Politics of Non-recognition? Biopolitics of Arab Gulf Worker Protests in the Year of Uprisings.” Interface 4 (1): 146–164. Kathiravelu, Laavanya. 2016. Migrant Dubai: Low Wage Workers and the Construction of a Global City. New York: Palgrave. Kendall, David. 2012. “Always Let the Road Decide: South Asian Labourers Along the Highways of Dubai, UAE: A Photographic Essay.” South Asian Diaspora 4 (1): 45–55. Khalaf, Sulayman. 2006. “The Evolution of the Gulf City Type, Oil, and Globalization.” In Globalization and the Gulf, edited by John W. Fox, Nada Mourtada-Sabbah, and Mohammed al-Mutawa, 244–265. New York: Routledge. Mohammad, Robina, and James D. Sidaway. 2016. “Shards and Stages: Migrant Lives, Power, and Space Viewed from Doha, Qatar.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 106 (6): 1397–1417. Osella, Caroline, and Filippo Osella. 2008. “‘I am Gulf’: The Production of Cosmopolitanism in Kozhikode, Kerala, India.” In Struggling with History: Islam and Cosmopolitanism in the Western Indian Ocean, edited by Edward Simpson and Kai Kresse, 323–355. New York: Columbia University Press.

210  N. DAKKAK Rahman, Anisur. 2010. “Migration and Human Rights in the Gulf.” Viewpoints: Migration and the Gulf, 16–18. https://www.mei.edu/sites/default/files/ publications/Migration%20Gulf_Viewpoints.pdf. Saad, Reem. 2012. “Margins and Frontiers.” In Marginality and Exclusion in Egypt, edited by Ray Bush and Habib Ayeb, 97–111. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press. Urry, John. 2007. Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity. Vora, Neha, and Natalie Koch. 2015. “Everyday Inclusions: Rethinking Ethnocracy, Kafala, and Belonging in the Arabian Peninsula.” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 15 (3): 540–552.

CHAPTER 9

“Flotsam of Humanity”: Bodies, Borders, and Futures Deferred Mike Lehman

On 8 May 2011, The Guardian published an article detailing the account of eleven survivors of a boat originally carrying seventy-two migrants attempting to reach Lampedusa from Tripoli (Shenker 2011). At first little was known about the account, but after a year of reporting by The Guardian and investigations by the Council of Europe it later became known as the “left-to-die boat” incident. Nearly a year after the initial report, Jack Shenker explains that the mass death on the “left-to die boat” resulted from the “failures by NATO warships and European coastguards” (Shenker 2012). After the boat ran out of fuel, it drifted for over two weeks in the Mediterranean, with the boat deteriorating slowly into wreckage, until it washed ashore in Libya. In one moment the boat came so close to a large military vessel that the “survivors claim those on board were photographing them from the deck as they held up the dead babies and empty fuel tanks in a desperate appeal for assistance” (Shenker 2012). Paradigmatic of the silent tragedies that are occurring in the Mediterranean, the “left-to-die boat” directly intervenes in the discussion of mobility, raising questions about who is granted the M. Lehman (*)  Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA © The Author(s) 2019 M. Aguiar et al. (eds.), Mobilities, Literature, Culture, Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27072-8_9

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rights to mobility, and who is cast-off, never able to gain citizenship and consigned to a form of (im)mobility. In this context, rights are only attached to a stable position in the future. Conceiving of the border as a space differentiated from the nation-state undermines the notion that the global future must necessarily take that national form. After washing ashore the survivors were taken prisoner with nine of the migrants being eventually released in Libya, thus reinforcing the myth of the stable nation-state and its ability to claim sovereignty over migrant bodies within its borders (Papastavridis, n.d., 9–10). As Efthymios Papastavridis notes, the refusal to give aid to the “left-to-die boat” possibly violates the non-refoulement principle from the Article 33 of the 1951 Refugee Convention which states, broadly, that “no refugee should be returned to any country where he or she is likely to face persecution, other ill-treatment, or torture,” and which Papastavridis believes applies “wherever it takes place and not only within a State’s borders” (Papastavridis, n.d., 9–10). Despite being in the vicinity, the NATO affiliated ships denied aid to the migrant boat, and their actions and the very terminology of the “left-to-die boat” places them/ it within the scope of what Zygmunt Bauman calls the “waste of globalization” in which he compares “refugees, the displaced, asylum seekers, migrants, the sans papiers” to “traditional industrial waste” (Bauman 2004, 58). Against that, in this chapter a different type of sovereignty is conceived in which rights emerge from the border itself. What is at stake in the “left-to-die boat” incident is the refusal to grant human rights in a form of forced (im)mobility and, in the process of this refusal, attaching human rights only to citizenships that are connected to the nation-state. There is little political representation for non-citizens, specifically while occupying the space of the border, but within this very space, potential for a different future exists, currently only visible in literature implying a need to explore the silent tragedies from the literary imaginary. The geopolitics of migration are largely framed around the absolute future tense of the nation-state, a perception of the world in which migrants are always moved in and out of the nation to retain its perpetual, static structure and in which the national form is always taken as the global future. The nation immediately sutures any fractures or gaps that have the potential to provide alternative futures and citizenships in order to maintain the stability and increase the longevity of a globe structured around national bodies. Within this schema, the proleptic, always determined nature of the nation closes off potential futures

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that emerge from the border imaginary. While mobility studies are ­concerned with the spaces the body moves through and across, mobility studies also provides a theoretical lens to explore the latent border imaginary from which arises possibilities for multiple futures to emerge that are not delimited by a negative perception of the border. The possibilities for these multiple futures occur in the future’s deferral, and in this deferral the undeveloped potential of the border subverts the present taken as the determined future. I claim that these futures deferred allow for a different conception of borders and a different type of global subject to emerge from the Global South. The in-between space of the border offers potentials for mobilising the border for a reconceptualisation of the world and a way for rights and sovereignty to emerge from the border itself.

The Border Kinaesthetics of Caroline Bergvall’s Drift In her 2014 poetry collection Drift, Caroline Bergvall gives voice to the silent tragedy of the “left-to-die boat” and the “waste of globalization,” constructing a narrative that weaves together the survivors’ stories with the European Council and NATO’s reports of the “left-to-die boat” incident. Her poetic and visual text’s central section entitled “Report” reimagines the discourse surrounding the “left-to-die boat.” Most of the poems in the collection are on white paper, but the “Report” and some other minor sections are printed on black pages with white ink which changes the reading practice of words emerging from a page toward absences left on the full, black page. Bergvall’s “Report” uses narrative to splice together different forms of mobility. A photo taken by a French military aircraft near the start of the journey precedes the “Report,” followed by a series of maps that mimic GPS coordinates but are actual constellation maps of the drift model and the Northern Line of the London Underground, among others (Bergvall 2014, 185). These visual aspects of the text serve to differentiate between a type of literary and visual tourism by the reader and the actual movement of bodies in the boat. The leisurely activity of the reader interacts, from the future, with the (im)mobility of the boat. Bergvall’s “macro” magnifies the image of the boat so that it looks like a type of fog, which the poet associates with “memory loss identity loss” (Bergvall 2014, 156). The poet continues to explain that she needs to “make sure that we can work through but not cancel out the uneasy sick feeling [we] get when

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peering down from the future at this image […]. It encounters the dead as they are still living and sailing” (Bergvall 2014, 157). The temporal break between the living and the dead forces the reader to encounter their place within this narrative and with the precariousness within the border, but also the border as precarious. The future place of the reader creates a form of interaction that completes the narrative from the future to be subsumed by the static nation-state. The reader gazes from the future upon the wreckage of the “left-to-die boat.” Through the problematics of the future gaze upon the alive migrants on the “left-to-die boat” boat, the text offers different conceptual frameworks of mobility that simultaneously encounter the denied access to geographic movement presented by the maps, and the reader’s access to both the maps and the narrative from the position of the nation-state. The reader accesses the complete narrative all at once, while the “leftto-die boat” remains in the indeterminate space of the border. It is the interaction between the future reader and the nation-state that subsumes the border as an appendage of the nation, thus mobility exists within the nation while migrant (im)mobility exists outside the national border. Here, the unthought space of the border is yet-to-be conceived. Yet, Bergvall’s literary perspective of the “left-to-die boat” incident offers a different sense of temporality, spatiality, and how the body interacts with these conceptual frames. Her poetic project confronts the silence of the current migration process and offers a type of border aesthetic. Thus, I begin by exploring Bergvall’s text to suggest that there is a form of mobility within the border. This mobility within the border has an aesthetic quality that can be termed what recent mobility scholars call “kinaesthetics,” and I suggest that this aesthetics of movement destabilises the bodily interaction with the nation-state. From here, I move toward the exploitation of human organs that benefits citizens of the Global North to imply that only the body-in-pieces has rights to sanctioned migratory routes, rather than the complete body. This problematisation of the body and borders allows a method of reading that uses an interdisciplinary approach to examine international law, organ transplantation, and literature so that we can begin to explore a specific kind of border imaginary that seeks to reworld the globe. At the end of the chapter, I explore the latent potential of the literary imaginary presented in Malika Mokeddem’s The Forbidden Woman to explore the potential of mobilising the alternative space of the border through what Suvendrini Perera theorises as the borderscape.

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Bergvall’s project problematises and offers potentials for the “new mobilities paradigm” (Hannam et  al. 2006, 1–2). In “Mobilities, Immobilities, and Moorings,” Hannam, Sheller, and Urry explain that mass movement transforms both the conception of home and the human body and commitments those entities have to communities and/or the nation (Hannam et al. 2006, 2). They write that complex mobility systems are associated with “moorings” and suggest that their approach to mobilities problematises both “‘sedentarist’ approaches in the social sciences that treat place, stability and dwelling as a steady-state, and ‘deterritorialized’ approaches that posit a new ‘grand narrative’ of ­mobility, fluidity or liquidity as a pervasive condition of postmodernity or globalization” (Hannam et al. 2006, 5). The mobilities project aims to “[go] beyond the imagery of ‘terrains’ as spatially fixed geographical containers for social processes, and [calls] into question scalar logics such as local/global as descriptors of regional extent” (Hannam et al. 2006, 5). Another paradigm can be included, that is the temporal and spatial in-between. Bergvall’s text offers a further exploration of temporality when conceiving of space, representation, and literary production. Her text occupies the space in between “sedantarist” and “deterritorialized” concepts of stability and dwelling. Drift decentralises the moored state, challenging a perspective from an (im)mobile vehicle, moving from a moored to an unmoored conceptual framework. Mobility becomes cut off between the image of the freeze-framed, moving boat and the reader’s ability to access the maps. The “fog” of the text occurs with the constellational maps, pinpoints that mark (im)mobility in their representation, and places mobilities under erasure until the text presents the names of the maps in the appendix. The reader of the “Report” exists as a point within the “fog,” both the area between weather patterns, but also the memory loss in the space between states. Here, mobility becomes an issue inside the border. Mobility details the productive space in between two states in which the possibilities of the future are never determined, an aesthetics of movement that seeps and leaks into possibilities of being, between both temporal and national states, and begins to push toward mobilising the alternative space of the border. The mobilisation of the alternative, unthought space of the border works toward creating an unmoored citizenship, one that depends on mobility to exist outside the confines of the nation. Drift’s constellations/maps are more aligned with a possible thread running through much of the arts and humanities research on mobility

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that Peter Merriman and Lynne Pearce describe as “kin-aesthetics” or the “aesthetics of movement” (Merriman and Pearce 2017, 498). With kinaesthetics, mobility and movement emerge in “writings which focus on questions of rhythm, temporality, and spatiality” (Merriman and Pearce 2017, 498–499). Thus movement and mobility become “associated with distinct proprioceptive and kinaesthetic ontologies and cultural practices” which emerge in Bergvall’s distinction between the NATO response and the migrants’ words: “The military vessel left without providing them with any assistance. / We knew that we would die little-by-little” (Merriman and Pearce 2017, 499; Bergvall 2014, 80). Death and spatial and temporal movement “little-by-little” further de-aestheticises the gradual association of the migrants with the boat they occupy: “The boat was a rubber ship, a zodiac type plastic vessel, 10 meters long and with a capacity to carry max 25 people” (Bergvall 2014, 71). Like the migrants aboard the boat, the “left-to-die boat” decays and becomes (im)mobile after the engine runs out of fuel. Through the description of their journey, the migrants become associated with an object and the boat as they “die little-by-little.” The body and object become nearly identical. Rather than a stable aesthetic, the text enacts a kinaesthetic representation, as bodies that are given a voice only through their death and silent tragedy. The movement of the narrative between the tool of mobility, the boat, and later the maps of mobility—the subway maps and other constellations—suggests an interaction with mobility, temporality, and spatiality that aligns with what Tim Cresswell defines as people, both “fleshy human bodies in the material world and as figures in a representational landscape” (Cresswell 2013, 82). He continues to explain that it “is possible to think of us humans as individual packages of living tissue moving through abstract space. In this sense, we can be mapped or tracked as dots on a map” (Cresswell 2013, 82). Bergvall’s exploration of the “tracked […] dots on a map” and “human flesh” moving toward the objectification of the migrants as glossed in the collective of the “leftto-die boat” suggests a specific kinaesthetic that operates in the border space of the Mediterranean, but also in the representational and perceptual move of the human to an object. The migrant and refugee in their (im)mobility change into an identifiable object. The text offers a productive space that calls into question “scalar logics” that rely on “human movement in a world of states,” a type of kinaesthetic representation that emerges from the border space (Soderstrom et al. 2013, xv). Since the

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border is figured as traversal space, it becomes defined as something that cannot be dwelled in yet, but still an unstable space not within the overly determined nation-state. In Drift the stripping of human rights as we move through the text forces the encounter of our futurity while reflecting on the experience of clandestine migration. Here, the “appropriate subjects and objects of social inquiry” dramatise the border in between object and subject, and highlight the move from a fleshy body toward the human as object and disposable waste (Hannam et al. 2006, 10). Yet as the body moves toward becoming an object as it dies “little by little,” humanity becomes attached to the deceased body. The questions this raises are why humanity is only attached to the migrant/refugee body in death, what becomes of the remains of the “fleshy human body,” and who has rights to these bodies and their representation? The proleptic nature of the nation reduces possibilities for citizenships through the continual maintenance of the nation’s health and longevity by using global disparities to maintain the disproportioned distribution of resources, both bodily and natural. Thus, the nation acts as a body receiving the “waste of globalization” only to maintain its longevity.

The Migrating Body in Pieces The significance of the border between subject and object and the potential of the in-between is no more apparent than in the case of the life and death of Alan Kurdi. On 2 September 2015, Alan Kurdi’s lifeless body washed ashore in Turkey. Much of the global awareness of the Syrian War began with the circulated image of Alan, and before his name was known, the toddler’s image spread across social media with the hashtag “Flotsam of Humanity.” In essence, the body became transnational, moving from the “waste of globalization” toward a recycled product and image. Better known for his red shirt, blue pants, and brown shoes recreated and multiplied through artistic representations of his body as protest that spread across social media, Alan is presented more as a commodified image than a person. Thus, there is a slippage in the hashtag “Flotsam of Humanity.” In maritime law, “flotsam” is cargo not deliberately discarded from a ship that can still be claimed by the owner; it exists as flotsam only while outside the vessel or before it reaches land. Thus, this “flotsam of humanity” becomes attached to the origin once it washes ashore, a transient term that applies only in specific spaces. Only in death does Alan have a

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claim to citizenship. His body as waste—segmented on the surface by his known representation: red, blue, brown—acts as in intervention in both current debates of migration and mobilities and relates the use of bodies to the nation-state and problematises a conceptualisation of transnational ethics in the context of his movement. In his digital form, Alan’s segmented representation operates in a similar way to the physical segmentation of migrant bodies. Thus, if the discourse of migration and mobility is brought to bear on his physical body as waste, we begin to see the latent and manifest exploitation of the body in transit across unconventional migratory routes. This raises the question: who has claim to this waste or flotsam and the ability to reclaim and recycle these byproducts? Here, we can turn to the current debate on transnational organ banks to challenge the theorisation of transnational and global citizenship and subjectivity. If the body can be claimed by the globe, who has rights to the organs and potential life-extending material of the body? In this regard, when praxis is brought to bear on a theorisation of the “rights” to/of the body, a neocolonial world is re-produced in which the North controls access to the resources of the South via technologies to extend life, but in this case the ore/organs migrate on their own following the same digital and technological migratory route into the Global North as the “Flotsam of Humanity.” Here, the body of the other acts as a container for resources to clandestinely move through borders, thus potentially enabling an obscene form of exploitation and biocolonialism that is playing out in networks of migration. Indeed, the washing up of the flotsam becomes obscene as it reaches the beach, the place of leisure and tourism par excellence. We can think of flotsam as it emerges and washes up as no longer in the non-statehood of the border, but on the beach and within the state. The spectacle of the body washing up on the beach forces the national citizen to encounter the possiblity of the nation’s death. National borders create a situation in which the body is only able to cross in segments while the full body is regulated to border zones. As The Times reported in 2017, bodies of refugees have become a source of capital for organ traffickers. African refugees who are unable to pay human smugglers are sold to Egyptian traffickers who come “equipped to remove the organ and transport it in insulated bags” (Kington 2016). A government informant added that the smugglers also sold the organs of migrants who died at sea on the journey to Italy (Moore 2016). Thus, while in the process of movement, the body becomes dismembered into small commodities that continue

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the migratory flow while leaving the full body behind. Yet, the contingency of the border confronts the agency of the nation-state, and the potential kinaesthetics of the moving border begins to undermine the very structures that divide space and the body. While the depiction of bodies as flotsam to be used as spare parts for capital gain seems like a recent phenomenon, postcolonial literature has presented these specific anxieties since decolonisation. The trope of the organ transplant in these literatures typically operates in two ways: some speculate on the use of the population as organ mines, while others remark on the use of bodies for organs and experimentation to show the unequal exchange of resources between nations. Malika Mokeddem’s The Forbidden Woman, published in French as L’interdite in 1994 and translated in 1998, intertwines these two discourses through the narrative of a French man who receives an organ from an Algerian woman. Literature of transplantation allows a specific kind of imaginary and critical work to take place that augments traditional theories of borders through the explorations of how the body in pieces achieves mobility before the individual subject. I suggest that literatures of transplantation are proleptic, and like Bergvall’s gazing from the future, the pieces of the body attain a problematic statehood before the body. The Forbidden Woman works through what Donna McCormack terms the transplant imaginary, “which gives space and time to that which cannot and may never materialize, demanding we sense that which is there even when it is an immaterial presence, an invisible materiality or a haunting absence” (McCormack 2016, 150). Yet the transplant imaginary envisions border zones as productive spaces to re-world the globe. Rather than delimiting movement, a perspective from the border allows for a reconceptualisation of nationally bound citizenships and rights, one in which mobility becomes open to diverse populations and contradicts the move towards a form of biocolonialism. Thus, literary texts that engage the border raise an impossible, paradoxical question about how humanity emerges in the act of being discarded: What types of mobilities grant humanity to the body and what kinds separate humanity from bodies? The dramatisation of the widespread circulation of Alan’s representation suggests that the dead body gains a form of citizenship, while the living body is denied this same type of citizenship and remains stateless. These themes are connected through perceptions of movement and how bodies are perceived through their mobility.

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Despite being rejected for asylum in Canada, Alan’s family made the decision to reach Europe by boat (Elgot 2015). Shortly after leaving, they came under duress as the boat overturned and Alan’s father realised he had lost his entire family. After Alan’s image began to spread, his body was quickly claimed by the state and returned to Syria by air. In his death, Alan gains the rights of movement decided by state citizenship which were denied him and his family when they attempted to gain asylum, suggesting that the body and its attachment to citizenship cannot remain undetermined. The acquired mobility of Alan’s body in dialogue with the rights denied his family relate back to the detainment of the survivors of the “left-to-die boat.” The nation-state’s right of detainment and exclusion reinforce the myth of the nation-state as stable. The mobility of populations who are in the border must be appropriated by the state through a violation of human rights and the exercise of power once the body leaves the border. A few months after Alan’s death and return to Syria, Michael Ignatieff wrote in The New York Review of Books that “Now, in the age of open borders and free exit, people are flowing out, and with them, the saving distance that kept zones of danger apart from zones of safety has collapsed” (Ignatieff 2015). For this lack of a “frontier” between the North and the South, Ignatieff states his solution: “the world badly needs a new migratory regime—based around an internationally authorized biometric ID card […] so that southern countries benefit from the remittances sent home and northern ones benefit from the labor and ingenuity their aging population needs” (Ignatieff 2015). Long considered a liberal thinker and revered for his human rights activism, Ignatieff’s statement on the need for biometric data for migrants comes as a surprise and highlights the anxiety about allowing bodies to enter specific nation-states. In fact, the very distinction of different types of identification suggests the strengthening of national space within structures that maintain the divide between the Global South and the Global North. Explaining that “migratory flows” are beneficial to the North and the South, specifically in remittances sent home by migrant workers and the labour provided for the North’s “aging population,” hints at an underlying desire for the formerly colonised subject’s body to migrate for a specific reason: the use of the physical body to be incorporated and plugged into the nationstate. Yet, the type of exploitation of the physical body continually shifts, moving from the potential of muscular productivity of the human body as a machine, toward the use of the tissue for the “aging population.”

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The “bio-political tattooing” proposed by Ignatieff provides a specific use for the data which classifies the body through emerging biometric DNA technology and other physiological markers that attach identity to state citizenship (Agamben 2008). Within this schema, there can be no in-between. Tracking the biological data of an individual raises ethical questions and also introduces the body into a microbiological exchange network within a global economy. More than labour, Ignatieff’s so-called “aging populations” of the North need raw, biological material. By organising migrant and refugee populations with biological markers, the body becomes certified as usable; in other words it is safe, healthy, productive, and ready to be exploited either through manipulation of labour or use of the very bio-pieces and organs of the body. In essence, the subject of the North becomes an aging ruin that can use the bio-pieces of the South to prolong life, reify privilege, and continue the economic and technological divide between the Global North and South. While living, bodies have innate tractable qualities that prevent border crossing. But in death, the parts of the body separate from these markers of difference to become a common resource or an interchangeable part. Similar to Alan’s digital body, the body is only able to cross borders in pieces. The fear of the body becoming a type of mine for human organs has long been a trope in postcolonial literature, perhaps best articulated in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s novel Devil on the Cross (1987; written in Gikuyu in 1980 and first published in English in 1982). Ngugi’s novel depicts a gathering among the comprador class of Kenya in which the participants, called experts in “theft and robbery,” compete for a crown which is obtained by presenting the best plan to exploit the Kenyan population. One participant explains that it was revealed to him that “in this country we should have a factory for manufacturing human parts like mouths, bellies, hearts and so on, spare parts for the human body” (Ngugi 1987, 180). He then elaborates: “We could purchase immortality with our money and leave death as the prerogative of the poor” (Ngugi 1987, 180). The rich man, a representative of the corrupt nation-state, always remains stable because his organs can be exchanged. He may become fragmented, but he is always made whole again. Pheng Cheah elaborates on the significance of this moment: “This is, in other words, an alienation that originates from within the nation itself, where the foreign prosthetic body becomes indistinguishable from the real body and death emerges from within life itself” (Cheah 2003, 368). This continual

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exchange of parts shows the movement of both capital and organs and how it sustains the nation-state as a stable force, but the novel’s depiction of a factory for “human parts” removes any form of agency from the national-subject and rather depicts the population as a way to sustain the nation itself through recyclability within the nation, but also in exportation. The body becomes a factory; that is, it naturally grows commodities for the use of the wealthy and the state. Here, Ngugi’s analysis of neocolonial exploitation moves into a globalised world. Not only are the bodies to be exploited by the comprador class in Kenya, but they are also to be exported to areas in which there is enough technological development to harvest and implant the organs. In the novel, the “expert in theft” continues to explain: “Every rich man could have two mouths, two bellies, two cocks, two hearts—and hence two lives! Our money would buy us immortality! We would leave death to the poor” (Ngugi 1987, 181). The depiction of the harvesting of the poor becomes especially problematic. The organs of the poor become transnational objects before the body. Futures are cut off for the majority of the population, while the nation-state and wealthy become the inheritors of bio-material. The anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes brings the literary representation of the body as mine into her detailing of the illicit trade of body parts. Her work examines the disjunction between where body parts come from and where they end up, and she highlights the inequality of the “exchanges by which organs and tissues are taken from young, productive, black bodies […] and transplanted to older, debilitated, affluent, white bodies” (Scheper-Hughes 2002, 40). Quoting Dr. Brink, the head cardiac surgeon from the Medical School of the University of Cape Town, Scheper-Hughes explains that prior to 1984 no familial consent was needed to harvest organs and they just took the “hearts [they] needed.” Furthermore, many organs, specifically heart valves, were taken from the “bodies of the poor in the police mortuary and shipped ‘for handling costs’ to medical centers in Germany and Austria” (Scheper-Hughes 2002, 60). The ease with which the organs become transnational commodities suggests an openness of national borders that is denied to the living body, but is accessible to the biomedical commodity. The body is tied to the origin, or the state, while the bodyin-pieces is truly a global and transnational organic material. The body as a receptacle of commodities to be mined that is vilified in Ngugi’s text becomes a moment in which transnational citizenship for organs and the closed, national borders for the “sovereign” national subject are

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reified. Citizenship is less easy to deconstruct than the body, and it is this moment that brings to the fore a “‘crisis of ethics,’ where the possibilities of being open to the other, and of bearing witness to the epistemic limits of self and other, are increasingly situated in a desire to procure parts of the other solely to sustain the vitality of the self” (McCormack 2012, 172; Chakravorty and Neti 2009, 196). Desiring to “procure parts of the other” reinforces the technological advantage the North has over the South and fetishises the body of the other in the same way that literature has done for centuries. Yet, this fetishism of the other and the other’s organs becomes a life-sustaining source for the North. Both the body and the labour of the other becomes the vital object to sustain the “aging populations” of the North.

Body as Mine: Malika Mokeddem’s The Forbidden Woman The trope of the organ transplant puts into conversation the movement of body parts and the (im)mobility of the body. The body as a mine moors it to the nation-state, unable to move until it is harvested, reconstructing a geographical sphere which remains divided between the Global North and Global South attached to conceptions of a geopolitical map invested in maintaining the body of nation-states. Malika Mokeddem’s The Forbidden Woman puts these multiple discourses in dialogue. Weaving together a novel from multiple vantage points that alternate in each chapter, Mokeddem’s novel narrates the story of Sultana, who leaves Algeria as a young woman to become a doctor only to return for her former lover’s funeral; Vincent, a French mathematics professor who receives a kidney from an Algerian woman who has passed away; and Dalila, a young child from the village with whom both Vincent and Sultana spend time. Each of the characters depict different concepts of mobility: Sultana with movement from one nation to another, Vincent with a physical organ transplantation, and Dalila who offers an imaginary conception of mobility and space. Before receiving a kidney transplant, Vincent believes that the organ he “so yearned for belonged to no one, had no origin” (Mokeddem 1998, 20). After learning that it is the kidney of an Algerian woman, he decides to visit Algeria to learn about the women in Algeria and attempt to trace the roots of the donor. In Algeria, Vincent meets Sultana and she asks him how he experiences “someone else’s organ in your body” (Mokeddem 1998, 86). He replies: “Like … someone similar and different, bound to me. I’ll never

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be able to consider that I have of this other person only an organ, to conceive of a human as being made of spare parts from the transplant bazaar. This kidney is only our meeting point” (Mokeddem 1998, 87). Only after he receives the organ does he begin to look for the “origin.” At first, it had no “origin” and exists only as life-extending material. Furthermore, the vision of the gift of life veils the differentiation between the donor and recipient. Only after the organ is turned into a commodity does the kidney donor come into any form of subjectivity. Yet, there is a type of chiastic structure in the mobility of subjectivity. In Vincent’s mind, the donor of course had subjectivity, and in a sense loses that at the time of death, only to be reattributed at the time of donation. This in-between state of the organ mimics the border between nations, in that there is a future potential of the organ and border before it is subsumed within the body/nation-state. Yet, the novel portrays this brief moment of “subjectivity” for the donor as bound to the nation. The kidney belongs to an “Algerian woman” and Vincent explains that the surgery “implanted in me two seeds of strangeness, of difference: the other sex and another ‘race’” (Mokeddem 1998, 21). After learning of the kidney donor’s origin, he desires to “read who she was, discover her, and construct her through the voices, gestures, and behavior of thousands, millions of Algerian women” (Mokeddem 1998, 22). By following his desire to rid himself of the “strangeness” and “difference” of the other “sex” and “race” Vincent’s “read[ing]” and “construct[ion]” of the other from “millions of Algerian women” implies a form of writing that brings the difference of millions into a discourse of genetic equality. However, this discourse of equality comes from the ability for the organ to become a transnational commodity. On a sceptical note, the ability to construct millions of Algerians suggests an expansive network of organs for the dying, French state. The spare part from the “transplant bazaar” becomes available on the global market. The very biopieces of the former colonial subject cross borders while the whole body is not able to, and in the process extends the longevity of the French “citizens” and nation. While Vincent believes that his identical match to the Algerian women hints at the equality of different races, his construction of the other emerges from Algeria as a place of spare, biological parts. He explains: “What a feeling to know that I had the same tissue identity as a woman and, moreover, a woman from elsewhere! Those who tell lies about the races would do well to take a glance at genetics!” (Mokeddem 1998, 91). Looking at “genetic” matching masks his desire to construct the other. In the character of Vincent, the liberal humanist is a self-aggrandising apologist for the direct exploitation of human bodies who only acquires

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a sense of discovering the “other” as his body is repaired by her organ. While thinking about the possibility for his body to reject the organ, Vincent notes: “My hand immediately moves to the scar on my right side. My index finger trembling, I trace the scar’s slightest lines up and down, written with the providential scalpel, which, one day, placed a foreign kidney among my entrails” (Mokeddem 1998, 19). This “up and down” tracing and the fetishisation of the suture depicts the incorporation of migrant populations into the Global North to sustain its structure in the same way Vincent receives a “foreign” organ to sustain his life. Access to migrant bodies amplifies Vincent’s skewed perception of transnational movement as something open to all. However, Algerians are not able to move across borders as Vincent is; only their organs have the same type of transnational and global citizenship of bodies from the North. Vincent becomes an active participant in the construction of the world as a global society in which all bodies are able to cross borders. He invents a specific global view to minimise his participation in the continual exploitation of the former colonies after so-called decolonisation. Indeed as the historian Todd Shepard writes, the Algerian war gave birth to the notion that decolonisation was part of the forward march of history which enabled France to “forget” the past in which Algeria was considered an integral part of France—more specifically Algeria was France—and through this “forgetting there emerged novel definitions of French identity and new institutions of the French state” (Shepard 2006, 2). He adds that after the 1962 revolution “the 130-year French insistence that Algeria was French was simply abandoned” (Shepard 2006, 8). While Shepard’s point is well taken, Mokeddem’s novel further complicates the relationship between France and Algeria. Vincent is able to easily gain access to the former colony while the former “French” are unable to move with the same freedom of mobility. Not only is decolonisation an invention that solidifies national borders, but the enforcement of national borders constantly shifts to benefit the North. While Algeria is no longer France, France still has access to the former colony and the formerly colonised bodies that remain in the periphery while their organs are able to become transnational commodities that exist without borders. Organs are global, while people remain tied to their origin. Despite a theory of a universal “we,” praxis is nonexistent. Prior to decolonisation, France defined Algeria “as an extension of itself” (Shepard 2006, 8). Now, it seems that France defines the organs of the formerly colonised subjects as a future extension of the national self

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from the former colonial subject. The body becomes a container, but once it ceases to exist the ore/gans gain global citizenship as they enter the body of the French, or former colonisers’, body. The biological and microbiological pieces of the former colonial subject become the collective possession of the so-called multicultural state self-defined as the global “we.” Mokeddem’s text seeks an alternative to the national exclusions that she sees when attempting to look toward a better future. McCormack suggests that in the character of Vincent and his alternative to seek alternative histories there is a decolonising move that remembers who had to die to maintain the “metropolitan French body” (McCormack 2016, 150). McCormack continues: “Organ transplantation, as embodied by Vincent, requires a different response, where he lives with this other who is inside and outside—integral to and separate from—the self. In other words, he remembers the present absence” (McCormack 2016, 150). Even here, rather than decolonisation, the world seems to have enacted a form of biocolonialism in which exploitation occurs at the level of DNA. This form of what I term microcolonisation seems to benefit everyone but the victims. In “Organs Without Borders,” Glenn Cohen attempts to imagine a postnational organ bank. Cohen explains that since “nationstates remain the key economic, social, technical, and above all ‘realspace’ actors in the procurement of organs” it is “harder to imagine them disintermediated without also disintermediating the nation-states’ involvement in the health care system more generally” (Cohen 2014, 215). He concludes: “still, it may be that my imagination has failed me, and others might take charge of designing (or at least imagining) a truly postnational system of organ allocation” (Cohen 2014, 215). It is his remark that his “imagination has failed” him which enables an imagined postnational system, but it must be postnational in both senses, not just in “organ allocation.” While it is possible that many critics’ “imaginations” have failed, literary texts create a specific kind of border imaginary that seek a world that is structured significantly different than the one we occupy today. In the figure of Dalila, the concept of the border as a different type of space emerges in The Forbidden Woman. I argue that it shows the potential of the shifting, constantly moving border as a productive space that allows the national future to be deferred. These futures deferred connect the concept of the organ and flotsam as offering potential of imagined futures before becoming subsumed within a physical or national body. Dalila and the kinaesthetic text exhibit the precarity

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of the border as a space outside the overly determined nation-state which collapses possible futures within nationally defined borders. The Forbidden Woman offers this imperative to imagine in the character of Dalila, a young Algerian girl who is trapped within a male dominated society and imagines herself as a migrant while occupying the erg, an area of shifting dunes in the Saharan desert. Dalila’s narrative is the excess that runs between the split narrative and bordered structure of the text presented in its strict, alternating chapters. It is the narrative organ that is able to gain access to a type of mobility through a conception of borders that emerges from the Global South. Within the narrative of biocolonialism and exploitation, Dalila exhibits a moment of hope. By exploring the kinaesthetics of Dalila’s imagined future, the text provides an emergent possibility from the border. A concern of mobility studies is the space that the body moves through, but I believe it is imperative that we imagine the border as the productive space for a different type of global subject who emerges from a theory from the South. In both The Theory of the Border and The Figure of the Migrant, Thomas Nail articulates a theoretical frame for understanding the “structures and functions” of borders in social life and explains how perceiving history from the perspective of the migrant, which he defines as the “political figure of our time,” shifts histor­ ical analysis from one of stasis and nation toward a theorisation of the migrant as the driving social force (Nail 2015, 235; 2016, 7). As Nail defines it, the border is always in motion (Nail 2016, 2–5). He further notes that a border is “a process of circulation,” that is, “borders are never done ‘including,’ someone or something” (Nail 2016, 7). For Nail, borders “regularly change their selection process for inclusion such that anyone might be expelled at any moment” (Nail 2016, 7). Thus, a focus on the migrant is a way to rethink notions of the nation-state and citizenship. Citizenship, as a form of exclusive inclusion is marked by violence. In this schema, the border becomes the regulating force of the nation, always changing to both include and exclude at the same moment. These shifting spaces mark social expansion based on the social expulsion of migrants, which Nail terms “kinopolitics,” or the study of scripted movement in which the migrant as a figure refers to “empirical migrants in the world and a more abstract social relation” that prefigures “a new model of political membership …” (Nail 2015, 16–17). Nail sees potential in the figure of the migrant, one in which the migrant is not defined as having no “social order” nor “history,”

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but a figure that redefines the space of borders through “irregularity and unpredictability,” giving birth “to a new form of social motion not defined by expulsion” (Nail 2015, 126). Furthermore, by explaining that the border is never done “including someone or something,” Nail gives a highly productive definition to the border that he does not fully develop. If the border is always capable of “including,” it is also a space of inclusion that continually expands, ruptures its limits, and can potentially encompass delimiting spaces. The border as a space of inclusion marks the potential of a shift in thinking about borders, or moving the border to the realms of an unthought space, to an inclusionary space, one that postcolonial and migrant literatures that focus on movement and textuality elaborate and claim through imaginative acts. The focus on movement suggests that through aesthetic production the border does not memorialise the narration of the nation, but of the migratory figure that moves in and inhabits the space. The central concept of movement and migration in kinaesthetics marks spaces of future production and organisational concepts beyond the scope of dividing land between national boundaries. The border itself operates in a space of its own, both swallowing the migratory figure but also giving a narrative voice to the migrant that must inhabit these specific border spaces. Texts marked by kinaesthetics and unthought spaces exhibit the permeability of the border. Nail’s border ought to be conceived of as a place of continual movement and production, a space of mobility itself, rather than a dividing line. Emerging from the borders of the text, Dalila bridges the gaps between Vincent and Sultana’s narratives and attempts to create a different space through acts of the imagination. Here, both Vincent and Sultana can be viewed as witnessing the formation of another space, the space that offers possibilities through the imagining of Dalila’s multiple selves. This can be referred to as what Homi Bhabha calls a transnational, migrant knowledge that the world so desperately needs, the third space of alterity which incites movement, “to and fro, that turns the interiority of the self outwards to face the world, while transforming external reality into an intimate relation, within oneself and with others” (Bhabha 2011, 18). Dalila deploys the transnational, migrant knowledge depicted when Vincent explains that Dalila has “invented a world and is taking refuge in it,” while Sultana remarks that any “refuge is precarious, as soon as one has left for the first time” (Mokeddem 1998, 63–67). The precarious nature of the “refuge” marks the need for a space of continual

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movement. Yet, Dalila, the “seed of all exiles,” offers a dream space with an imagined future of herself, displayed as her sister Samia who does not actually exist. For Dalila, exile and existing outside of delimited areas is the key to “finding the space you want,” which, she explains, is the “space” in a term such as “maybe” (Mokeddem 1998, 79). Dalila further explains that she finds space in “peut-être,” a “pretty” word, “this word with its ‘peut’ that has a head and a tail and its ‘être’ that has a hat behind its head. And the dash that unifies the two and makes it look like they’re holding their hands to walk” (Mokeddem 1998, 119). Through this “maybe,” she does not just create a different world, but formulates multiple worlds and selves. These spaces and dreamscapes open areas similar to the seemingly endless space of the erg, and its endlessly shifting dunes that border the village and which continually form and reform with the winds. The erg embodies a form of kinaesthetics, and through its continual movement it becomes a space that can possibly open up potential futures. The erg is not delimited by the national, but it is Dalila’s refuge, where she imagines multiple futures with space, maybe the space in the dash between the “peut” and “être.” This dash suggests play in the meaning of definitions, one which is transgressed in the play of words for Dalila, who continually transgresses the “law” set in the “dictionary” to disrupt the temporality of the present (Mokeddem 1998, 120). Here, Dalila shifts the meanings of a male-dominating eyeball that pervades her town and why she finds freedom in the erg: [Samia] “says that because of this hell, eyes are burning and burned. They can’t look. All they can do is eyeball. They have to touch, palpate, pinch things like blind people do with their hands, just to know what it is. I think Samia, my sister, is right. That’s why I eyeball my dreams so strongly. My eyes touch them. So I think they exist for real. What’s real?” (Mokeddem 1998, 82). The attempt to change the “hell in their pupil,” to a transgressive “eye” that touches her dreams does similar work to the playful “dash that unifies” the “peut” and the “être,” a somewhat temporal deferral of a becoming that is not dependent on an overly determined future nor the proleptic future the nation-state provides. Dalila’s imaginative “space,” one that erases the present, potentially offers a better future, always deferred. Yet, like the erg, this imaginary dreamscape and creation of worlds depends on textual play and movement with a kinetic text. The Forbidden Woman creates this world from a shifting border space through an aesthetics based on movement, or kinaesthetics.

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The Forbidden Woman conceives of borders as productive spaces. Rather than being the space that creates zones of sovereignty and exclusion, the border is a constantly shifting, potentially shaping space that in Dalila’s terms, can potentially “[erase] the whole world” (Mokeddem 1998, 79). These figurations of borders, and the redefinition of them as inclusive areas, rather than exclusive, offers a form of world-making of a refuge that augments Thomas Nail’s and Giorgio Agamben’s concepts of borders. For Agamben, there is always rupture in the formation of the P/people, always exclusionary tactics, but only in “a world in which the spaces of states have been thus perforated and topologically deformed and in which the citizen has been able to recognize the refugee that he or she is—only in such a world is the political survival of humankind today thinkable” (Agamben 2000, 26). Furthermore, Nail defines the border as porous to let people in and to regulate them, rather than being a space for peoples to emerge. Through kinaesthetics, The Forbidden Woman offers a type of creation through its depictions of movement: movement that is physical, aesthetic, and imaginative. Dalila’s “lost space” in the erg seeks to create a connective tissue from her delimited identity as a woman in Algeria, toward a projected, future exile. In a conversation with Sultana, Vincent appropriates Dalila’s concept of the erg and associates it with “the emptiness in me” (Mokeddem 1998, 86). Sultana replies that this “lost space” makes her feel “broken up” into “several dispersed me’s” (Mokeddem 1998, 86). Yet for Dalila the space of the erg and the dispersal into multiple “me’s” produces a type of solitude that becomes “her erg” for those “looking for space” (Mokeddem 1998, 64). Dalila explains that the “erg is the sea of dreams” (Mokeddem 1998, 58). In a conversation with Vincent in which he asks her if the erg is a sea like the “Mediterranean or like the one that gives us life,” she responds: “Both of them. Samia, she told me that the sea is an erg made of water that erases the waves. […] The erg, it’s the sea from here” (Mokeddem 1998, 58). Here, Dalila is not only the narrative organ between Vincent and Sultana, but she provides a larger connective narrative that threads together different border spaces. The erg becomes the Mediterranean, bridging possibilities for both spaces within an imagined future, always deferred. Suvendrini Perera defines the possibilities of such border spaces as borderscapes which open up new possibilities for understanding the “limits of membership in the nation and for the possibility of new sovereign-ties, itineraries, and affiliations” (Perera 2007, 214). The borderscape gives

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rise to “multiple resistances, challenge, and counterclaims” and remakes different forms of border space into a larger connecting borderscape. She suggests that narratives from the borderscape perform a double function, “at once anticipating and projecting the possibility of new spatial identities and affiliations across the cut-up pieces and divided fragments of the map” (Perera 2007, 224). What Dalila further offers through her narrative is a borderscape that connects across the “cut up pieces and divided fragments” of the human body. She creates multiple potential selves in the erg in which she offers possibilities for a future that is always deferred. This remains the potential of the border as its own space, not as the constructed border of the nation-state. Dalila’s kinaesthetic creation always moves and the border space becomes the place for continual production, not only a mobile space, but a mobilising space. Furthermore, Dalila moves her narrative outside her own temporality and place, one that connects to the “Mediterranean,” but also the zone between life and death, where there are no “footprints” and death is unable to “rewind” the living who leave footprints on the nation (Mokeddem 1998, 58). This detachment, or continual “rewind[ing]” connects Alan Kurdi’s image, the “left-to-die boat,” and the The Forbidden Woman. As Dalila explains, “the erg, it’s the sea from here. And in the sand, on the sand, are the people from dreams who go to the sky and come back down, who make light, and who never die. The people from life, they don’t always know how to see them. Me, I see them, I talk to them” (Mokeddem 1998, 58). In this moment, Dalila differentiates herself from those who are unable to “see” and becomes the thread that sees the living, the dead, and those that “never die.” She imagines an alternative, and through the imagination reveals a potential different future of the self, a migrant future in migrant time and an imaginary from the Global South for the physical body to later follow. This imagination no longer conceives of the body as a container for ore/gans and instead envisions the body as a migrant and mobile space. These alternative sovereign spaces offer networks for different communities with the shifting sovereignties of the erg, its connection to the Mediterranean, and the as yet uncharted space of mobilised borderscapes. Dalila’s mobilised borders, the as yet unthought connective organ of possible citizenship, have the potential to re-world the globe through futures deferred and the refusal to be subsumed within the national body.

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References Agamben, Giorgio. 2000. Means Without Ends: Notes on Politics. Translated by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Agamben, Giorgio. 2008. “No to Bio-Political Tattooing.” Translated by Stuart J. Murray. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 5 (2): 201–202. https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420802027452. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2004. Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishing. Bergvall, Caroline. 2014. Drift. New York: Nightboat Books. Bhabha, Homi K. 2011. Our Neighbours, Ourselves. Contemporary Reflections on Survival. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. https://www.degruyter.com/view/ product/177770. Chakravorty, Mrinalini, and Leila Neti. 2009. “The Human Recycled: Insecurity in the Transnational Moment.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 20 (2–3): 194–223. https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-2009-009. Cheah, Pheng. 2003. Specter Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberations. New York: Columbia University Press. Cohen, Glenn. 2014. “Organs Without Borders? Allocating Transplant Organs, Foreigners, and the Importance of the Nation-State (?).” Law and Contemporary Problems 71 (3): 175–215. Cresswell, Tim. 2013. “Citizenship in Worlds of Mobility.” In Critical Mobilities, edited by Ola Soderstorm, Shalini Randeria, Didier Ruedin, Gianni D’Amato, and Francesco Panese, 81–100. Oxford: Routledge. Elgot, Jessica. 2015. “Father of Drowned Boy Alyan Kurdi Plans to Return to Syria.” The Guardian, September 3. https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2015/sep/03/father-drowned-boy-aylan-kurdi-return-syria. Hannam, Kevin, Mimi Sheller, and John Urry. 2006. “Editorial: Mobilities, Immobilities, and Moorings.” Mobilities 1 (1): 1–22. https://doi. org/10.1080/17450100500489189. Ignatieff, Michael. 2015. “The Refugees and the New War.” The New York Review of Books, December 17. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/ 12/17/refugees-and-new-war/. Kington, Tom. 2016. “Migrants ‘Killed for Their Organs If They Cannot Pay’.” The Times, July 5. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/migrants-killed-fororgans-if-they-cannot-pay-fare-tvknqdqwq. McCormack, Donna. 2012. “Intimate Borders: The Ethics of Human Organ Transplantation in Contemporary Film.” Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 34 (3–4): 170–183. https://doi.org/10.1080/10714413.2 012.687290.

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McCormack, Donna. 2016. “The Transplant Imaginary and Its Postcolonial Hauntings.” In Bodily Exchanges, Bioethics and Border Crossing: Perspectives on Giving, Selling and Sharing Bodies, edited by Erik Malmqvist and Kristin Zeiler, 135–152. London: Routledge. Merriman, Peter, and Lynne Pearce. 2017. “Mobilities and the Humanities.” Mobilities 12 (4): 493–508. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2017.133 0853. Mokeddem, Malika. 1998. The Forbidden Woman. Translated by K. Melissa Marcus. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Moore, Jack. 2016. “African Migrants Are ‘Being Sold for Their Organs.’” Newsweek, July 5. http://www.newsweek.com/migrants-are-being-sold-theirorgans-claims-former-trafficker-477635. Nail, Thomas. 2015. The Figure of the Migrant. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Nail, Thomas. 2016. Theory of the Border. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Ngugi, wa Thiong’o. 1987 (1982). Devil on the Cross. Oxford: Heinemann Educational Publishers. Papastavridis, Efthymios. n.d. “The ‘Left-to-Die Boat’ Incident of March 2011: Questions of International Responsibility Arising from the Failure to Save Refugees at Sea.” Refugee Law Initiative Working Paper No. 10, pp. 1–22. http://sas-space.sas.ac.uk/4957/1/RLI_Working_Paper_No.10.pdf. Perera, Suvendrini. 2007. “A Pacific Zone? (In)Security, Sovereignty, and Stories of the Pacific Borderscape.” In Borderscapes: Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territory’s Edge, edited by Prem Kumar Rajaram and Carl Grundy-Warr, 201–227. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 2002. “Commodity Fetishism in Organs Trafficking.” In Commodifying Bodies, edited by Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Loic Wacquant, 31–62. London: Sage. Shenker, Jack. 2011. “Aircraft Carrier Left Us to Die, Say Migrants.” The Guardian, May 8. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/may/08/ nato-ship-libyan-migrants. Shenker, Jack. 2012. “Migrants Left to Die After Catalogue of Failures, Says Report into Boat Tragedy.” The Guardian, March 28. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/mar/28/left-to-die-migrants-boat-inquiry. Shepard, Todd. 2006. The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Soderstrom, Ola, Shalini Randeria, Didier Ruedin, Gianni D’Amato, and Francesco Panese. 2013. “Of Mobilities and Moorings: Critical Perspectives.” In Critical Mobilities, edited by Ola Soderstorm, Shalini Randeria, Didier Ruedin, Gianni D’Amato, and Francesco Panese, v–xxv. Oxford: Routledge.

PART IV

Mobility Futures

CHAPTER 10

Cycling and Narrative Structure: H. G. Wells’s The Wheels of Chance and Maurice Leblanc’s Voici des ailes Una Brogan

H. G. Wells’s The Wheels of Chance (1896) and Maurice Leblanc’s Voici des ailes (1898) are two iconic cycling novels written respectively in Britain and France during the “bicycle boom” of the 1890s, when cycling first became popular as a mode of transport and pastime. Wells’s story recounts the draper Hoopdriver’s ten-day cycling holiday in the south of England, while Leblanc’s tale relates two Parisian couples’ cycling tour over several weeks in Normandy and Brittany. Although each of these texts have received considerable critical attention in their own right, no comparative study of these contemporaneous cycling tales has been published to date. Reading these two texts in tandem will allow us to uncover the ways in which this new form of mobility altered its users’ interaction with their surroundings and suggested a fresh approach to the act of narration.

U. Brogan (*)  Valence, France © The Author(s) 2019 M. Aguiar et al. (eds.), Mobilities, Literature, Culture, Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27072-8_10

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Setting Off The first three chapters of The Wheels of Chance are brief, providing momentary glimpses into Hoopdriver’s working life. Within these opening sections the narrative gradually begins to focus on the steep learning curve of the aspiring cyclist, at first obliquely (the reader’s attention is initially drawn to “The Remarkable Condition of this Young Man’s Legs”, which the narrator proceeds to describe with “the scientific spirit, the hard, almost professorial tone of the conscientious realist” [Wells 1935, 5]), and then explicitly, when we are provided with an impressionistic depiction of Hoopdriver’s lessons: Behind the decorous figure of the attentive shopman that I had the honour of showing you at first, rises a vision of a nightly struggle, of two dark figures and a machine in a dark road […] a wavering unsteady flight, a spasmodic turning of the missile edifice of man and machine, and a collapse. (Wells 1935, 7)

So long as the protagonist is unable to ride, the narrative remains at an effective standstill—recounting little else than “the tale of [Hoopdriver’s] bruises and abrasions” (Wells 1935, 8) while he attempts to mount a bicycle—and the paternal voice of the narrator is loudly heard. The mysterious “vision of a nightly struggle” provides the interest of the story, a rare glimpse of movement and intrigue within the draper’s static, humdrum life. It is only from the fourth chapter, entitled “The Riding Forth of Mr Hoopdriver”, that the story begins to get into its stride, as the protagonist’s voice starts to emerge. The chapters lengthen and the narrator retires, setting aside the judgements of the first three chapters in order to leave front of stage to characterisation and plot. Similarly, in Leblanc’s tale, the opening chapter conveys an impression of stasis and immutability that is connected to the fact that the characters have not yet begun their journey. Two wealthy young couples, Pascal and Régine Fauvières and Guillaume and Madeleine d’Arjols, have come to dine at their club at the Bois de Boulogne, where they engage in the fashionable activity of riding bicycles. Their enthusiasm for the machine is apparent, yet the narrator insists that their main motivation for cycling is to follow society’s codes and appear fashionable: There are such things as necessary opinions, indispensable pleasures, obligatory shows, and they obeyed all these requirements like good, submissive children, as anonymous, elegant, frivolous beings with idle souls and

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sleeping hearts, indentured to fashion, taking exercise for fashion, just as they would have stayed in bed all day if fashion had required it.1 (Leblanc 2012, 14)

Reflecting contemporary French concerns around idleness, decadence and degeneration (for a discussion of this in the context of the cycling craze see Thompson [1999]) these childless, loveless couples appear as listless automatons who mindlessly follow the precepts of the social circle to which they belong. Towards the end of the novella, Pascal will reflect that these years were “my lost years, my years of sleep, torpor, discomfort, hypocrisy!”2 (Leblanc 2012, 87). Cycling is the activity that will rouse Pascal and the other characters from their torpor and indifference. When Guillaume suggests riding to Dieppe—where their club is to meet the following week—the idea appears to the women as “some extraordinary adventure, outside the normal conditions of life, one of those distant and perilous adventures from which there may be no return”3 (Leblanc 2012, 15). Although their expectations seem exaggerated, they will in fact correspond to the reality of their journey, which transforms their lives completely. The growing enthusiasm around their departure culminates in the closing line of the first chapter—“Well then, let’s go!”4 (Leblanc 2012, 16)—which invites us away from the stagnant, bland world of the Parisian club to take part in the voyage of discovery just beginning. In both novels, then, cycling represents an escape from the monotony of daily life, providing the means by which the characters will begin an adventure and undergo personal transformation. In the opening chapters of Wells’s “Bicycling idyll”, the narrator’s musings on the nature of fiction and his evocation of the literary style of realism establish a parallel between Hoopdriver’s attempts to learn how to ride a bicycle and mastery of narrative form. Wells was not alone in suggesting a link between the frustration of learning how to ride a bicycle and managing to produce a worthy literary text. Mary Kennard (or Mrs. Edward Kennard, the name under which she published), wrote a prolific number of now neglected works of popular fiction and non-­ fiction on themes such as horse riding, cycling, motoring and sports from 1883 to 1903. In her Guidebook for Lady Cyclists (1896), she recounts her own struggle of learning to ride, and makes a telling comparison: “It was as bad as writing one’s first novel, when one set to work secretly and would have died rather than let anybody suspect the task on which one was engaged” (Kennard 1896, 3). When she has mastered the skill, however, cycling becomes a writing tool: Kennard recounts

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how she set out on rides in the morning to clear her head before writing (Kennard 1896, 23). As well as mirroring the difficult creative process, cycling can provide inspiration to artists. For instance, Edward Elgar rode fifty miles a day in the Malvern hills when he was composing Enigma Variations in 1899 (Nye 2000, xxv). Like Hoopdriver and the aspiring novelist, Kennard battles in private to acquire a new skill, hiding her imperfect cycling and writing from public view. The fits and starts of the novice author mirror the covert exertions of these apprentice cyclists. While Leblanc’s characters are already proficient cyclists when the story begins, the second chapter of Voici des ailes refuses an effortless start to their journey. The characters are seen “sprawling on the bank of a ditch” while “the machines lay pell-mell, to the right and left, like cumbersome objects that have been discarded as quickly as possible and not without some resentment”5 (Leblanc 2012, 17). Not yet used to the physical difficulties of riding long distances in the heat, the journey and the story get off to an unsure start that has the virtue of introducing an element of humour into an otherwise straight-faced narrative. In various ways, then, both Wells and Leblanc make use of the difficulties of cycle touring, or riding a bicycle itself, in order to get their own narratives into motion, and to mirror the apprentice author’s hesitant first steps.

Discovering a New Literary Geography Once the skill has been mastered, the story may begin. In both novellas, it is the bicycle that physically allows the change of location and the encounter with various characters needed to determine the rest of the narrative. It opens up a narrative space and a unique geography in which mobile protagonists cross and recross each other’s paths, forming new and unexpected configurations in the process. Marc Augé, one of the rare critics to have considered the literary qualities of the bicycle, provides the following compelling description of the spatial and sensory transformation operated by the bicycle: You slip subtly into another geography which is eminently and literally poetic, since it creates immediate contacts between places that ordinarily could only be visited separately. This geography seems to be the source of spatial metaphors, of unexpected mergings and short-circuits that are aroused by the awakened curiosity of these new ramblers, one pedal stroke at a time. […] The bicycle is writing, often free or even wild writing – an experience of automatic writing6 […]. (Augé 2008, 55–56)

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What emerges from early cycling literature is a renewed form of human interaction and relation to one’s environment which creates its own literary geography. Augé highlights how the cyclist’s privileged, immediate contact with her surroundings, combined with the speed that allows her to reconnect places and people that must remain separate for the walker or train traveller, create unexpected couplings that are a direct inspiration for metaphor and poetry. Cycling becomes a form of writing, which in turn can actively shape texts that place this form of locomotion at the core of the narrative. In The Wheels of Chance, in stark contrast to the stasis of the opening chapters (which reflect the immutability of Hoopdriver’s working life in London) successive scenes of country life and specifically the intrigue with fellow cyclists Jessie and Bechamel quickly provide rhythm and interest to the narrative. As Ellen Gruber Garvey remarks, “as a prop or narrative convenience, the bicycle had many of the same attractions for story writers as it did for tourists: riders could ride alone or in pairs or groups; they could stop at will and visit familiar or unfamiliar places” (1996, 124). Like the coach and the train before it, the bicycle fulfilled that basic and crucial function of literature: moving characters from place to place and confronting them with new people and landscapes. In Wells’s novel, Hoopdriver encounters two upper class cyclists on the first day of his ride: teenage Jessie, fleeing home, and her tutor Bechamel, who has helped her escape from her overbearing stepmother. The three cyclists’ south-bound trajectories repeatedly overlap, producing numerous unexpected encounters. In this sense, Wells’s cyclists correspond to Tim Edensor’s view of rhythmically constitued places, with each character’s bicycle becoming “one rhythmic constituent in a seething space pulsing with intersecting trajectories and temporalities” (Edensor 2014, 164). These trajectories eventually collide to form a new configuration on the evening in Bognor when Jessie escapes from Bechamel, who has lured her away from home with the intention of seducing her, and cycles off with Hoopdriver. Unlike collective, timetabled rail travel, the bicycle creates its own subjective time and rhythm in the narrative that allows for confrontations and coincidences that would otherwise seem forced and unlikely. When Hoopdriver takes detours to avoid the couple by whom he feels he is “haunted”, he invariably meets them on the road or in an inn (Wells 1935, 36). Ironically, it is when Hoopdriver starts actively pursuing the pair, after he is alerted to Bechamel’s attempted (and uninvited) seduction of Jessie, that he loses their trace. It is as though the

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bicycle introduces a contingent time that refuses forward planning, constantly confronting the characters with unexpected events, to which they must respond spontaneously and ingeniously. Just as previous works “haunt” texts, in Derrida’s terms (Derrida 1993), these cyclists are on individual journeys that haunt each other, creating points of friction and interaction that constantly weave the texture of the story. Carsten Meiner points out how chance and contingency were central to literary depictions of coach journeys (Meiner 2008), and such an outlook is closely connected to the bicycle in Leblanc’s pastoral tale. Pascal depicts his new life as “the good life, full of chance and unexpectedness”7 (Leblanc 2012, 30), and similar terms appear later, when the narrator describes how “they travelled at random on the roads and at random through life”8 (Leblanc 2012, 50). In common with Hoopdriver, these cyclists are constantly confronted with unexpected sights and situations, and rejoice in this experience. Towards the end of the novella, Pascal describes how “Our souls, like our bodies, have flown across the great white roads, through the purity of space. […] It even seems that events have come upon us just as [the bicycle] itself rushes across landscapes and horizons”9 (Leblanc 2012, 87). The bicycle as a form of locomotion is here directly linked to narrative progression; events come suddenly and vividly upon the reader, just as impressions unfold unexpectedly before the mobile cyclist. All this might seem to point to a lack of agency on the part of the travelling protagonists (or, for that case, the reader), but these cyclists do in fact actively participate in determining the rhythm of their journey. In contrast to Wells’s tale, no new characters are introduced over the course of Leblanc’s narrative; rather the bicycle journey intervenes to form a new constellation of the four characters we meet at the beginning. Thanks to the different speeds of each cyclist, two new couples form, since “we always left together, but we invariably arrived in pairs, Guillaume and Régine speeding ahead like lunatics, Mme d’Arjols and Fauvières contenting themselves with a moderate pace”10 (Leblanc 2012, 26). While the narrator aligns himself with Pascal’s perspective from the beginning, the diminishing view of his wife and Guillaume, cycling ahead, effectively removes them from the narrative from this point. The reader stays behind with Pascal and Madeleine who, cycling slowly and making frequent stops, gradually fall in love (as do the speeding pair ahead). It is the personal, subjective nature of travelling by bicycle that makes such a turn of events possible, allowing the continuity of

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traditional alliances and social constraints to be broken down. Had the four characters been travelling in a collective, passive manner such as by train, there would have been no possibility for privacy and the growth of mutual affection. The budding desire between Madeleine and Pascal, as well as that implied between Guillaume and Régine, soon merges with the joy of cycling to become the main narrative drive. The novel form relies on movement from place to place, from one perspective to another, and it is the bicycle that provides the motor and sets the pace for this narrative mobility in both texts. In The Wheels of Chance, the speed, flexibility and independence of the bicycle place the characters in a sort of perpetual motion, locating them in a different temporal sphere from the non-cycling characters. Bechamel remains in the narrative only as long as he is a cyclist; once Hoopdriver has stolen his much superior bicycle to escape with Jessie, the narrator leaves him fuming in his hotel room. We hear no more of him and do not find out how or if he returns home to his wife after his botched elopement (Wells 1935, 95). It is in the closing chapters of the novel, when Jessie’s stepmother and her three admirers are in hot pursuit of the pair, that the bicycle reveals itself as both an exemplary narrative device and a supremely adaptable technology. Jessie’s fraught stepmother, Mrs. Milton, first hears of her whereabouts from her admirer Widgery, who has been cycle touring in Sussex and rushes to her house to bring her the news (Wells 1935, 105). The late hour prevents them from leaving straight away, as there are no more trains; coming only pages after the description of Jessie and Hoopdriver’s nocturnal flight from Bechamel, the superior potential of the bicycle for the purpose of escape is thrown into sharp relief. The subsequent chapters recount the pursuit of the cyclists and repeatedly drive home the superiority of the bicycle over the train; while Mrs. Milton and her cohort are held up by late trains and the incomplete railway network, Jessie and Hoopdriver slip effortlessly from their clutches, flitting from one village to the next without a trace. In the description “the fugitives vanished into Immensity; […] there were no more trains” (Wells 1935, 137), the cycling characters seem to exist in a different dimension to the encaged and dependent train travellers. Dangle eventually catches up with the pair on a horse-drawn dog cart, but—in a further display of the bicycle’s supremacy over traditional forms of transport—the horse is spooked by the bicycles and bolts down the hill, once again allowing the cyclists to escape. The final scene

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exclusively involves bicycles and tricycles, since the rescue party have mounted “a remarkable collection of wheeled instruments” (Wells 1935, 186). They eventually manage to catch up with the fugitives thanks to the fact that “downhill nothing can beat a highly geared tandem bicycle” (Wells 1935, 181). It is interesting to note that communication as well as transportation technologies play a crucial narrative role in the chase; Jessie is betrayed by the letter she writes to her former teacher Miss Mergle, who immediately alerts Mrs. Milton of her whereabouts by telegram (Wells 1935, 187). The bicycle was just one of a range of fin de siècle technologies that allowed authors such as Wells to move characters and information around at will, experimenting with narrative forms that could convey the speed, elasticity and contingency of modern experience.11

Accelerated Automobility or the Cycling Flâneur? This fresh approach to space engenders a different attitude to, and perception of, time within both novels. Being at once an industrial and a human-powered technology, the bicycle occupies a space at the fulcrum of modernity and tradition and incarnates conflicting approaches towards time. Where Wells’s novel aligns cycling with the general “acceleration” observed at this period by Harmut Rosa (2013), Leblanc’s characters experience an alternative temporality that goes against the grain of the contemporary focus on speed in order to foreground slow-paced exploration and flânerie. The culminating chase scene mentioned above typifies Wells’s vision of the bicycle as a rapid, modern technology that alters its users interaction with time and space. In an earlier scene, Hoopdriver rides past Jessie and Bechamel as they are arguing under a bridge. Here, it is the bicycle’s unique silence and speed that allows him to “[come] on them suddenly, without the slightest preliminary announcement, and when they least expected it, under the South-Western Railway arch” (Wells 1935, 53). Wells draws attention to the cyclist’s singular mode of perception by placing the characters in a position where they would be invisible to passengers in passing trains. Riding fast, Hoopdriver receives only “the impression of a second”, but the few words he hears and the body language he glimpses are enough for him to grasp the dangerous nature of the situation Jessie is in. “It’s horrible”, he hears Jessie cry, “it’s brutal— cowardly—” (Wells 1935, 53). At this pivotal moment in the story,

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Hoopdriver realises the pair are not in fact siblings, and hatches the plan of saving the young woman from Bechamel’s uninvited advances. Wells’s narrative use of the moment is exemplary of what one critic has termed a late-century “shift in priorities away from the moment as a vector of emotional pitch and narrative movement to the moment as an opening into or distillation of meanings that are invisible to sight and invite complex interpretative procedures” (Zemka 2011, 65). While Hoopdriver’s moment of insight under the railway bridge does involve visual clues, it is the words he hears (again, inaccessible to the closed-in railway passenger or to the pedestrian, whose gradual approach would have been seen or heard) which allow him to distil the various clues he has received over the preceding days. Wells’s focus on this insight-giving moment was exemplary of the new attitudes towards time engendered by rapid technological change. The bicycle was one of a range of technologies that encouraged the increasing tendency to pay attention to short intervals of time, observed by the historian Karl Lamprecht. Stephen Kern quotes Lamprecht, claiming that at the turn of the twentieth century people became interested in “five-­ minute interviews, minute-long telephone conversations, and five second exchanges on bicycles” (Kern 1983, 110–111). The above scene from Wells’s work may be considered a literary reflection of this cultural trend. The rapid succession of short, intense impressions that early cyclists experienced may have contributed to the general sense of social acceleration observed by Rosa. In another example from contemporary British fiction, the collection of short stories The Humours of Cycling (1897) contains several instances of brief but insightful exchanges on bicycles, chosen to give structure and rhythm to a short piece. For instance, in “The Junior Constitutional” by Pett Ridge, two friends sit at Hyde Park Corner listening to amusing, decontextualised snippets of conversation from passing cyclists. In “A Drama in One Mile”, the anonymous author relates a heated dialogue between a recently married couple during their brief journey on a tandem. The collection ends with a section entitled “Spokelets”, which includes short jokes and anecdotes, mostly about bicycle accidents. These brief formats in fiction mirrored the intense yet fleeting manner in which the bicycle allowed its riders to interact with people and surroundings. The bicycle was a form of mobility that allowed rapid, individual movement from one place to another, offering a radically new paradigm of travel. This has led some critics to claim that cycling helped lay the

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basis for the twentieth century paradigm of automobility, a transformation in society’s relationship to space and time theorised by John Urry. A progression from the “collective” or “clock” time and the “panoramic gaze” that the railways helped to establish in the mid-nineteenth century (see Schivelbusch 1986), Urry argues that the autonomous mobility provided by motor cars was accompanied by “fragmented” or “instantaneous” time (Urry 1990). He claims that such an outlook came to characterise the twentieth century, replacing “the pattern of nineteenth-century ‘public mobility’” with “individualised mobility built on instantaneous time, fragmentation and coerced flexibility” (Urry 2004, 36). Automobility, Urry claims, has expanded into all areas of life, and continues to define our on-screen interactions in the digital age, where we may be fleetingly present in many different places at once. It is a system that gives us an impression of autonomy while in fact obliging us to be extremely flexible and adaptable, effectively imprisoning us within machines and estranging us from our body and individual volition. Urry mainly focuses on the psychological and social impact of the railway, the car and, later, the computer, yet he briefly mentions the bicycle in his study Mobilities (2007), claiming that “the humble bicycle paved the way for the car and for its subsequent domination of paths and pavements, roads and freeways” (Urry 2007, 112). Zack Furness (2010) extends Urry’s line of reasoning, arguing that many elements of the automobile subject’s outlook were first formulated by and for cyclists. Furness makes a case for the bicycle’s preponderant role in founding the very concept of automobility through “the development of an entire meaning system around personal transportation, and the disciplining of bodies and the environment in the service of an autonomous mobility” (Furness 2010, 17). Indeed, the bicycle was the first industrial technology that allowed users to be independently mobile, and Furness credits this technology with inaugurating “mobile subjectivity” (Furness 2010, 17), that is, the ability to move independently and rapidly from one place for another at any moment, thus favouring the “instantaneous” and “fragmented” experience of space and time theorised by Urry. In Wells we can find one humorous appearance of a cyclist whose autonomous mobility appears to imprison him in something resembling the automobile paradigm. The flustered cyclist Hoopdriver encounters in an inn seems condemned to constant movement, despite his intentions to ride slowly and observe the world around him:

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There’s no hurry, sir, none whatever. I came out for exercise, gentle exercise, and to notice the scenery and to botanise. And no sooner do I get on the accursed machine, than off I go hammer and tongs; I never look to right or left, never notice a flower, never see a view, get hot, juicy, red,— like a grilled chop. Here I am, sir. Come from Guildford in something under the hour. WHY, sir? (Wells 1935, 27)

This “scorcher”—to borrow the pejorative term applied to ­speed-obsessed cyclists at the period—appears unable to choose anything other than rapid progression once he mounts his bicycle. A precursor of Urry’s automobile subject, this cyclist appears to be a victim of the “coerced flexibility” that comes from the possibility of being capable of reaching many different localities in rapid succession. Nonetheless, it is misleading to view the bicycle’s relationship to modernity purely through the automobility lens. In my opinion, the bicycle helped introduce certain elements of the automobility paradigm, while simultaneously incarnating an alternative movement towards slower-paced, contemplative, embodied travel. The bicycle dared to harness human energy in an age of steam, when electricity and petrol were also emerging as new sources of power. As Philip Vannini observes, “To slow down is to act and move differently, to experience the social and ecological environment in ways that run counter to the logic of speed” (Vannini 2014, 117). Turn-of-the-century cycling made the radical statement that locomotion did not necessarily have to be powered by external sources of energy. Rather than “encaging” or “disciplining” the body (to cite Urry and Furness), the bicycle relied on its user for momentum and direction, leaving the cyclist open to the elements and free to stop and dismount at will. As such, it cast a nostalgic look back to the pedestrian ramblers of the early nineteenth century, who created their own itineraries in a rapidly industrialising environment. This technology was unique amongst others in encouraging reconnection with the body, rather than estrangement from it. Going against the grain of rapid train or car travel, slower cycling becomes, to borrow Vannini’s terms, “an oppositional practice to the dominant culture of speed” (Vannini 2014, 117). The embodied movement of cycling encourages observation and contemplation of one’s environment. This recalls Paul Virilio’s work on the negative effects of mechanisation on our interaction with space; he argues that rapid, mechanised transport results in the “negation of space” (Virilio 1977, 131)

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and a loss of connection to one’s environment that can only be regained when “the multidude of passers-by […] ceases being the technical relay of the machine and itself becomes a motor […] in other words, a generator of speed” (Virilio 1977, 13).12 A crucial part of this embodied mobility is the cyclist’s awareness and use of all their bodily senses, something which Justin Spinney documented in an ethnographic study of present-day London (Spinney 2007). Spinney mobilises Marc Augé’s concept of “non-places” (a similar concept to Virilio’s negation of space), which is used to describe dehumanised, mechanised spaces such as motorways and airports (Augé 1992). Focusing on the bicycle as a technology which challenges such alienating uses of space, Spinney illustrates how ‘in an embodied practice such as cycling […] vision is shown to be re-embodied alongside the other senses as part of a multi-sensory construction of the experiences and meanings of place’ (Spinney 2007, 41). Early cycling authors attested to this novel sensory and bodily engagement with one’s surroundings, describing an awakening and a blending of all the senses. This counter-cultural and embodied reconnection to space is perceptible even in The Wheels of Chance, a novel which tends to foreground the bicycle’s speed and modernity, as we saw above. As Hoopdriver accustoms himself to riding on the open road on the first day of his holiday, he reflects on what his colleagues at the drapery must be doing at the same time, and experiences a sense of liberation from the constraints of the city and work (Wells 1935, 30). No longer a prisoner to clock and timetable-regulated shop time, Hoopdriver rejoices in his new-found mobility which allows him to interact freely with his surroundings. Rather than encouraging a “fragmented” experience of time and space, however, the mobility Hoopdriver experiences allows him to move at his own pace and effect close observation of the localities he passes through, as the following description conveys: And here was quiet and greenery, and one mucked about as the desire took one, without a soul to see, and here was no wailing of “Sayn,” no folding of remnants, no voice to shout, “Hoopdriver, forward!”. And once he almost ran over something wonderful, a little, low, red beast with a yellowish tail, that went rushing across the road before him. It was the first weasel he had ever seen in his cockney life. There were miles of this, scores of miles of this before him, pinewood and oak forest, purple, heathery moorland and grassy down, lush meadows […]. (Wells 1935, 30)

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This passage, which comes shortly after Hoopdriver’s encounter with the scorcher described above, highlights the tension or even the incompatibility between industrial and subjective modes of being. Hoopdriver’s cycle journey temporarily liberates him from the “clock time” of the industrial era, yet rather than experiencing “fragmented” time like the scorcher, his new experience of his surroundings is embodied and holistic. From the saddle, he discovers a slower-paced, individual, contemplative approach to time and travel. This alternative and embodied relationship to time and one’s environment is explored at length in Voici des ailes. After the characters have become accustomed to cycling all day, their relationship to time seems transformed. The narrator describes how “the hours that had gone by left them with a feeling of beatitude and surprise. Those hours seemed strange to them […] In the heady confusion of their dreams, they felt like fabulous beings that have been touched by a fairy’s wand”13 (Leblanc 2012, 22). It is as though they have entered into a strange cycling time that mirrors the fictional, narrative time in which the reader must suspend belief for the length of the story. The magic wand that touches the cyclists seems also to operate on the reader, inviting her into an imaginary, fantastic world. Now that the protagonists have left behind the tedium of their old lives, the idea of joining their club at Dieppe seems impossible; indeed, it would mean the end of the journey, and the conclusion of the story. It is the suggestion made by one member of their party, “What if we carried on in this way, far away, without a plan, towards Brittany?”14 (Leblanc 2012, 22) that allows for the continuation of the narrative. They decide to continue their journey “wandering on the high roads, obeying their every whim”15 (Leblanc 2012, 23), thus aligning themselves with the observant, marginal outlook of the flâneur. Like the flâneur, the cyclist seeks the position of an anonymous, slow-paced, mobile observer of the world around him and rejects the focus on time-efficiency and speed that had come to characterise industrial societies. Where the flâneur created a marginal, alternative and private space by walking through urban environments, these cyclists use their mobility to create their own temporality and geography in the countryside. Leblanc’s characters challenge the contemporary focus on speed by travelling “without haste, without a programme”16 (Leblanc 2012, 26) and as such are able to enter into an alternative temporality that permits a closer interaction with their surroundings and, by the end of the novel, will allow them to cast off society’s moral and behavioural codes completely.

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Interrupted Movement Whether the mobility they offer is efficient or meandering, bicycles do more than move characters from origin to destination. The form of movement they represent in both Wells’s and Leblanc’s texts is reliant on interruptions, unexpected encounters, stoppages and accidents. In this sense, they share a common lineage with literary depictions of the carriage as theorised by Carsten Meiner, who argues that the nature of the vehicle is “that of not working, of falling apart and breaking” (Meiner 2008, 221), thus inscribing chance and contingency into the narrative, while reflecting the uncertainties of modern experience. Lukács also notes the important narrative role that may be played by failure, arguing that “by a strange and melancholy paradox, the moment of failure is the moment of value; the comprehending and experiencing of life’s refusals is the source from which the fullness of life seems to flow” (Lukács 1971, 126). Indeed, the bicycle provides even more opportunity for chance encounters and coincidences than a public coach, as it follows no set route and can change direction or stop according to the rider’s will. The title of The Wheels of Chance already gives an indication of the importance of random encounters in the narrative; it is Hoopdriver’s repeated, unplanned meetings with the cycling couple Jessie and Bechamel that provide the backbone to the story, as we have seen. Yet in the majority of cases it is the bicycle’s dysfunction that allows the characters to actually engage with each other. When the hero first meets Jessie cycling along the Surbiton road, it is his fall (an incident he significantly blames on the bicycle—“Had the machine a devil?” [Wells 1935, 21]) that allows them to exchange a few words. Some chapters later, Hoopdriver’s first exchange with the dastardly Bechamel occurs while the latter is repairing a puncture on the Ripley Road (Wells 1935, 31). As such, the mobility provided by the bicycle sets up the context for encounters, but, as with coach travel, it is often when the vehicle breaks down that “these chance collisions of human beings” (to borrow E. M. Forster’s phrase) (Forster 2000, 21) are able to occur. Indeed, as Forster portrays in Howards End (1910), brief encounters between strangers are part and parcel of the experience of modernity, and are a phenomenon that transportation technologies such as the train, car and bicycle helped render commonplace. It is not only mechanical failures that may cause the cyclist to call a halt. The bicycle is intimately connected to the body that powers it, as

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well as prevailing meteorological conditions. Just as earlier authors such as Fielding or Dickens made use of coaching inns as a metaphor for the breaks between chapters, Wells and Leblanc mobilise their cyclists’ necessary pauses to eat and sleep in order to structure their narratives. In coaching days, horses were changed and travellers able to refresh themselves at set points during the journey. With the bicycle, however, it is the human body that must be periodically refuelled and rested, and this provides a rich opportunity to add narrative rhythm and structure. Leblanc’s heroes listen carefully to their bodies; the narrator recounts how “They did not exhaust themselves. Two or three hours in the morning, and again at the end of the day, without haste, without a programme. The slightest sign of fatigue led them to call a halt”17 (Leblanc 2012, 26). Rather than pushing themselves to cover impressive distances, or stick to a rigid schedule, the four cyclists adopt the pace their body dictates. This pace is mirrored in the narrative, which alternates cycling scenes with descriptions of the long breaks the two couples take from cycling. The physical requirements of the cycling protagonists also provide opportunities for punctuating the narrative. In the opening chapter of Voici des ailes, the first words spoken are by Guillaume, who remarks as he gets off his bicycle, “Let’s not lose any time […] I’m starving”18 (Leblanc 2012, 5). In addition to Pascal’s enthusiastic admiration of the bicycles lined up in the stable, it is the cyclists’ appetite that provides some sign of life within the stifling environment of the club. Guillaume relishes his meal, stating that “I know of nothing more delicious than satisfying the hunger that you have earned with your own muscles”19 (Leblanc 2012, 9). The pleasure he takes in eating after physical exercise prefigures the importance of food in the rest of the narrative. For example, the first premises of the liaison between Guillaume and Régine occur in the following exchange, when the young woman dares to call him by his first name: “Guillaume, can you see the village that’s all the way over there?” “Yes, that’s where we’ll have lunch.” “Well then! Let’s bet I’ll be there before you.”20 (Leblanc 2012, 25)

Motivated by the prospect of lunch, the two quicker cyclists shoot off, thus constituting two newly formed couples in separate narrative spaces.

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In addition to the physical requirement of eating and sleeping, the pace of these cyclists’ journey is also determined by the weather. In contrast to coach, train or car passengers, cyclists are open to the elements and the rate of their progress depends on factors such as heat, wind and rain. Thus, when rain “detained them for two days”21 (Leblanc 2012, 70) in a small town, Pascal and Madeleine have the time to discuss and work through the latter’s jealous feelings concerning Guillaume and Régine. As such, the physical needs of the body and the weather conditions constantly provide the structure to the journey and to the text, interrupting movement to provide necessary moments of reflection and introspection. In The Wheels of Chance, the places where Hoopdriver stops to eat, drink and sleep during his journey are described in detail; in addition, they are often sites where key encounters or realisations occur. Moreover, the reader is invited to enter into the rhythms of Hoopdriver’s body; on the first night of his holiday we share in his sleep by reading an account of his rather surreal dreams (Wells 1935, 48–51). It is as though his bodily rhythms correspond directly to the narrative time, with a journey into his subconscious only being made possible by the fact he is asleep. On the evening he escapes with Jessie, the narrator explicitly makes use of the time when the young people are sleeping to insert an “interlude” describing the events occurring at Jessie’s home. “And here,” the narrator informs us, “thanks to the glorious institution of sleep, comes a break in the narrative again.” (Wells 1935, 102). At the end of this chapter, the reader is once again reminded that “this is only an Interlude, introduced to give our wanderers time to refresh themselves by good honest sleeping.” (Wells 1935, 107–108). Thus, the narrative is aligned with the sensations, needs, pains and pleasures connected to the body of the central cyclist. This bodily approach perhaps took one step towards a more unified and subjective conceptualisation of narrative that would be exemplified by modernist authors at the beginning of the twentieth century. Sue Zemka points out how Joseph Conrad, in negotiating the serialisation of Lord Jim (1899–1900) with Blackwood Magazine, refused chapter breaks in the usual sense (Zemka 2011, 200–201). He explained that the divisions in the text “are only meant as pauses – rests for the reader’s attention while he is following the development of one situation, only one really from beginning to end” (Conrad 2007, xli). The subjective experience of cycling, being intimately connected to the steady rhythms of the body’s movement and its physical requirements, invites us to adopt a

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unified perspective that differentiates itself from the disconnection of rail travel. In-between spaces are revived, taking attention away from departure and destination, or beginning and end, in order to concentrate on the subjective process of the journey as a unified, bodily experience. Both authors draw on the bodily, subjective rhythms of cycling to conclude their narratives. Yoonjoung Choi establishes a compelling parallel between Wells’s narrative and the act of cycling, observing that “Like cycling, which encourages people’s active participation, Wells’s cycling romance refuses the final statement; it is a participatory reading in carnivalesque ‘becoming’” (Choi 2012, 112). Choi mobilises Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque in order to illustrate how Wells adopts a literary mode that subverts dominant discourses through humour and chaos, while inviting the reader’s participation in the narrative. The reader is left to imagine the end of the story, as Hoopdriver returns to his dreary life as a draper in London. Just as Bechamel was eclipsed from the story when his bicycle was stolen, Hoopdriver “dismounts with a sigh” in the last paragraph of the novella, and so “vanishes from our ken” (Wells 1935, 197). Leblanc’s novella “refuses the final statement” even more categorically; the two newly formed couples simply take separate routes—one pair towards the coast, the other inland—and we are left wondering if they ever attempt to return to their bourgeois, married lives in Paris, or whether they decide to prolong their bohemian existence indefinitely. Thus, just as a cyclist cannot be simply carried along by her machine, in both these tales the reader is invited to contribute imaginative energies to the journey on which she has been taken, finishing the story in her own manner and at her own pace.

Conclusion The bicycle followed in the tracks of previous modes of transport, such as walking, coach-travel and the railway, and paved the way for new ­technologies such as the car and the airplane, by shaping modes of perception and framing new interactions with the environment. As these two texts illustrate, the cycle journey quickly came to mirror the narrative endeavour and provide a novel framework for it. Both Leblanc and Wells adopt the cycle journey as the structure for their narrative, the new-found mobility of their characters providing the pretext for encounters with successive localities and people. The specific form of mobility provided by the bicycle opened up a new geography based on

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individual exploration and unexpected encounters. At the same time, progression remained attuned to the needs and desires of the person powering the machine, and subject to interruptions and stoppages that provided opportunities for punctuating the narrative. The temporal structure of these two novels reflects the complex role of the bicycle as both a modern, rapid mode of transport and a means to decelerate and reconnect with the rhythms of the body and the environment. Cycling participated to some extent in the general acceleration observed at the turn-of-the-century, yet it also pointed to an alternative, human-powered modernity. The bicycle incarnated the tension between the accelerated, fragmented time emerging at this period and a contemporary desire to re-establish a connection with the body and a slower, pre-industrial time.

Notes





1. Quotes from French are provided here in the original; translations in the text are my own.“Il y a des opinions nécessaires, des plaisirs indispensables, des spectacles obligatoires, et ils obéissaient à tout cela en bons enfants soumis, en êtres anonymes, élégants, frivoles, d’âme oisive et de coeur endormi, inféodés à la mode, faisant l’exercise par mode, aussi bien qu’ils fussent demeurés au lit jusqu’au soir si la mode l’eût exigé”. 2.  “mes années perdues, mes années de sommeil, de torpeur, de gêne, d’hypocrisie!” 3. “quelque aventure extraordinaire, hors des conditions possibles de la vie, une de ces expéditions lointaines et périlleuses dont il n’est pas sûr que l’on revient jamais”. 4. “Et alors, en route!…” 5. “affalés sur le talus d’un fossé”; “les machines gisaient pêle-mêle, de droite et de gauche, comme des objets encombrants dont on s’est débarrassé le plus vite possible et non sans quelque rancune.” 6. “On se glisse subrepticement dans une autre géographie, éminemment et littéralement poétique puisqu’elle est l’occasion de contacts immédiats entre lieux que d’ordinaire on ne fréquentait que séparément, et qu’elle apparaît ainsi comme la source des métaphores spatiales, de rapprochements inattendus et des courts-circuits que ne cesse de susciter à la force du mollet la curiosité réveillée des nouveaux promeneurs […] Le vélo, c’est une écriture, une écriture libre souvent, voire sauvage – expérience d’écriture automatique […]” 7. “la bonne vie de hasard et d’imprévu”. 8. “ils allaient au hasard des chemins et au hasard de la vie”. 9. “nos âmes, comme nos corps, ont volé sur les grandes routes blanches, dans la pureté de l’espace. […] On dirait même que les événements se

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sont rués sur nous comme [la bicyclette] se précipite, elle, à travers les paysages et les horizons”. 10. “on partait toujours ensemble, mais on n’arrivait jamais que deux par deux, Guillaume et Régine filant en général comme des fous, Mme d’Arjols et Fauvières se contentant d’une allure modérée”. 11. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) is another interesting example of a novel that makes compelling narrative use of a host of new technologies, culminating in a chase that tests the limits of each of them. For a discussion of this see Senf (1998). 12.  “la négation de l’espace”/“la multitude des passants […] cesse pour un temps d’être le rélais technique de la machine et devient lui-même moteur […] c’est-à-dire producteur de vitesse.” 13. “les heures écoulées leur laissaient de la béatitude et de l’étonnement. Elles leur paraissaient étranges, ces heures […] Dans le trouble grisant de leurs rêves, ils se faisaient l’effet d’êtres fabuleux qu’a touchés la baguette d’une fée”. 14. “Si l’on s’en allait comme ça, très loin, au hasard, du côté de la Bretagne?” 15. “en flânant sur les grand’routes, selon l’ordre de leur caprice”. 16. “sans hâte, sans programme”. 17. “Ils ne se surmenaient point. Le matin, deux ou trois heures, de même à la fin de la journée, sans hâte, sans programme. Le moindre symptôme de fatigue motivait une halte”. 18. “Ne perdons pas de temps […] je meurs de faim”. 19. “assouvir la faim que l’on a gagnée par la force de ses jarrets, je ne connais rien d’aussi délicieux”. 20. “-Vous voyez, Guillaume, le village qui est tout là-bas, tout là-bas?/- Oui, c’est là que nous devons déjeuneur./- Eh bien! Parions que j’y serai avant vous.” 21. “les retint deux jours”.

References A Drama in One Mile. 1897. The Humours of Cycling, 52–53. London: James Bowden. Augé, Marc. 1992. Non lieux: introduction à une anthropologie de la supermodernité. Paris: Seuil. Augé, Marc. 2008. Eloge de la bicyclette. Paris: Payot. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1984. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Choi, Yoonjoung. 2012. “The Bi-Cycling Mr Hoopdriver: Counter-Sporting Victorian Reviving the Carnivalesque.” Critical Survey 24: 102–115. Conrad, Joseph. 2007 [1900]. Lord Jim. Edited by Allan Simmons. London: Penguin.

256  U. BROGAN Derrida, Jacques. 1993. Spectres de Marx: l’état de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale. Paris: Galilée. Edensor, Tim. 2014. “Rhythm and Arrhythmia.” In The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities, 163–171. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Forster, E. M. 2000 [1910]. Howards End. London: Penguin. Furness, Zack. 2010. One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Gruber Garvey, Ellen. 1996. The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture, 1880s to 1910s. New York: Oxford University Press. Kennard, Mary E. 1896. A Guide Book for Lady Cyclists. London: F.V. White & Co. Kern, Stephen. 1983. The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Unversity Press. Leblanc, Maurice. 2012 [1898]. Voici des ailes. Vierzon: le Pas de côté (Translations from French provided in the text are my own, with the original given in endnotes.). Lukács, György. 1971. The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature. Translated by Anna Bostock. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Meiner, Carsten Henrik. 2008. Le carrosse littéraire et l’invention du hasard. Paris: PUF. Nye, Edward. 2000. A Bicyclette: Anthologie. Paris: Sortilèges. Ridge, Pett. 1897. “The Junior Constitutional.” In The Humours of Cycling, 29–31. London: James Bowden. Rosa, Hartmut. 2013. Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity. Translated by Jonathan Trejo-Mathys. New York: Columbia University Press. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. 1986 [1979]. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century. Translated by Anslem Hollo. Berkeley: University of California Press. Senf, Carol A. 1998. Dracula: Between Tradition and Modernism. New York: Twayne Publishers. Spinney, Justin. 2007. “Cycling the City: Non-place and the Sensory Construction of Meaning in a Mobile Practice.” In Cycling and Society, edited by Dave Horton, Paul Rosen, and Peter Cox, 25–45. Aldershot: Ashgate. Spokelets. 1897. The Humours of Cycling, 93–94. London: James Bowden. Thompson, Christopher. 1999. “Regeneration, Dégénérescence, and the Medical Debate about Bicycling in Fin-de-Siècle France.” In Sport et santé dans l’histoire/ Sport and Health in History, edited by Thierry Terret, 339– 346. Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag. Urry, John. 1990. The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies. London: Sage.

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Urry, John. 2004. “The ‘System’ of Automobility.” Theory, Culture & Society 21: 25–39. Urry, John. 2007. Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity. Vannini, Phillip. 2014. “Slowness and Deceleration.” In The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities, 116–124. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Virilio, Paul. 1977. Vitesse et politique: essai de dromologie. Paris: Galilée. Wells H. G. 1935. The Wheels of Chance: A Bicycling Idyll [1896]; The Time Machine [1895]. London: J. M. Dent. Zemka, Sue. 2011. Time and the Moment in Victorian Literature and Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 11

Autonomous Vehicles: From Science Fiction to Sustainable Future Robert Braun

Introduction One of the key dilemmas of our times is understanding how technology shapes our social present and socio-technological futures. Of course, this is not new. Philosophers, sociologists, and scholars in the science, technology and society (STS) field have, during the latter part of the twentieth century, been concerned with trying to understand the constellation and interplay between social and technological phenomena, as well as the process of the production of collective knowledge on and about technology (Bijker 1995; Latour 1996, 2005; Jasanoff 2004; Jasanoff and Kim 2015). Recent developments in technology—especially in digitalisation, nano- and biotechnology, quantum computing and cyber-physical ­systems—have brought these dialogues between technology and society to the forefront of social science research. One of the areas concerning the confluence of advances in technology and its potential impacts on society which is now highly topical is connected autonomous mobility (Canzler and Knie 2016; Cohen 2012; Laurier and Dant 2012).

R. Braun (*)  Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna, Austria © The Author(s) 2019 M. Aguiar et al. (eds.), Mobilities, Literature, Culture, Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27072-8_11

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The fascination with this new technology is seen in the White Paper on the Future of Europe (EU WP), presented by the President of the European Commission in 2017 (EC 2017), which offers “connected car” use as an example of the sort of political decision-making that member states will have to deal with vis-à-vis the future direction of the EU. The Commission is right in selecting connected car use to illustrate potential techno-social futures: autonomous mobility (AM) is at the crossroads of many of the changes that characterise current decision-making. The growing influence of cyber-physical systems, the association and interaction between human and non-human agents, the multidimensional connectedness of people, objects and algorithmic devices, and the potential opportunities of quantum computing are just a few of the recent technological developments with major societal consequences that are brought together under the sign of AM. Also, from a social science point of view, AM intersects with both the “complexity turn” (Urry 2005) and the “mobilities turn” (Sheller and Urry 2006, 2016; cf. critically Randell 2018), as well as with influential and emerging theories in the STS field such as actor network theory (ANT) and social construction theory (SCOT). There is also a growing body of literature on the transformational societal bearings of autonomous mobility, discussing the social effects as well as moral and ethical implications of the transition to autonomous mobility, and the economic, security, health, urban planning and policy impacts of “cyberised vehicles” (Sheller 2004) or “mobility things” (Hansson 2015; Laurier and Dant 2012). This chapter takes as its starting point a literary approach to societal and technological interaction by looking at the first appearance of driverless cars in science fiction (SF) publications at the beginning of the twentieth century. Science fiction, as a literary genre, offers an alternative, speculative approach to thinking about the interplay of technology and society. Works of science fiction offer a different kind of truth (Miller and Bennett 2008) or “transknowledges” (Haraway 2013) to that of traditional expert-based techno-optimism. I am not considering here the somewhat sensational dystopic science fiction inspired representations of other worlds that influence much of the public discussions of technosocial futures today (Gordon 2009): rather, depictions which are true “in a deeper sense of reflecting the enduring realities of human existence, meaning and identity; true in the sense of illustrating fundamental moral dilemmas faced by individuals and communities when confronted by new

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and emerging technologies, and the struggles to grapple meaningfully with those dilemmas in the ways only humans know how” (Miller and Bennett 2008, 600). Here, I will be looking at two of the earliest science fiction stories that imagine an autonomous mobility world: David H. Keller’s “The Living Machine” (1935) and Isaac Asimov’s “Sally” (1995 [1953]). I have selected these short stories because they were among the first texts to focus specifically on autonomous or driverless cars, thus providing a picture of the sociotechnical imaginaries of the early twentieth century (Jasanoff and Kim 2015, 2009). I will also mention other stories that have driverless cars even if they are only part of the main narrative, like Miles Breuer’s “Paradise and Iron” that first appeared in 1930, preceding Keller’s work. The chapter is structured as follows: first, I discuss some of the characteristics of the early years of the “system of automobility” (Urry 2004) as represented in these texts. I then go on to consider the two early science fiction, or sci-fi, texts introduced above and explore their techno-social imaginaries in relation to autonomous mobility. After that, I turn to the contemporary discourses surrounding the implementation of autonomous vehicles and consider the ways in which they differ from those represented in early science fiction. This will be exemplified by the representation of autonomous connected car futures in the White Paper on the Future of the EU. Here I will argue that the difference works to validate the emerging re-conceptualisation of autonomous vehicles in spatial and infrastructural terms, and to explain why autonomous vehicles of this kind did not populate the pages of science fiction in the early decades of sci-fi magazines and books. I will finish by arguing for the potentially positive and transformational nature of autonomous mobility if conceptualised sensitively and in line with the insights subsequent upon the “mobilities-turn” (Urry 2008).

The Early Years of Automobility Altogether, very few works of early science fiction are devoted to the theme of autonomous or driverless cars. This is perhaps surprising since, in the 1930s, when pulp magazines helped popularise the sci-fi genre, robotics and machine-human interaction was a central theme of popular sci-fi stories. Also, this was the era when cars and the socio-cultural impacts of the auto world were already mainstreamed.

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The “system of automobility”—the interconnected order of production, of consumption, of mobile socialities and territorialities, of cultures and of uses of specific resources locked-in and “path determined” by the steel-and-petroleum car (Urry 2004)—was already in full swing by the 1930s, especially in America. The automobile allowed “the car-driver to travel any time in any direction along the complex road systems of western societies that link together most houses, workplaces and leisure sites” (Urry 2004, 28). While the concept of the car was closely connected to being a “machinistic hybridization of the car-driver” (Urry 2006; Dant 2004), the twenties and thirties also saw experiments with cars that did not have a driver. The idea of a driverless technology of mobility was therefore present very early on in the evolution of the “car-system.” The first “driverless car,” the Haudina radio controlled automobile, was introduced on McCook air force base in Dayton Ohio in 1921 (Green 1925). This was followed by the American Wonder, another distantly activated experimental vehicle, which was trialled on the streets of New York in 1925, followed by several other offshoots used for demonstration or advertising purposes in the 1930s (Kröger 2016). These vehicles were controlled by radio waves from other, following, vehicles or even from an aeroplane. Technology and its social impacts were red-hot topics of the 1930s. During the Great Depression and decade of economic insecurity, a fear emerged that machines would take the jobs of the already threatened American worker. This anxiety extended specifically to driving and drivers. The taxi driver market was flooded with despairing men looking for work as the rest of the public was heavily cutting back on expenses. In 1934, taxi drivers went on strike because of their plummeting salaries and long working hours. The strike soared out of control, leading to violent confrontations across the city between taxi drivers and the police (Hodges 2007). The last thing drivers wanted was an autonomous car that would take away the last remaining opportunity to earn money. The word “robot,” an invention of the Czech writer Karel Capek in 1920, originated from the Czech word “Robota” (forced labour) and was exemplified in Capek’s stage play (R.U.R.—‘Rossum’s Universal Robots’) about robots being created to do the work of humans. The play premiered in New York in 1922, ran for 184 performances, and was widely known by the 1930s. Another theme that was connected to mechanised mobility was the realisation that human error induced danger on the roads. The number

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of annual road casualties in the years between 1924 and 1934 almost doubled (Miller 2015); the single biggest increase in one decade in the “century of the car” in America. This prompted General Motors (GM) to commission a short film on vehicle safety, The Safest Place, in 1935. The film shows a car with no driver maintaining traffic regulations in a textbook manner. The film does not aim to present a version of a technically feasible driverless car, however; it does suggest that the sole responsibility for accidents lies with drivers. Automobiles are depicted as smooth and safe operators in perfect harmony and rhythm with their environment. Cars, then, are presented as “perfect machines,” not moral agents; all the risk and potential for harm rests with the human being at the wheel (Kröger 2016).

Autonomous Vehicles in Early Science Fiction Driverless cars duly appear in science fiction for the first time on the pages of Miles Breuer’s “Paradise and Iron” (Breuer 2008) around the same time as the first experiments with driverless or “distant driven” automobiles took place. Breuer’s story originally appeared in Amazing Stories Quarterly, one of the leading advocates of the new genre of popular science fiction stories in 1930. Here, the whole narrative is framed in terms of the coexistence and conflict of autonomous machines and humans as well as the dystopic impacts thereof. Autonomous cars are depicted as an illustration of the robotic world populated by autonomous vehicles (ships, cars), working machines and their robot creators, all of which are manipulated by the “Electrical Brain” preparing for a showdown with humanity. While the storyline foreshadows many of the tropes of later SF by exploring the dystopia of robotic machines (the loss of human interaction, the potential obliteration of humankind by machines and the horror of total robotic manufacturing) my focus in this paper is specifically on the socio-technological futures represented by autonomous mobility. The autonomous vehicles in “Paradise and Iron” are some of the first glimpses of the dystopic world of automatisation and robot-operated social systems. Meanwhile, the first sci-fi text to focus entirely on the idea of the autonomous car was a short story by a popular science fiction writer (and psychiatrist) of the time, David H. Keller, called “The Living Machine.” In this short story, first published in the 1935 edition of Wonder Stories,

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Keller is inspired by the recent appearance of the driverless car. The story is about the ultimate mainstreaming of the autonomous car idea: Old people began to cross the continent in their own cars. Young people found the driverless car admirable for petting. The blind for the first time were safe. Parents found they could more safely send their children to school in the new car than in their old cars with a chauffeur. In one year, every other make of car faced failure. […] In five years America depended on fifty million automatic cars for its transportation. (Keller 1935, 1471)

The conflict here is presented in primarily business terms. An inventor creates the autonomous car and sells the idea to one of the big automobile manufacturers of the country. With the societal benefits of the driverless car, the manufacturer quickly dominates the automobile market and sells fifty million cars in a matter of five years. One of the competing, but sidelined, car manufacturers is also the biggest distributor of petroleum throughout America. In order to win back consumers’ trust in human operated automobiles (and regain its market share), the company mixes cocaine with the fuel in order to make the cars irresponsible and strip them of their key competitive advantage—safety. As the cars are fed the new fuel they become dangerous operators: they collide with each other, they knock people down, and they create a world in which no one is any longer safe from the drug-crazed vehicles. By now, the inventor of the car has serious reservations about their living, humanoid properties and proposes to stop manufacturing them—just as another entrepreneur has invented a new battery that will enable cars to “run ten thousand miles and be recharged for ten dollars” (Keller 1935, 1511). Keller’s story was an almost “stand-alone” act of imagining an autonomous-car-populated future. His narrative is straightforward: autonomous cars create a safe mobility environment (“In spite of the great increase in the number of automobiles, there was a constantly decreasing number of accidents and death” [1471]); offer mobility access to several disadvantaged social groups (“Old people began to cross the continent […] the blind for the first time were safe” [1471]); mobility is made easy and comfortable (“Young people found the driverless car admirable for petting” [1471]); and more miles could be travelled without the “empty time” normally associated with travel (“the idea of sitting still any length of time in one place was simply intolerable to them” [1471]). The idea of the automation, meanwhile, spills over to other areas of everyday life

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such as the home and workplace (“They wanted to make things, to use machinery, to drive mobile engines. The housekeepers prided themselves on having a hundred electrical servants in the home” [1472]). Automation, however, comes at a price in Keller’s story: “In New York alone three hundred taxi men were killed before the rioting started by the introduction of the new car as a driverless taxi” (1471). Keller’s narrative, as discussed in the introduction to the text, encapsulates the hopes, fears, problems and opportunities of his time. Cars are dangerous; driverless cars are safe. The system of traditional automobility excludes certain social groups—the old and the young—so they are actively assisted by the invention of the driverless vehicle. These AMs create a habitable environment for travel—not necessarily the comforting “cocoon” John Urry describes in his article “Inhabiting the car” (Urry 2006)—but more like the 1950s advertisements of happy families travelling in the car and playing a board game. I now turn my attention to the the well-known sci-fi author, Isaac Asimov, whose story, “Sally,” was first published in 1953. His story is of a rather different kind to Keller’s inasmuch as he is less interested in the world populated by autonomous vehicles than fascinated by what happens to the “intelligent beings” after they have “served their time.” The action is set in a “retirement home” for cars, where the first generation of AVs are expected to spend the rest of their lives in peace. The retirement home undertakes to treat the autonomous cars “humanely” at the end of their “life,” but an entrepreneur comes up with the idea to place the cars’ “automatic positronic systems” in the chassis of new cars and re-sell them for profit. The warden of the home, Jake Folkers, turns the idea of re-using the cars down; however, the entrepreneur persists and uses force to get hold of the cars. However, the cars—as living, feeling and eugenic creatures—unite and save themselves, finally killing the intruder. In Asimov’s autonomous mobility universe— although we admittedly know very little about the world outside of the retirement home—the “system of automobility” as conceptualised by John Urry (2004) seems still to be very much intact: the car as manufactured object, the automobile as a product for individual consumption, the infrastructure of the car “industry” and operation, the private mode of mobility, the culture with its symbolism of “locked-in steel-and-petroleum,” are all unchanged. Both stories focus more on the technology than on the social environment they create or impact upon.

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While Keller’s social world is influenced positively by the mainstreaming of autonomous vehicles—travel impaired groups gain access; safety is increased; travel is smooth and easy—there appear fewer practical benefits in Asimov’s autonomous universe. Asimov’s cars are aestheticised— they are beautiful objects—and humanised: they have names, show emotions, communicate and cooperate with humans and machines alike but it is unclear how they will benefit the social realm in practical terms. In Keller’s story, then, autonomous mobility creates a techno-social future that makes everyday life easier for “users,” but there are ramifications of this autonomous technology beyond its use as transport that are dystopic. Think what would be the result if these living automobiles started to do their own thinking and united tried to form a ruling race? Of course that sounds impossible. But you have had the same idea. And with an absolutely new force of nature, how can we tell what will happen? We cannot, and so I am going to stop. Babson wants to put my invention into other machines, for example, into the cotton mills of the South and England. That would mean the unemployment of five million men and women and their certain starvation. (Keller 1935, 1472)

Both authors imagine autonomous vehicles as humanoid creatures and as moral agents: they act, think and behave like humans. This is more evident in Sally, but also represented, as indicated in the title, in the “Living Machine.” Keller’s cars behave like humans when in receipt of psychotropic substances; not only do they get high but they also become irresponsible and irrational; in other words, they are “living” but no longer thinking machines. Keller’s autonomous mobility world nevertheless depicts a future not dissimilar to that conceived of at the beginning of the twenty-first century. With the “real” deployment of autonomous cars imminent, as forecast in the EU White Paper on the Future of Europe, access is improved and safe and harmonious urban environments are imagined in which autonomous vehicles carry people seamlessly from place to place (Braun 2016; Cohen 2012; DiClemente et al. 2014). Both sci-fi authors’ imagination revolves around moral questions: what happens when machines as moral agents make moral decisions, for better or for worse? Both authors also go beyond the current discussions on responsibility and liability, or the modern renderings of the “trolley problem” (i.e., the ethical model

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of moral decision-making where a runaway tram may be directed to kill one person or five on a railway, depending on the choice made by the onlooker), its variations, moral modelling or moral free riding, and its policy implications (Thomson 1985; Bonnefon et al. 2016; Goodall 2014; Foot 1978; Walker-Smith 2015). Moreover both authors are concerned with what, today, is at stake as the result of the elision of the human/non-human binary. The critical question, however, as in much of the science-fiction literature to follow, is what happens if machines become smarter than people and will not “accept” the rules men prescribe to them. While Folkers, the warden of the “retirement home,” disagrees with the intruder and wants to stop the violence to the cars, once the machines kill the aggressor he becomes seriously concerned about the prospect that cars can make moral decisions about matters of life and death and may, eventually, turn against their masters. The same applies to the inventor of the “living machines”: he plans to stop creating new ones and to take his secret to the grave based on similar considerations. The techno-social imaginary of early sci-fi authors writing about such potentially transformational technology as autonomous cars is, in some ways, similar to the techno-imagination of the present era. Autonomous cars are represented as ready-made technological artefacts replacing other technologies without entering into interaction or discourse with the social universe they are part of. Neither Keller’s nor Asimov’s socio-political environment is a world of post-automobility: this is still very much the era when automobility—of all kinds—is being celebrated and the vision of new autonomous “humanoid” cars is conceived as part of that system. These new humanoid cars are still manufactured along traditional lines: they are made of steel, run on petroleum, operate within the same infrastructural “system,” share cultural symbolism (to an extent), and reproduce a similar “passengering” (Laurier et al. 2008)—if not driving—experience. Similarly, the interior or exterior of the cars do not change; nor do other elements of the system. In both texts explored here, the problem is seen to stem from the ability of humanoid machines to make ethical decisions and, once again, this echoes the main concerns of STS scholars and policy researchers in the present. The aestheticised universe of Asimov even features the gendered symbolism of car culture which has become so familiar to us (Jain 2006). Cars are figured as objects of beauty—“skittish” and sexually inviting— while men are “intruders”: not only into the retirement home where the

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cars are stored, but also into the sexually private universe of the female car-body. Sally has her privacy (“Automatic lock. She’s got a sense of privacy, Sally has.” [33]), but Mr. Gellhorn, the intruder, forcibly takes her for a ride. She automatically locks her doors when the intruder strikes, but is then “raped” through the open top. He stepped back three or four paces, then quickly, so quickly I couldn’t take a step to stop him, he ran forward and vaulted into the car. He caught Sally completely by surprise, because as he came down, he shut off the ignition before she could lock it in place. For the first time in five years, Sally’s motor was dead. […] “There.” he said. “I think I did her a lot of good.” (Asimov 1995 [1953], 33)

All the elements of twentieth-century gendered culture are present: notably, the driver-intruder man and the victimised woman, including the way in which the latter is made responsible for her sexual assault: “A car with a sense of privacy shouldn’t go around with its top down” (33). No irony is present. From this discussion it may be seen that the techno-social imaginary of the “system of automobility” was already “locked in” by the 30s. On this point, it is of anecdotal interest that Asimov imagined the first commercially available autonomous car, the Mat-O-Mot, to be deployed in 2015. This frames the emerging world of auto-mobility nicely. Our everyday lives of “traveling, dwelling and socialising” (Thrift 2008; Urry 2000, 59) begins with the emergence of the system of automobility in the 1930s and is assumed to end in the 2010s with the appearance of Asimov’s Mat-O-Mot, the autonomous car that foreshadows today’s driverless automobiles. This leads us to inquire why the autonomous automobile was such a compelling concept in the sociotechnical imagination of these early sci-fi thinkers, and what it will take for AVs to signal the end of the “system of automobility” rather than simply being an extension of it. In the concluding parts of this chapter I will try to answer these questions.

Apparatuses of Automobility In recent years, STS scholars have added new layers of complexity to how we envisage our techno-social futures. Jasanoff and Kim (2015) recommend that we attend to “sociotechnical imaginaries” (STIs): “collectively held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed visions of

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desirable futures, animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology” (Jasanoff and Kim 2015, 6). STIs evolve over time and also compete with each other; they affect innovation processes and policy decisions as well as the literary imagination. Sociotechnical imaginaries, as Jasanoff and Kim (2009, 123) in their original paper argued, “are instrumental and futuristic: they project visions of what is good, desirable, and worth attaining for a political community; they articulate feasible futures.” Automobility is a prime candidate for a rigorous interrogation in terms of such imaginaries not least because it is a deeply political arrangement “entail[ing] patterns of power relations and visions of a collective ‘good life’ which are at the same time highly contestable and contested” (Böhm et al. 2006, 4–5). As Michel Foucault (1986) famously prophesised almost 40 years ago, the era of the modern is above all the epoch of space. Automobility involves complex social, spatial and cultural interrelations (Featherstone et al. 2005) as well as creating “dreamscapes” that rearrange socialities (Urry 2004; Jasanoff and Kim 2015). However, it is evident that early twentieth-century sci-fi stories of autonomous mobility approach their subject in a manifestly non-spatial way: they conceptualise technology purely instrumentally, leaving the social and psychological aspects of the spatial and the political unaccounted for. The world of these SF writers may therefore be said to be “flat” and two-dimensional; in the minds of the two early sci-fi writers discussed here, automobility had not yet emerged as a sociotechnical imaginary per se; it was not yet figured as a shared spatial or political vision of a desirable social future, nor one that is held collectively by the people and institutions that depend upon it. These writers experience and depict the automobile as a technological artefact in a vaguely conceived social context rather than a social phenomenon which is co-constructed (Bijker 1995) or co-produced (Jasanoff 2004) by and with society. Automobility is not yet conceived as “a self-organizing autopoietic, nonlinear system that will spread world-wide, and which includes cars, car-drivers, roads, petroleum supplies and many novel objects, technologies and signs” and which will restructure time and space, “locking in” “social life into the mode of mobility that automobility generates and presupposes” (Urry 2004, 27). Nor is it yet a “regime” producing “truth effects about driving or self-driven subjects” (Böhm et al. 2006, 8–9). This being the case, then, how are we to conceptualise what we see

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emerging in the pages of these early visions of an autonomous automobility future? From the perspective of the twenty-first century, we can see that the whole story of “The Living Machine” revolves around the emerging hegemony of the car system even if this has yet to be brought to consciousness. The story is that of a power struggle between different players for the future of automobility: the manufacturers of automobiles, the innovators, the policy makers and the oil producers are all heavily invested in the outcome. In Sally, it is all about taking the automatic positronic systems of the autonomous cars, placing them in a new chassis, and then reselling them for a profit—once again involving makers, innovators, policy makers and entrepreneurs. In this regard, it is tempting to see the emergence of automobility less as a developing sociotechnical imaginary, as previously discussed, but as an Ideological Sociotechnical Apparatus (following Althusser [1971]) driven by capitalist institutions. The concept of sociotechnical imaginaries, as we have seen, focuses on visions of sociotechnical futures being collectively held, institutionally stabilised, and publicly performed; however, in Keller’s work we see how these imaginaries become privately fought over and institutionally stabilised. It is the brute forces of power interests, driven by economic greed, that both animates the emergence of this early technology and also uses the technology to foster wider economic and ideological interests. I have therefore elected to turn to Louis Althusser’s concept of Ideological State Apparatuses in an attempt to demonstrate the interplay of technology, society, and power in these representations of the “car-system” in the early part of the twentieth century. In his landmark essay, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (ISAs) (1971), Althusser explains ideology as an “imaginary assemblage” in which social groups internalise and reproduce the relations which condition their existence. Althusser also claims that this representation is always material (as opposed to “ideal”) and becomes visible through practice: “existence is inscribed in the actions of practices governed by rituals defined in the last instance by the ideological apparatus. Ideology therefore exists in material ideological apparatuses that prescribe material practices governed by a material ritual, which practices exist in the material actions of a subject acting in all consciousness according to his belief” (Althusser 1971, 129). According to Althusser, common-sense beliefs often come to be seen as “obvious” through the process of what he calls “interpellation,” whereby subjects are positioned in such a way

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that they freely incorporate ideologies of various kinds into their conceptions of the self. Ideological State Apparatuses may therefore be thought of as “realities” that present themselves to the observer through distinct and specialised institutions. Institutions in the Althusserian sense are not only organisational structures such as the Church or the education system, but also what, following Foucault (1995, 2009) and Bourdieu (1993), we think of as everyday discourses (such as romantic love and a wide range of tastes and prejudices). ISAs invisibly coerce (“hail”/“interpellate”) subjects to follow certain material practices and rituals, and create socialities that then will “reinforce” their subjectivities. In the fight between the car manufacturers, the automobile entrepreneur, the oil producer and the innovator we arguably see the emergence of automobility as an ideological (sociotechnical) apparatus. This is exemplified by Keller’s and Asimov’s imaginary of automobility which is spatially and socially “flat” as they limit their focus to the material practices (i.e., the battle of economic interests) governed by a material ritual (i.e., the market) and the interpellation of the individual car-user in the manner outlined by Althusser; in other words, while the texts astutely capture the way in which the “car system” had become so powerful, they failed to grasp what was needed to turn their dystopian fantasies of an AV future into one that would work. Automobility is not yet a true “imaginary” as it is does not project visions of the good, the desirable, and what is worth attaining for the community.

Post-automobility When we turn to the discourses surrounding the production of present day autonomous vehicles, by contrast, we see that their main feature is not their driverless nature but rather their hyper-connectedness. In the 2017 EU White Paper (WP), a political vision based on the current technology innovation landscape, “connected cars” are presented as “illustrative snapshots” of the EU’s political and technological future and the decision-making that will entail. Although the staging of connected autonomous mobility technology is not as detailed as in the early sci-fi works, this is one of the first political descriptions of an autonomous mobility prospect presented as something that really is going to happen as opposed to a hypothetical technological future. Autonomous vehicles are conceptualised in the WP as fully connected “cyberised vehicles”: in one of the scenarios (“Doing less more effectively”)

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“[a] European Telecoms Authority has the power to free up frequencies for cross-border communication services, such as the ones needed for the use of connected cars across Europe” (EC 2017, 23). Autonomous mobility is thus presented as hyper-connected autonomous mechanised movement: algorithm-controlled, multi-dimensionally connected cars flow “seamlessly across Europe thanks to EU-wide rules and the work of an EU enforcement agency” (EC 2017, 25). According to the EU WP, and other representations of our present autonomous mobility future (Bertoncello and Wee 2015; Canzler and Knie 2016), AVs are self-driving, smart “mobility-things” (“the socio-material mechanism for getting the job done” [Hansson 2015]) that operate according to safety-critical functions such as cameras, onboard sensors, and other telecommunications, as well as algorithm and computer-driven infrastructure, in order to respond to safety critical situations as well as to utilise automated navigation strategies. They also acquire, and share, real-time information with an extended time horizon and improved awareness of distance that is beyond human capacity and includes complex technical and navigation information, remote diagnostics, maintenance, and safety warnings to provide flawless operation. Further, the AVs of the twenty-first century have been conceptualised as mobile spaces connected to every other space possible. AVs are multi-dimensionally connected to other people, to other spaces (roadside infrastructure, buildings, other vehicles) as well as to technological narratives (datasets of the past already interpreted by human or artificial intelligence). These vehicles, as opposed to the “living machines” imagined by the novelists of the 1930s, are both spatially and kinetically conceived: they move through space, and are hyper-connected to multiple other spaces through the networks of flows (Castells 2009). AVs are thus on their way to becoming part of a new post-driver/car system; they may be thought of as multi-fueled, ultra-light, smart, de-privatised, multimodal and multi-dimensionally interconnected, mechanised autonomous moving spaces (Urry 2004). In addition, they have the potential to rearrange our existing topographies of power; AVs do not require a driver, thus space is not organised around a designated and marked position of function and/or power. There is no one person in control, no specific human agency behind the movement, choice of direction, stopping, pulling away, turning and accelerating. And there is no specific human agency behind the interconnections and intersections of movement either: etiquettes are reorganised, interruptions reconnected and topographies of

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disruptions reordered. A new phenomenology of driving and passengering (Thrift 2008; Laurier et al. 2008) as well as a novel “automotive consciousness” therefore emerges (Pearce 2016). It is, however, important to recognise that there are many types and forms of AVs being experimented with at the present time: some transporting people (one, few or many); some transporting goods or the things that people would normally carry. As Mimi Sheller (2004) indicated, already more than a decade ago, “vehicular cyberisation” has been happening at an accelerating pace since the converging infrastructures of transportation and information were created in the last decade of the previous century. A “post-driver/car” autonomous mobility system potentially transforms the “car” into something quite “other”: the “path-dependence,” as well as the “lock-in” of the steel-and-petroleum infrastructure associated with traditional automobility is finally displaced. New materials, new forms of propellant, new interior and exterior designs will emerge, radically reconceptualising people- and object-carrying “mobility things” as well as rearranging the desires, inhabitations, socialities that accompany them (Urry 2004; Sheller and Urry 2000, 2006; Sheller 2004). As we have seen, Keller and Asimov, by contrast, imagined autonomous cars as simply new technology: autonomous humanoid agents thinking, acting and moving along the “scapes” that had already come to be associated with “system of automobility” (Sheller 2004). A driverless car, they imagined, is simply a car without a driver. It is now clear, however, that the transformational nature of the autonomous connected vehicle is not its driverlessness, but rather its potential to transition from the “system of automobility” to the radically re-conceptualised social and geographical realm of post-automobility. Post-car, autonomous, interconnected mobility may therefore be theorised as a techno-social ecosystem in which the car-driver hybrid assemblage, embedded in fluid but systemic interconnections (Urry 2004), gives way to a more “liquid” arrangement of mobility populated by interconnected human– non-human mobile hybrids (Bauman 2007; Sheller 2004). Shared urban spaces, for example, may soon be populated by self-driving cyberised mobile “things” carrying people, objects and information in a radically new and fluid ontological operation. Nevertheless, the materialisation of post-automobility will also require the emergence of a radically new (sociotechnical) mobility imaginary with the ability to “interpellate”

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twentieth-century subjects into new ways of being, or becoming, mobile subjects. Meanwhile, this twenty-first century conceptualisation of autonomous vehicles may offer answers as to why the driverless car did not continue to capture the imagination of the early writers of science fiction. Lacking the fully “cyberised” networks of post-automobility, driverless or autonomous cars could not be envisaged as socially or technologically transformational. These fictional prototypes were imagined simply as “technology fixes,” offering solutions to some of the social challenges created by the first generation of cars (such as their risk and danger). However, what was then seen as the the more fascinating aspect of human-machine interaction—namely the potential for the machine to replace its maker—did not necessarily need to be linked to transport; other forms of robots—humanoid autonomous agents—were widely fantasised. Very soon, autonomous cars were no longer seen as the most interesting socio-technical sci-fi fantasy and disappeared from the cultural imaginary until they re-emerged in sci-fi literature and film in the seventies and eighties—but that is another story entirely.

Conclusion: Towards a New Politics of Autonomous Mobility Since early sci-fi writers imagined autonomous cars as independent autonomous agents and not as hyper-connected cyberised “mobility things” they missed one of the key aspects of autonomous mobility: the politics of autonomous hyper-connected space. “Mobility things,” driver-machine hybrids or autonomous artefacts, are deeply political in the sense that they are symptomatic of the way in which social relations, involving the production and distribution of power with the ability to transform inevitable social conflicts, quickly settle into socially acceptable and institutionalised hierarchies and oppositions. Mobility, as the “mobilities turn” has shown, often lies at the centre of such conflicts as well as their potential transformation; it is also a resource that is differently accessed—“one person’s speed is another person’s slowness,” writes Tim Cresswell (2010, 21)—and therefore liable to be fought over on a number of levels. For Cresswell, indeed, the politics of mobility is multifaceted and made up of: (1) constellations of material movement—distance, speed and frequency; (2) representations— the discourse, rites and symbolism of mobility; and (3) the practices of

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mobility—embodiment, comfort and autonomy (Cresswell 2010, 22). This account of the politics of mobility relates closely to my own description of the workings of the ideological sociotechnical apparatus: that is, the “imaginary assemblage” associated with the material practices of automotive movement, and governed by a material ritual of certain discourses, rites and symbolism attached to the “car,” will determine the imaginary of the car user and her “imagined” sociotechnical future. Moreover, the “regime” of traditional automobility is tenacious and difficult to “shake off” (Böhm et al. 2006, 11). Indeed, the ideological sociotechnical apparatus of automobility is in full force at moments of sociotechnical transition such as our own, just as it was when “The Living Machine” and “Sally” were written. This may be illustrated by the competing discourses and imaginaries at work in the European Union’s vision for the “Future of Europe.” Following up on the White Paper (discussed at the beginning of this essay), EC President Jean-Claude Juncker presented his own vision of the future in his 2017 State of the Union speech (Juncker 2017). One of the key political initiatives he proposed was “to make our industry stronger and more competitive” and to invest further in “the world-class products that give us our edge, like our cars. I am proud of our car industry” (Juncker 2017, 3, my emphasis). While there are clearly multiple imaginaries implicit here—including ones propagated by believers of a sustainable, low-carbon, less mobile techno-future (Buehler et al. 2017; Geels et al. 2017)—it would appear that the sociotechnical apparatus that created the first-generation “car system” and informed the pages of the early twentieth-century sci-fi writers is still largely intact; the focus is still on the cars per se rather than the thinking needed to create a post-automobility future. If the conditions necessary for true post-automobility were realised, autonomous vehicles would have the capacity to rearrange gendered motions, representations, and practices “on the move.” The new algorithmic rhythm of the road would, for example, reorder gendered biases: speed, distance, route would be defined by the system and the hyper-connected interplay of its participants, not by the gendered individual. Autonomous vehicles, thus conceptualised—and unlike “Sally”— are spaces, not the adjuncts of people; “meanings” would be created by the system’s multifold inter-connectedness, by the users passing through its portals, with the vehicles detecting data that these individuals wished to share. Mobility practices would be recreated by the new

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spatial, temporal, sensory, bodily interplay of subjects walking, driving, passengering, wandering, carrying, pushing, placing and swarming through a maze of other bodies, “mobility things,” objects and their related infrastructures (Harman 2009; Jensen 2013; Hansson et al. 2016; Cochoy 2009). In a hyperconnected post-driver/car automobility universe, the manmade synchronised rhythm of urban mobility would give way to (partially) algorithmic synchronisation of the hybrid system of humans, machines and infrastructure, taking control out of the hands of drivers and their machines. Shared rules and common sets of communication tools and mechanisms would be replaced by cyber-physical systems rearranging socialities and what Doreen Massey had described as power-geometries (Massey 2005). The social construction of the private and the public would be fundamentally challenged. However, even with all these material changes in place, there is the likelihood that the politics of mechanised mobility would continue to be ordered by the existing ideological sociotechnical apparatus of automobility such is the tenacity of this way of thinking. The autonomous automobility future imagined by Keller and Asimov was politically “flat” because it originated from the same ideological sociotechnical apparatus as traditional car-driver hybrid automobility, and—at the present moment—this is where Europe’s future is stalled also. For the politics of automobility to be truly transformed, first the ideological sociotechnical apparatus needs to change; new power arrangements, material practices, and rituals of the discourse—along with their associated rites and symbolism— need to emerge. The White Paper on the Future of Europe is a poignant current illustration of this impasse. Indeed, the EU approach to connected autonomous mobility is quite similar to Keller’s or Asimov’s conceptualisations of autonomous machines in many respects. Although the EU’s cars of the future are not seen as humanoid and/or living creatures, they are nevertheless envisaged as “moving seamlessly” across Europe within a “system of automobility” which is merely technical in nature and invention; there is no understanding of the change which must also take place in the social and cultural realm for such technology to be meaningfully embraced and deployed. In the texts of today’s current European policy-makers, as in the techno-social fictions of early twentieth-century sci-fi writers, the vision of connected vehicle autonomous mobility is ultimately non-transformational as the ideological sociotechnical apparatuses informing the vision remain fixed and unchallenged. Envisioning a

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genuinely new sociotechnical future requires the currently silenced alternative ideologies animating technology to be embraced by the citizens of Europe. The vision of a fluid, seamless, hyper-connected post-automobility system will be socially and politically transformational only if the ideological sociotechnical apparatuses which inform it change as well.

References Althusser, Louis. 1971. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation).” In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, 121– 173. New York: Monthly Review Press. Asimov, Issac. 1995 [1953]. “Sally.” In The Complete Robot, 9–28. London: HarperCollins. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2007. Liquid Times: Living in the Age of Uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bertoncello, Michele, and Dominik Wee. 2015. Ten Ways Autonomous Driving Could Redefine the Automotive World. London: McKinsey. Bijker, Wiebe E. 1995. Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change. Cambridge: MIT Press. Böhm, Steffen, Jones Campbell, Chris Land, and Matthew Paterson. 2006. “Conceptualizing Automobility.” In Against Automobility, edited by Steffen Böhm, Jones Campbell, Chris Land, and Matthew Paterson, 3–16. Oxford: Blackwell. Bonnefon, Jean-Francois, Azim Shariff, and Iyad Rahwan. 2016. “The Social Dilemma of Autonomous Vehicles.” Science 352 (6293): 1573–1576. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993. The Field of Cultural Production. Cambridge: Polity Press. Braun, Robert. 2016. “The Autonomous Vehicle Revolution.” In Multi-level (e) Governance: Is ICT a Means to Enhance Transparency and Democracy, 521– 530. Wien: Austrian Computer Society. Breuer, Miles J. 2008. “Paradise and Iron.” In The Man with the Strange Head and Other Early Science Fiction Stories, 44–256. Nebraska: Bison Books. Buehler, Ralph, John Pucher, Regine Gerike, and Thomas Götschi. 2017. “Reducing Car Dependence in the Heart of Europe: Lessons from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.” Transport Reviews 37 (1): 4–28. Canzler, Weert, and Andreas Knie. 2016. “Mobility in the Age of Digital Modernity: Why the Private Car Is Losing Its Significance, Intermodal Transport Is Winning and Why Digitalisation Is the Key.” Applied Mobilities 1 (1): 56–67. Castells, Manuel. 2009. The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

278  R. BRAUN Cochoy, Franck. 2009. “Driving a Shopping Cart from STS to Business, and the Other Way Round: On the Introduction of Shopping Carts in American Grocery Stores (1936–1959).” Organization 16 (1): 31–55. https://doi. org/10.1177/1350508408098921. Cohen, Maurie J. 2012. “The Future of Automobile Society: A SocioTechnological Transition Perspective.” Technology Analysis & Strategic Management 24 (4): 377–390. Cresswell, Tim. 2010. “Towards a Politics of Mobility.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28 (1): 17–31. https://doi.org/10.1068/ d11407. Dant, Tim. 2004. “The Driver-Car.” Theory, Culture & Society 21 (4–5): 61–79. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276404046061. DiClemente, Jonathan, Serban Mogos, and Ruby Wang. 2014. Autonomous Car Policy Report. Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Mellon University. EC. 2017. White Paper on the Future of Europe. Brussels: European Commission. Featherstone, Mike, Nigel Thrift, and John Urry. 2005. Automobilities. London: Sage. Foot, Philippa. 1978. The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect in Virtues and Vices. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Foucault, Michael. 1986. “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias.” Diacritics 16: 22–27. Foucault, Michel. 1995. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Random House. Foucault, Michel. 2009. History of Madness. New York: Routledge. Geels, Frank W., Benjamin K. Sovacool, Tim Schwanen, and Steve Sorrell. 2017. “The Socio-Technical Dynamics of Low-Carbon Transitions.” Joule 1 (3): 463–479. Goodall, Noah J. 2014. “Machine Ethics and Automated Vehicles.” In Road Vehicle Automation, edited by G. Meyer and S. Beiker, 93–102. London: Springer. Gordon, Ruthanna. 2009. “Learning from Fiction: Applications in Emerging Technologies.” Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society 29 (6): 470–475. https://doi.org/10.1177/0270467609349054. Green, Herdon. 1925. “Radio Controlled Automobile.” Radio News, 592. Hansson, Niklas. 2015. “‘Mobility-Things’ and Consumption: Conceptualizing Differently Mobile Families on the Move with Recent Purchases in Urban Space.” Consumption Markets & Culture 18 (1): 72–91. Hansson, Niklas, Jean-Sébastien Vayre, Helene Brembeck, and Michèle Lalanne. 2016. Life Phases, Mobility and Consumption. London: Routledge. Haraway, Donna. 2013. “SF: Science Fiction, Speculative Fabulation, String Figures, So Far.” Accessed April 27. https://adanewmedia.org/2013/11/ issue3-haraway/.

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Harman, Graham. 2009. Prince of Networks. Melbourne: re-press. Hodges, Graham R. 2007. Taxi! A Social History of the New York City Cabdriver. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Jain, Sarah S. 2006. “Violent Submission: Gendered Automobility.” Cultural Critique 61 (Fall): 186–214. Jasanoff, Sheila. 2004. States of Knowledge: The Co-production of Science and the Social Order. London and New York: Routledge. Jasanoff, Sheila, and Sang-Hyun Kim. 2009. “Containing the Atom: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and Nuclear Power in the United States and South Korea.” Minerva 47: 119–146. Jasanoff, Sheila, and Sang-Hyun Kim. 2015. Dreamscapes of Modernity. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Jensen, Ole B. 2013. Staging Mobilities. London: Routledge. Juncker, Jean-Claude. 2017. President Jucker’s State of the Union Speech. Brussels: European Commission. Keller, David H. 1935. “The Living Machine.” Wonder Stories 6 (12): 1465–1511. Kröger, Fabian. 2016. “Automated Driving in Its Social, Historical and Cultural Contexts.” In Autonomous Driving, edited by M. Maurer, J. C. Gerdes, B. Lenz, and H. Winner, 41–67. Berlin: Springer. Latour, Bruno. 1996. “On Actor-Network Theory: A Few Clarifications Plus More Than a Few Complications.” Soziale Welt 47: 369–381. Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-NetworkTheory. New York: Oxford University Press. Laurier, Erich, and Tim Dant. 2012. “What Else We Do While Driving: Towards the Driverless Car.” In Mobilities: New Perspectives on Transport and Society, edited by M. Grieco and J. Urry, 223–244. Farnham: Ashgate. Laurier, Eric, Hayden Lorimer, Barry Brown, Owain Jones, Oskar Juhlin, Allyson Noble, Mark Perry, Daniele Pica, Philippe Sormani, Ignaz Strebel, Laurel Swan, Alex S. Taylor, Laura Watts, and Alexandra Weilenmann. 2008. “Driving and ‘Passengering’: Notes on the Ordinary Organization of Car Travel.” Mobilities 3 (1): 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 17450100701797273. Massey, Doreen. 2005. For Space. London: Sage. Miller, Wayne G. 2015. Car Crazy: The Battle for Supremacy Between Ford and Old and the Dawn of the Automobile Age. Philadelphia: Perseus Books. Miller, Clark, and Ira Bennett. 2008. “Thinking Longer Term About Technology: Is There Value in Science-Fiction Inspired Approaches to Constructing Futures?” Science and Public Policy 35 (8): 597–606. Pearce, Lynne. 2016. Drivetime: Literary Excursions in Automotive Consciousness. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

280  R. BRAUN Randell, Richard. 2018. “No Paradigm to Mobilize: The New Mobilities Paradigm Is Not a Paradigm.” Applied Mobilities: 1–18. https://doi.org/10. 1080/23800127.2018.1493063. Sheller, Mimi. 2004. “Mobile Publics: Beyond the Network Perspective.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22 (1): 39–52. Sheller, Mimi, and John Urry. 2000. “The City and the Car.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 24 (4): 737–757. Sheller, Mimi, and John Urry. 2006. “The New Mobilities Paradigm.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 38 (2): 207–226. https:// doi.org/10.1068/a37268. Sheller, Mimi, and John Urry. 2016. “Mobilizing the New Mobilities Paradigm.” Applied Mobilities 1 (1): 10–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/2380 0127.2016.1151216. Thomson, Judith J. 1985. “The Trolley Problem.” Yale Law Journal 94 (6): 1395–1415. Thrift, Nigel. 2008. Non-representational Theory. London: Routledge. Urry, John. 2000. Sociology Beyond Societies. London: Routledge. Urry, John. 2004. “The ‘System’ of Automobility.” Theory, Culture & Society 21 (4–5): 25–39. Urry, John. 2005. “The Complexity Turn.” Theory, Culture & Society 22 (5): 1–14. Urry, John. 2006. “Inhabiting the Car.” Sociological Review 54 (1): 17–31. Urry, John. 2008. “Mobilities and Social Theory.” In The New Blackwell Companion to Social Theory, edited by B. S. Turner, 475–495. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Walker-Smith, Brian. 2015. “Regulation and the Risk of Inaction.” In Autonomes Fahren: Technische, rechtliche und gesellschaftliche Aspekte, edited by M. Maurer, J. C. Gerdes, B. Lenz, and H. Winner, 593–609. Berlin: Springer.

CHAPTER 12

Science Fiction Cinema and the Road Movie: Case Studies in the Estranged Mobile Gaze Neil Archer

The protagonists of cinematic science fiction have often been embattled ones. As recent examples of the form suggest, they are also frequently grappling with the rigours of the road. In Children of Men (2006), the protagonist, Theo, embarks on a circuitous journey through the English south-east, finding his way eventually to the now militarised town of Bexhill, in search of the activist group waiting to take charge of the planet’s first newborn child in over eighteen years. Elsewhere, in 28 Days Later (2002), four survivors from a bio-agent epidemic, one that has rendered the UK a zombie-strewn wasteland, flee London in a black cab, driving along mile after mile of empty motorway. In Monsters (2011), set several years after a crashed space probe scattered alien life over the US– Mexican borderland, two young Americans are forced to negotiate their way on foot through this so-called “Infected Zone” in order to reach home. The Road (2010), meanwhile, has its father-and-son protagonists wandering alone through an American coastal landscape rendered barren and infertile by an unspecified environmental catastrophe. Even in N. Archer (*)  Keele University, Keele, UK © The Author(s) 2019 M. Aguiar et al. (eds.), Mobilities, Literature, Culture, Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27072-8_12

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more overtly mainstream science fiction cinema such as War of the Worlds (2005), the familiar expectations of the genre frequently give way to images of wandering and the movement en masse of displaced peoples, within which we find an estranged father, Ray (played by Tom Cruise), striving to bring his two children from New Jersey to their mother’s family home in Boston. As I will discuss here, this meeting of the science fiction film and motifs of movement, and a particular reconfiguration of the road movie in science-fictional terms, represents an important aesthetic and ethical tendency in recent popular cinema. This chapter will consequently seek to identify what is at stake for mobilities research, and not just for the study of film, in this meeting of the two genres. My chapter develops some of the ideas already explored in a previous article, written as part of a special edition of Mobilities on “Mobilities and the Humanities” (Archer 2017). That particular essay responded to Peter Merriman and Lynne Pearce’s suggestion that arts-and-humanities’ methods, and the study of creative texts, could be fruitful forms of mobilities research. As Merriman and Pearce argue, it is not merely the traditional approaches of the social sciences that offer us a meaningful perspective on mobility. Rather, and with an important inflection, they note that “[t]he history of humanities is littered with lines of thinking, philosophical approaches, and complex ontological frameworks in which movement and mobility are understood in ‘alternate’ ways” (Merriman and Pearce 2017, 497). It is the significance of fiction film’s “alternate” ways of seeing that interest me in this chapter. As I argued in the earlier article, both film and social sciences scholars should be attentive to the ways creative fictions work to evoke or express both subjective and more general circumstances and experiences of (auto)mobility; especially as they can often elucidate complexities and contradictions of the mobile subject, in ways that more notionally objective and empirical approaches cannot. While this present essay focuses more broadly on the same subject of the road movie, it takes my earlier claims further. The previous essay focused on texts that were, at least, grounded in a viable sense of reallife plausibility (focusing, that is, on driving subjects and contexts mostly recognisable within contemporary experience). I argue here, by contrast, for the same relevance of the genre in the distinctively less “realist” framework of science fiction. This chapter, consequently, sets itself the challenge of embracing Merriman and Pearce’s ideas, through the discussion of a form often understood in terms of spectacle and futuristic

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imagination. Above all, the chapter draws on the sense that approaches to mobility from a humanities perspective “challenge singular configurations of what ‘the real’ is, was, or might be” (Merriman and Pearce 2017, 497). It is not surprising if, within the contexts of the early twenty-first century, the road movie should have become a privileged form through which we might discuss the varied politics, ethics, and representational possibilities of mobility. The emergence of the road movie as a cinematic genre—and more specifically, as an American one—can be understood in relation to the contemporary development of a transport infrastructure based around the automobile, coincident with the emergence of Hollywood cinema as a culturally dominant narrative form. John Urry has noted how the petroleum and automotive industries were effectively fused together at the heart of the USA’s industrial and economic system early in the last century; more pointedly, at the moment when General Motors “bought up US tramways in order to close them down,” and a wave of highway-building was initiated (Urry 2007, 114). This emergence of a type of “car-petroleum complex” in American society (Archer 2017, 512) coincided with the advanced rationalisation of car production (most famously, on the part of Henry Ford) and the subsequent affordability of the motor-car on a massive scale (Eyerman and Löfgren 1995, 56). The importance of the car as an almost given central aspect of the twentieth century therefore derives from a process of erasure and naturalisation on the part of industry itself. Technology in this respect “discloses human nature’s mode of dealing with nature” (Brereton 2005, 104). In order for the technology to make sense, for consumers to buy into the automobile myth and embrace the “commodified necessities demanded of the new industrialised world” (ibid.), any counter myth needs to be erased. Early prototypes of the road movie, films such as It Happened One Night (1934) or The Grapes of Wrath (1940), subsequently place the emphasis on motor vehicles, and the passage of the road itself, as conduits for social inclusion, connectedness, but above all social and economic mobility, even in the Great Depression contexts of both these films (Borden 2012, 18). From one perspective, the road movie, with some of its signifying motifs—the visual expanse of the road, the first-hand replication of a driver’s vision, travelling or panoramic shots, the music track sometime emanating, quasi-diegetically, from inside the vehicle itself—offers its

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own representation of twentieth-century time and space as shaped by, or even synonymous with, motorised transport. Sharing as they do the focal point of a wide screen, motorised mobility, in an inevitably overdetermined way, is informed by the invention and sensation of cinema itself. After all, the infant medium of the Lumière Brothers’ cinématographe, or of Thomas Edison’s kinetoscope, predicated their attractions on the lure not just of moving images, but images of things that move. These medium-defining kinetic possibilities of twentieth-century experience, and its particular fixation with automobility, give impetus to the cinema’s reiterative desire and ability to capture “the thrilling sensation of first-hand movement” (Mills 2006, 17; see also Archer 2016, 7–8). What then might we understand by the introduction of science-­ fictional elements into this cinematic framework, and what is at stake in introducing these? For some scholars, science-fictional inflections within the road movie suggest a response to extraordinary contemporary political circumstances, especially the contexts of forced mobility and the consequent imposition of borders. Discussing Le Temps du loup/ Time of the Wolf (2004), a road movie of sorts set in a vaguely-specified Europe, devastated by an uncertain environmental event, Aidan Power argues that the film epitomises a new form of science fiction cinema for a Europe experiencing critical change. Time of the Wolf, argues Power, exemplifies science fiction’s “propensity to reflect, exploit and comment on popular political and cultural anxieties, a propensity that is of particular salience at times of economic, social and political crisis” (2015, 60). Sheryl Vint, meanwhile (2016), considers Monsters in light of what she calls the “biopolitics of migration”: the way movement of economic migrants is constantly regulated or obstructed by the same powers (in Vint’s reading, the Global North) that simultaneously keep such “others” at bay while still exploiting them for their labour value. Neither of these approaches, though, is consistently specific about the aesthetics of science fiction as it is used in these films, nor how it is relevant in terms of representing mobility. Power’s suggestion, for instance, that a film like The Time of the Wolf has an analogical dimension in light of recent European contexts only goes halfway, avoiding the thorny question of why, here, if the contexts demand it, the more obviously pertinent form of contemporary realist drama is not employed. The choice of science fiction presents a theoretical problem, as by its own nature it largely insists upon modes of distance and deviation from actual worldly contexts. It might, if anything, be more logical to suggest that these

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films avoid a more significant engagement with their contemporary contexts of mobility, precisely by displacing them onto the often fantastical and hypothetical scenarios of science fiction’s generic contexts. The more pertinent question, in fact, is to ask what happens in cognitive, perceptual and mimetic terms within this generic meeting-point, and why this is important. I will come more specifically to the road movie below. Firstly, though, it will be useful to think about how recent science fiction cinema offers some perspectives on the contexts of mobility.

Cinema, Movement and Mimesis A significant aspect of the contemporary world picture and its mutually informing geopolitical contexts, and within the broader terms of global over-population, is that the notions of centre and periphery are contracting and collapsing to the point of non-distinction. This idea, and its implications for the narratives and aesthetics of the road movie, is central to much of the ecological and geopolitical thinking underpinning the various films under discussion here. As David Wood argues, the impacts of population shift, and impending ecological change, link both as cause and effect to what he calls the loss of “externality”: the gradual erasure of a space into which we can escape, or export what we do not need (2005, 172–173). The separation of “civilization” and “nature” that relied on this externality, and historically informed narratives of expansion, can no longer be relied on: there is no “out there” to go to; or at least, going out there involves a significant reappraisal of what such movement truly implies. Indeed, this loss of externality as a science-fictional conceit is a frequent basis for various dystopian science fiction movies since the early 1970s, all of which deal in some regards with the idea of a planet “used up” or rendered uninhabitable by environmental damage and/or overpopulation. We would include here the “post-nature” depictions of hermetically sterile or green-free environments in THX 1138 (1971), Silent Running (1972) and Soylent Green (1973), or the industrialised urban claustrophobia, catastrophe and promised “off-world colonies” of Blade Runner (1982) and Wall-E (2008). These films share an approach to their narrative subject matter most aptly described (by Robert Scholes) as “fabulation.” In their extended near-future tales, they are examples of a fiction that “offers us a world clearly and radically discontinuous from the one we know,” yet also one which “returns to confront that known

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world in some cognitive way” (Scholes 1975, 2). Scholes’ d ­efinition alludes to the possibility that the “discontinuous” element of the ­fiction—in this case, the hypothetical scenario of disaster—is already contained or implied within the contexts of the present. This reframing of the present has significant possibilities for the road movie, given that it is inherently a genre that looks backward, as much as it is propelled forward in vehicular terms. As Pat Brereton points out, the past, and in particular a form of “endless nostalgic desire” (2005, 102), is also central to many road movies’ romantic recourse to open roads and vistas; a solitude that is usually gendered as masculine, and reinforced aesthetically by its vision of “the whole world and all space [as] a vast homeless home” (ibid.). The generic connotations of the road movie inform its peculiarly paradoxical ecology, given that it is a largely nostalgic and Romantic genre constructed around a technology that is one of the planet’s greatest pollutants, and a key source of spatial congestion. As illustrated by the opening of the iconic road movie, Easy Rider (1969), where the motorbike-riding protagonists (shot by a fast-moving tracking camera), head out onto the open highway to the strains of Steppenwolf’s “Born To Be Wild”, the genre frequently associates—and in this audiovisual narrative synthesis celebrates—open movement and expansiveness as a cinematically-mediated wilderness. Getting (back) to this wilderness, then, becomes a key narrative and aesthetic theme in these films. At some level, therefore, this idea of an untrammeled and free space of “Nature,” or a wilderness, informs the imaginary of both science fiction and the road movie. This wilderness, especially in American culture and society (a more specific English context might be “the country”), has perennially been located as the spatial antithesis of urbanised modernity. This is a key idea in some of the formative texts of the American conservation and National Parks movement, such as the writings of John Muir or the landscape photographs of Ansel Adams (Garrard 2004, 66–69). This might underpin the presence of an overtly pre-modern or at least ex-urban landscape within any number of US road movies across the last fifty years, in which frequently harassed protagonists act out on the roads their “desire for an abstract form of spatial utopianism” (Brereton 2005, 119). As Greg Garrard points out, though, the “trouble” with this wilderness (using here William Cronon’s phrase [1990]) is the way it posits a “place of freedom” and “landscape of authenticity” (Cronon 1996, 80; quoted in Garrard 2004, 69–70) that are wrought by the same human civilising processes the ideology of wilderness decries. Man, or at least

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other humans, are often absent in the Romantic wilderness aesthetic. But this absence of the human is a contradiction, as it implies the absence of an observer, or of humankind’s ecological removal altogether. We cannot, in other words, take the human out of the wilderness, or out of Nature. They are constructed as part of a human imaginary, and as something witnessed by human eyes—or in cinema, and the road movie especially, by the observing camera, which sometimes occludes its necessary human operator, showing the world it captures as a seemingly vast and unpeopled space. This authentic space of Nature, moreover, is often inextricable from types of consumerism, the industrial basis of which is clouded over by being bundled up with forms of “wilderness experience” and the lifestyle options of an “ecological philosophy” (Garrard 2004, 71): mountain bikes, hang gliders, surfboards; also the leisure trails and hiking cultures that go with them. Garrard’s overview here implicitly draws on Raymond Williams’ reading, in The Country and the City, of the way English countryside is constructed through its binary relationship to modern urban centres and industrialisation. For Williams, this “country” is historically ideological insofar as it fulfils an imaginary function central to the interests of British imperialism. The English “home” is within these terms built on a network of commercial speculation and exploitation concealed by the very development of this “rural mode”: “a mode of play: an easy realisation of the old imagery of… field sports, fishing, and above all horses; often a marginal interest in conservation and ‘old country ways’” (1973, 282). It is not a huge leap from here to recognise how the road movie, with its formal capacity to efface its own industrial basis, and to create audio-visual relays between protagonist, viewpoint and viewer, has mediated this authentic wilderness or country experience. It does this in a virtual and emotionally powerful form for the benefit of proxy travellers, pursuing cinematic release from the rigours of urban life. What then, does the meeting of these two particular genres do to bring about new configurations of seeing, and of understanding mobility? Within the expectations of a chapter about science fiction, and within this section of the book focusing on the idea of “Future Mobilities,” my argument will inevitably touch on some of the more prognostic aspects of these films and their hypothetical narratives. Obviously the contribution of the motor vehicle to the planet’s environment more generally, what we have come to understand as the “Anthropocene,” is a significant one. To a degree the films under discussion here offer speculations

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on how human mobilities might adapt to contexts of drastic planetary change. But I suggest here that we understate their value if we merely see them as offering vaguely dystopian “what if?” scenarios—especially as this effectively lets the contemporary contexts of mobility off the hook, or at least leaves them unexamined. That the road movie is premised on a mythic construction of what is “natural” allows us to see the problem of the road movie as one of mimesis more specifically. The representation of mobility in the road movie, in other words, can work to deny its own impacts and implications, even to the extent of separating the automotive protagonist and implied viewer from the technological and physical contexts of both driving and of cinema. Crucially, though, the same kinds of naturalised mobile experiences that are problematic in the road movie are also instructive, revealing as they do some of the fantasies of mobility that are inherent to the automotive experience. The remainder of this chapter will focus on the way the science fiction road movie is a form that exposes and explores what we might call a form of (auto)mobile imaginary. My argument for a science-fictional approach both to the production and interpretation of the road movie consequently has two elements. On the one hand, such an approach, which offers what I am calling an “estranged” vision of the automotive experience via the road movie, provides in the same motion a critical approach to the idea of cinematic “realism” itself. It is perhaps useful to clarify here that, in this chapter, I am not arguing for particular kinds of reading strategies on our part, but rather for a strategic approach to genre filmmaking on the part of the films themselves. “Realism” in genre films, or what we might more accurately call their verisimilitude—literally, their appearance of truth—is in effect a product of generic verisimilitude: that which is plausible not necessarily by reference to real-world contexts, but within the familiar terms set by the genre itself. While a genre such as the musical, for example, overtly transgresses what we understand by the realistic in real-life experiential terms, a genre like the road movie, more (seemingly) rooted in familiar experience and vision, can more easily be taken for real. Genre films are nevertheless also cultural negotiations between text and audience. And while they come with a set of rules and expectations, it is one of the paradoxes of genre that the genre film, in order to distinguish itself from other films in the same genre, has to break with these expectations and do something different (Maltby 2003, 76). Successful

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innovation in genre is therefore organised around “a process of difference in repetition” (ibid.). At one level, then, the work on the part of these films to combine and, eventually, bring into conflict generic frameworks of expectation suggests a pragmatic approach to genre cinema more broadly; a strategy of differentiation within the field in order to stand out. This would only tell some of the story, though, as the reworking or undermining of expectations in these films, where their use of the road movie is concerned, works precisely to unsettle the more secure perspectives and assumptions we bring to such texts as viewers. With the exception of Children of Men director Alfonso Cuarón, whose companion-documentary The Possibility of Hope (2007), available on the Children of Men DVD, was a discussion-piece on over-population, climate change and the other varied challenges to twenty-first-century humanity, it is not totally clear whether the generic work in these films suggests an explicit authorial engagement with film form. My point here, though, is that the films perform this critical readjustment by default: unsettling the generic expectations of the road movie is, by its very nature, to call into question the “real” of mobile experience itself as viewed through film, along with the untenable fantasies of mobility that go with this. As I will explore, this is achieved through the “estranging” possibilities of the science fiction text, as it is brought to bear on the frameworks of the road movie.

Estrangement as Realism Rather than thinking about science fiction road movies simply as analogies for real-world contexts then, in the ways I outlined above, we can understand the uses of science fiction in films about mobility in terms of perceptual renewal and revision. Darko Suvin’s influential definition of science fiction in terms of “cognitive estrangement,” of narratives that work through constructing “an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment” (1979, 7–8), is suggestive here, in its emphasis on the disorienting or alienating potential of the form. The distinction here is that, in Suvin’s understanding, science fiction’s ethical and political qualities reside in its capacity not to create fabulous escapist worlds, but rather to challenge the ideological frameworks of realism in narratives. Realism traditionally speaking, for Suvin, is inadequate to encompass the extent of actual experience and representation. This explains his stipulation that science fiction is not a departure from

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realism in the sense of real world experience, but rather from the western aesthetic idea of mimesis: “the ideal [artistic] extreme of exact recreation of the author’s empirical environment” (1979, 4). Put differently, the idea that science fiction offers a merely different or imagined way of seeing underestimates the extent to which our given or “natural” modes of vision are already distorted by specific political and ideological contexts. Looking for example at the nascent forms of western travel writing, historically forged out of the traditions of imperialist expansion, Suvin identifies the ways early examples of the genre sought to domesticate experiences and manifestations that were alien to the writer-traveller’s cognitive and cultural field (1979, 4). Suvin touches on the way that early modern travel and its documenting established the dominantly Eurocentric linkage of exploration, eye-witnessing and empiricism. The natural philosophy and scientific rationalism of René Descartes and Francis Bacon would replace the “fecund Magna Mater” of Paleolithic times with a view of the world as one “reducible to an assemblage of parts functioning according to regular laws that men could, in principle, know in their entirety” (Garrard 2004, 61–62) (and as Greg Garrard specifies here, it would be men, not women; mimesis in this respect being linked to a worldview that is both colonialist and gendered). Thinking about the estranging possibilities of science fiction within the frameworks of the road movie suggests, then, a very pointed interference with film genre at the level of both semiotics and narrative syntax. Such an approach has an important critical capacity to open up and expose the mimetic strategies informing genre films such as the road movie. This is especially pertinent in the case of the latter, as historically the genre so often focuses on ideas of ethical and spatial liberty, for which the road acts at once in a metaphorical and literal narrative capacity (Laderman 2002). As a premise for the generic expectations of the road movie, this already requires us to position it within particular cultural and geographic contexts of power, and political or economic mobility—or at least a fantasy of it. In this idea, then, of science fiction’s generic interference of the road movie, there are two mutually reinforcing concerns at stake. On the one hand, we should understand how the road movie is perennially informed by the assumptions or fantasies of mobility on the part of (usually) First World, male protagonists. On the other hand, we need to gauge the viability or logic of such territorial and spatial frameworks in the twenty-first century. It is from these related

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contexts that the science fiction road movie aims to rethink the latter’s traditional mimetic basis: in this case, by rejecting the realist aesthetic that puts (hu)mankind at the mastering rational center of an empirical world to begin with. In arguing for the mimetic possibilities of the science-fiction road movie we initially, and inevitably, encounter the problem of specialeffects technologies: the types of post-production additions to the film image that are for many the aesthetic hallmarks of the science fiction genre, and not always in a positive sense. Critics of the genre, in some cases, see its technological capacities as a spectacular distraction from science fiction’s conceptual or fabulist possibilities (see, for example, Grant 1999). The distinction between a notionally photographic realism (sometimes called “indexical” representation) and the embellishments of cinematic special effects is, however, less pronounced than we might assume. Computer-generated imagery (CGI) technologies, while notionally suggesting a growing divide between the digital and the indexical, are increasingly used to simulate the effects of the photographic image. Longstanding processes of compositing such as “static and travelling mattes, back projection and rotoscoping,” frequently used to simulate an impression of realism, now have “digital equivalents” that create such impressions more effectively (Purse 2013, 4). This is not necessarily a form of digital deception, though. As Lisa Purse argues, to see such techniques as deceptive overlooks the point that cinema’s traditionally photographic basis has frequently been “hybrid” from the start (2013, 5). In effect, film has consistently imposed a technologically determined mode of vision upon a landscape that in turn signifies mainly in relation to this technology. Examples of the brand new cinématographe, such as Leaving Jerusalem by Train (1897), in which the camera is fixed to the rear of a moving locomotive, offer early indications of the way aspects of cinematic vision and perspective will be shaped by such literal travelling shots. Such shots realise in thrilling photographic form the new technologised modes of perception brought about, in the nineteenth century, by the train (see Schivelbusch 1977), and in the motorised century that soon followed it, by the automobile. But as this suggests, it is not a “natural” perception. Rather, it is one shaped by cultural practices, and therefore subject to revision; as we will now explore with detailed reference to the films in question.

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Children of Men These films, exemplifying a revisionary approach both to science fiction cinema and the road movie in the new century, are frequently at pains to highlight the extent to which motorised mobility is, in some respects, already organised cinematically. This is not always noted in discussions of the films, though. Plenty of commentators on Children of Men have identified the film’s signature use of long takes and composition in depth, where the camera perennially follows its cynical and disillusioned protagonist, while at the same time allowing consistent sight of what is going on, seemingly unnoticed or ignored, around or behind him. Such formal strategies work through a “disjuncture … between the image on the screen and the protagonist’s unconcern for the scene that obsesses the camera” (Chaudhary 2009, 82). Or alternately, Children of Men operates around an “aesthetics of intrusion” which involves “(re)focusing on the margins and peripheries” (Chaudhuri 2012, 197). However, the extent to which it is forms of public transport, or the motor vehicle itself, that play a constitutive role both in the production and refocusing of dominant space and power, has been overlooked. In Children of Men the camera is often ambiguously positioned; both as the potential means of accessing the marginal or peripheral aspects of its setting, but also as that which occludes it as the approximation of driver, passenger or commuter’s point of view (in a literal and figurative sense). As such, the motor car exemplifies the inherent paradoxes of this particular technology of moving and seeing, interposing barriers via the machinery of vision itself. The car and its screens in this sense embody what Jean Baudrillard sees as the “fundamental ambiguity” inherent to glass and the world it both reveals and contains. Such material offers “at once proximity and distance, intimacy and the refusal of intimacy, communication and non-communication” (Baudrillard 1996, 42). Within Baudrillard’s object world, “atmosphere,” the perception of which is offered by glass’s transparency—“the outside world, nature, landscape”—becomes in effect part of “the intimate or private realm” (1996, 43). “The whole world,” he in turn concludes, “becomes integrated as spectacle into the domestic universe” of the vehicle (1996, 44). We can see the whole “world” without ever needing to have contact with it. Kristin Ross summarises this inherent tension in her point that the car, but only in a problematic sense, “can compensate for the destruction it has created” (1995, 55), glossing over its own environmental impact

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through the panoramic, perceptual pleasures and smooth movement of driver and passenger perspective. The road movie frequently does the same by conflating driver and cinematic point of view. Children of Men is consequently strategic in its employment of the car as narrative and generic motif. The film’s driving scenes set up a context for our mobile consumption of the film’s landscape, which at once encourages us to take the driver’s point of view, while also drawing attention to this same “destruction” for which it is a contributor. The car in the film moves through a home-counties landscape filled with dank autumnal trees and muddied fields, charred with the pyres of still-smouldering slaughtered cattle. Cued to John Tavener’s score, such sequences offer a memory of the road movie’s history, even as a form of nostalgia. Children of Men flirts here ostentatiously with the iconography of a lost Nature, in an elegiac way. Yet the frequent return to an image of the moving car itself tacitly reminds us that such constructions, established as they are on the illusory notion of “externality,” are in effect part of the film’s underlying narrative problem. Motorised mobility is, then, consistently staged in the film in ambiguous and problematic terms. The catastrophe at the basis of the film— that the human race became infertile nearly twenty years previously, and is dying out—seems another way of representing a more incipient actual crisis, in the form of environmental damage and resource depletion (in this ageing and ailing world, people get by on rationing and makeand-do approaches to fuel and energy shortages). In the early London scenes, the aforementioned long takes, shot with depth of focus, show the protagonist Theo moving through a still-crowded city of pedestrians and traffic. But there are also tacit and specific allusions in the travelling sequences themselves to the ways in which the city’s “others” are a constant yet peripheral presence: whether these be in the form of the persistent governmental announcements playing on the bus, warning of the presence of “illegal immigrants,” or the vaguely undefined homeless groups glimpsed in the urban outskirts from the train. In this latter instance, escaping as he is from the proximities of the capital city, Theo heads into the countryside as a form of pastoral retreat; here, in the form of the forest home in which his old activist friend, Jasper, lives. While Jasper’s isolated house is in many respects a utopian ideal of sustainable living, with its organic vegetables and renewable energy sources, it is significantly protected from social contact by its concealed location (entrance to it involves moving a set of strategically placed roadside

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foliage). It is also heavily alarmed in the event of intrusion—by, we might assume, the same socially exempt and banished ex-urban dwellers that elsewhere people the film’s peripheral zones. Fleeing to Nature, as a site of retreat from the problem of urban living, is here a disavowed enactment of the very problem itself. As a means of getting away, the car or other motor vehicle is to this extent part of, and not merely a vehicle for, the same doubled, oscillating vision that defines the film’s rhetoric. The “naturalness” of the car as vehicle of narrative action, but also observation, is conveyed here through its very familiarity as a means of cinematic and narrative movement. It is easy to overlook the fact that Children of Men is itself structurally informed by a fairly archetypical quest structure, which has need of the motor vehicle to propel it. The car journey becomes an entirely “natural” means of reaching narrative goals; yet it is at this point that what we might call the critical generic work of Children of Men, the precise function of its semantic and syntactic practice, comes to a head. This is because any desire to comprehend the film generically implicates us by necessity in its own problematised aesthetic. Because the film’s narrative initiates a form of quest on the part of its protagonist, it also makes the car the apparently inevitable vehicle for its narrative journey. Once we engage with the film as a form of road movie, though, we are already complicit with the perspectival logic the film seeks to challenge. As I have already indicated, this is a perspective to which the film both alludes and to an extent encourages, while also insisting that we recognise the tensions between its mobile vision and its narrative and thematic contexts. This comes overtly into focus at the moment where the car’s protected vantage point, which is in effect a remote vantage point for the film itself, is literally intruded upon and collapsed. The long, unbroken sequence in which Theo, along with his ex-wife Julian and the pregnant girl, Kee, head into the Kent countryside to meet up with the rest of Julian’s activist group, focuses initially on the relatively free and relaxed environment of the car. The mobile camera, which only much later leaves the car’s interior, moves between the participants, eventually settling on a game Theo and Julian played when they were together, involving one blowing a table-tennis ball into the other’s open mouth. It is precisely at this moment when the film, for perhaps the one and only time, suspends its immediate dramatic and thematic concerns—an unexpected moment of levity, with the countryside beyond the window rolling past—that this mobile interior is infringed upon from outside. First, a burning car rolls

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down the hill and blocks their forward passage; immediately following this, a forest-dwelling gang rush out from the trees to give chase to the now reversing car, culminating in Julian’s fatal shooting by an armed pursuer on a motorbike. The timing and impact of this assault, given what precedes it, are strategic. The carefully composed shock effects of this sequence seem intended to jolt us from the earlier moment of ease into a position of renewed awareness, particularly as regards the fragile shell of the car and its illusory maintenance of privileged and protected vision. Yet in fact, the film’s constant preoccupation from its opening with vehicular screens has already alerted us to this possibility. On board buses and commuter trains, in this instance, the false transparency of glass is partly concealed, and hence exposed, by the metal grilles that cover them (Fig. 12.1); frail protection against violent intervention that, made to appear inevitable in the contexts of public transport, is nevertheless forgotten in the individualist and monadic cocoon of the automobile (Fig. 12.2). When Theo is travelling by train to his rendezvous with Jasper, for example, a hurled bottle shatters against one of these grilles. Yet the motivation for such protection in the motor car is never acknowledged—until, that is, this false sense of protection is brutally exposed in

Fig. 12.1  The illusory transparency of glass highlighted: screen grab from Children of Men (Strike Entertainment/Hit and Run Productions/Universal Studios, 2006)

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Fig. 12.2  The “cocoon” of the motor-car as illusory safe space: screen grab from Children of Men (Strike Entertainment/Hit and Run Productions/ Universal Studios, 2006)

the sequence described above. In terms of the film’s overarching rhetoric, then, and its reflexive critique of automobility, that which is on the other side of these screens cannot be reduced simply to a hostile other impinging on the sovereign space of the individual. Rather, the film establishes the car’s—and, by the same token, the road movie’s—illusory transparency of vision as that which both occludes and ideologically subtends the violent separation of self and other. Monsters As discussed earlier, the integration of the photographic and the digital in recent cinema can be seen as responding to the critique of mimesis offered by Suvin, for whom a nominal realism can only reiterate the given and assumed environment of the author or reader. Throughout Monsters (shot on location in Costa Rica, Guatemala, Mexico and the USA), footage of the cast’s movement through cities, rural highways and up-river is amended by digitally-composited details: road signs and warnings referring to the approaching Zone; a wall mural depicting the creatures across the security fence; the sight of passing military vehicles, as well as abandoned boats and crashed fighter jets (Figs. 12.3 and 12.4).

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Fig. 12.3  Photo-realistic CGI: digitally-inserted vehicles, in a screen grab from Monsters (Vertigo Films, 2010)

Fig. 12.4  Photo-realistic CGI: digitally-inserted road signs, in another screen grab from Monsters (Vertigo Films, 2010)

To return to a previous point, such post-production manipulations of the photographic image might be viewed as distractions, yet they fit here into the film’s wider concerns with documentation and perspective. This is especially pronounced, insofar as one of its two main protagonists, Andrew, is a dissolute, disaster-seeking American photojournalist, working in a Central American country for a US-based international

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magazine, called, in a significant allusion to European colonial history, New World. After being asked to escort back home a privileged American tourist, Sam (the magazine owner’s daughter), Andrew is subsequently robbed of their money and boat tickets out of the country, obliging the pair to travel through the alien Infected Zone between Mexico and the USA. Monsters in this way underlines the pair’s white, Euro-American normativity, as well as their generic associations with the road movie’s historically mismatched couples. Indeed, the pairing of cynical reporter and globe-trotting heiress, pitching them on the road of ordinary “folk,” directly replicates the plot structure of It Happened One Night (1934), in which a journalist and heiress travel cross-country by Greyhound bus and by hitch-hiking. If Frank Capra’s Depression-era film in some respects celebrates this idea of the road as a space of popular contact and rejuvenation (Archer 2016, 16–19), in Monsters’ twenty-first-century revision, it imposes on its protagonists some of the folk they would presumably prefer to avoid, given the lengths they go to not to take this particular route in order to get back to the haven of the US. Paradoxically, as a road movie, Monsters makes the key decision to withhold from its protagonists the means of motorised transport. Throughout all these films, in fact, the loss of the car is a significant narrative event: for Theo, in Children of Men, obliged eventually to enter Bexhill on a bus in the guise of an immigrant; or for Ray in War of the Worlds, whose vehicle is taken at gunpoint, forcing him and his children to go the rest of the way on foot. In these films, though, the moment when the generic vehicle of the road movie is abandoned is also the point at which the genre literally revises itself: the point at which the nominal narrative “crisis” gives way to the potential for new configurations of space and seeing. In the latter two films, this means leaving the monadic space of the motor car and voluntarily placing oneself within the same displaced and disavowed others from the other side of the screen. Theo, huddled in the bus, must literally go side by side with those same bodies and faces that, formerly, only made up the background of the scene or were glimpsed through glass. Ray, meanwhile, must walk alongside the hundreds of similarly displaced refugees. In Monsters, in a similar but slightly different way, the initial narrative compulsion to get from one point to a distant other as quickly as possible is gradually subjugated to an economy and aesthetic of drifting: here, in the form of travelling montages, and motivated and unmotivated pointof-view shots. These shots dwell on the sheer surface and (special) effects

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of the strangely hybrid world the film depicts. The difference of this world is evidenced not only through the direct or indirect impact of alien presence (wreckages and ruined buildings; sounds and sights of unidentifiable creatures; biological growths and mutations in the flora), but also the new “rewilding” and re-forestation of the now relatively untouched land. To this extent, in fact, this narrative site of “disaster,” generically speaking, constitutes in the film’s leisurely depiction a potential ecological alternative, or at least oppositional space, to the dominant landscape of industrial capitalism: the landscape notionally threatened in the film by the alien life forms (on rewilding, see Monbiot 2013). By necessity, though, the relatively untrammelled biological space both prescribed and permitted in Monsters is amoral and indifferent with regards to the concerns of the human. Inviting in its languorous tracking shots and montages the visual consumption of this space and its diversity, the film’s Infected Zone is what ecologists call a climax ecosystem: the steady state achieved as a culmination of plant and animal life evolving coterminously. While, for its own maintenance, such a system depends on modes of cooperation and a pragmatic sense of sustainability, such a steady system is hardly peaceful, including as it does predators for the maintenance of stability. Monsters in turn avoids the more obviously sentimental position it initially invites, by making its alien creatures at once victims and threat, especially when one attacks and kills all of the migrant convoy except Sam and Andrew, very visibly leaving a dead infant in its wake. Insofar as such events are merely the representation of a functioning non-anthropocentric ecosystem, Monsters consequently rethinks its cinematic “wilderness” in its literal sense as a site of “bewilderment” (Cronon 1996, 8); a term deriving from the old Anglo-Saxon wilddeoren, “where ‘deoren’ or beasts existed beyond the boundaries of cultivation” (Garrard 2004, 60). Such a place consequently challenges the anthropocentric construction of wilderness as “Nature,” illustrating the idea of a natural world operating beyond humankind’s purview and organisation. As indicated in both Children of Men and Monsters, then, the sciencefiction road movie aims to target and expose the viewer’s own presumed “empirical environment” (to return to Suvin’s terms), focusing on the construction of a “Natural” world in and through the films, and drawing attention to the “other” (people, spaces) that underlies their dominant representations. This accounts for the collapsing and blurring of apparent empirical vision with estrangement in these recent movies;

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especially as their political intent is to illustrate the connectivity of ­western capitalism, privilege, mobility and cinematic vision. The subtle readjustment of the present at work in the science fiction road movie goes even further, though, sometimes hypothesising imminent or immanent collapse of social and economic borders. These are the borders between, for example, Naomi Klein’s “Green Zones” of socio-economic privilege and those other spaces from which such enclaves demarcate themselves (Klein 2008). This is dramatised here by the physical loss of, or intrusion into, “secure” mobile spaces of the car or other individualist motor transport. 28 Days Later So far, though, something has been missing. As argued at the start of this chapter, analysing fictional representations of mobility is a tactic both for challenging and articulating what we understand by the “real” of the (auto)mobile experience. Up to this point our discussion has focused on what we might call the repressed of the driving experience, in terms of the contact with other mobile bodies and the exterior of the motor vehicle. Cinematic estrangement is in turn a mode of bringing this repressed real to light. Inasmuch as it does this, films like Children of Men or Monsters appear to take a didactic, or even punitive approach to their mobile subjects, inscribing in effect an ethics of mobility. Motorised mobility, such films seem to imply, and the individualist fantasies of mobility underpinning it, can only be a problem that requires exposing. Is it possible, though, to turn this around in any way? What if, for instance, estrangement could be used in the road movie to explore similarly repressed, but ethically very distinct circumstances underpinning automobility—in this case, the possibility that driving is not the individualist experience we might suspect, but is actually shaped, at a profound level, by the need for contact? As noted above, Children of Men draws on a nostalgic, lamented sense of lost Nature which is deployed to a melancholy yet also ironic effect, as Theo’s car moves through a polluted, disease-ridden countryside. The earlier 28 Days Later takes a similar approach, in its extended sequence of the group’s flight from a London overridden by plague. Here, the long, sustained shots of the solitary car moving along an otherwise deserted motorway (Fig. 12.5), in a landscape replete with the now useless markers of modernity (pylons, power stations and distant

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Fig. 12.5  The uncanny nature of “fantasy” automotive space: screen grab from 28 Days Later (DNA Films/UK Film Council/Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2002)

conurbations), is accompanied on the soundtrack by plaintive musical cues: Charles Gounod’s “Ave Maria,” Brian Eno’s “An Ending (Ascent)” and an excerpt from Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem in D Minor. It is possible to see these juxtapositions as, again, ironic. It is the signature aesthetic tactic of 28 Days Later to offer shots of familiar landscapes—the motorway, public spaces such as hospitals or roadside service stations, touristic sites such as Westminster Bridge and Whitehall—that are defamiliarised by being emptied of human presence, apart from the sole figure of the protagonist, Jim, or the black cab dwarfed by its physical surroundings (Fig. 12.6). As has been noted in comments elsewhere on the film, the depiction of the city in 28 Days Later is uncanny, since it offers entirely familiar sights, yet ones evacuated of their human context and function: types of still-standing memorials for the city. These images in turn become, in the narrative contexts of the film, cognitively disorienting and intolerable spaces, as our perception of them strives literally to re-cognise what was previously known and understood as inhabited and populated. While these analyses focus on urban contexts, they do not always identify some of the more paradoxical aspects of the film, especially in terms of its expression of mobility. As we have seen at length, the “other” of the road movie is historically the genre’s problem, the

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Fig. 12.6  Public space stripped of its purpose: screen grab from 28 Days Later (DNA Films/UK Film Council/Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2002)

external presence that is so frequently rejected or disavowed, either by being positioned behind a windscreen, or rendered absent altogether. The solitary mobile protagonist therefore becomes the preeminent figure of the road movie, which then deploys its image of the motorbike or motorcar moving freely through unpopulated highways. This, of course, is exactly what is offered by 28 Days Later. Counter-intuitively, then, what is so potently expressed in this dystopian film is actually a realised fantasy of automobility, in which all the supposedly ideal conditions for free automotive movement are established. Here, then, through narrative context, the fantasy of solitary mobility converts into nightmare. The plaintive nature of the music track underscores a lament for what is lost within this scenario, as much as it might also, in an eerie way, evoke its beauty. The shots of the car moving down an endless, empty road elicit a nostalgia, but this is not a nostalgia for any lost pastoral moment. Rather, it is a nostalgia for modernity itself, and crucially, for the appearance of other people whose presence would, in fact, alleviate the intolerable sense of estrangement. Such shots have in fact become a signature of various recent films and other narratives exploring mobility in these quasi-apocalyptic environments. We see these in the opening episode of the long-running and itinerant zombie series The Walking Dead (AMC, 2010–), in which

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the protagonist Rick Grimes rides a horse down a vacant highway, the gleaming but now de-humanised Atlanta skyline looming in the distance. We also see them in The Road, which frequently takes in panoramic long shots of useless power and telecommunications infrastructures, or of highway systems rendered merely decorative backdrop in a post-car world. We could say that these images summon up, again in a rhetorical fashion, the violence of a consumerist and petroleum-based economy that formed the landscapes they depict: the human world estranged to the point of a post-human abstraction. Yet this would also overlook how such images draw for their cognitive and, in turn, emotional impact on the image of the everyday itself. The banal sights of quotidian mobility are what our automotive and fictional fantasies frequently deny: consequently, at the point when the quotidian and banal become irretrievably lost, they may suddenly resurface as the lamented object of desire. It is in this sense, then, that the (science-)fictional forms of the contemporary road movie can offer meaningful perspectives on the everyday contexts of mobility. If the shot of the solitary motor vehicle on an expansive highway has become a stereotypical image for the ecstatic flights of the road movie, it has returned in more recent circumstances to signify what this same scenario represses. We find, though, that this is not necessarily the ecological or social violence of mobility as an individualistic act. Fantasy needs to be understood in terms of its actual contexts. It might be instinctive to suggest that the scenes of untrammelled liberty afforded by the road movie are representations of what the everyday (auto)mobile subject thinks that they really want. This overlooks the fact, though, that these fantasies emerge from a context, as we have seen, in which there is no “externality,” and in which space and absence of contact are impossible. The fantasy is in this sense inversely proportionate to the contexts from which it emerges in cinematic form. What a film like 28 Days Later consequently teases out is the idea that this contact with other vehicles, and other bodies, is a vital part of mobile experience, even if partly as the basis for automotive daydreams of liberty (for more on this idea, see Pearce [2016, 156–210]). These daydreams have in turn become the stuff of fictional automobility, but taken to their actual and logical end-point they would become unbearable. The road-movie aesthetic can in this respect explore, in a searching way, the underlying ethics of mobility; though as I suggest here, it does this best through incorporating the estranged and estranging visions of science fiction.

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Conclusions As the ecocritic Timothy Clark has asked about the Anthropocene (2015), how are we meaningfully to represent this phase of planetary and environmental development, where human life and action have transformed the Earth’s ecosystem? If getting in a car and driving ­somewhere is only further contributing to environmental conditions it helped create—pollution, congestion, climate change—while also, ironically, ­ reproducing the human-centred myth of wilderness, what are cultural efforts to break this bind supposed to do? As I was writing about the long driving sequence in Children of Men, analysed above, I found myself struggling to find words to describe the image of the landscape beyond the window. When I finally settled on writing “with the countryside… rolling past,” I realised straightaway that I had myself fallen into a mimetic trap. It is, after all, the car that is ­moving, not the landscape. While the Earth moves through space, the landscape does not move in relation to the motor vehicle. Yet the nature of vehicular perception, simulated in the aesthetics of the road movie, suggests in an illusory way that it does, as if its own unfurling panorama or multi-faceted blur was happening purely for our mobile benefit. How, then, might representations of mobility confront this? Clark’s suggestion is that art-works attempting to engage critically with the effects of anthropocentric activity and culture need to find new forms to express them: one such possibility being the attempt to evoke “a nonhuman or inhuman vision of phenomena” (2015, 185). It has been one of the main points of this chapter that, traditionally at least, the road movie offers an impossible, or contradictory, form of representation, frequently disavowing in its very form the contexts and consequences— environmental, ideological—it has generated and fostered. Yet the more “estranging” formal and ecocritical approach to the genre I have looked at here, both in terms of film-making approaches and our own reading strategies, may go some way towards forging a different route. As I have argued, this hybrid of the road movie with the aesthetics of science fiction is far from the escapist or removed treatment of mobility it might otherwise suggest. Once we establish the limits of both mobile vision and cinematic representation, and identify that human-centric realism does not monopolise the myriad ways of representing the world, we can make headway in rethinking both the imaginary of mobility and its filmic aesthetics. The renewal of perception offered by these films is a

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significant move in the efforts to undermine residual assumptions about mobility, which are themselves underpinned by dominant cinematic representations. In turn, they open up new and vital forms of cinematic encounter for an era increasingly defined by proximity, inter-connectivity and the correlative sense of global responsibility. In this way, they also offer a road map for new political and ethical possibilities for humanities studies, and its significance as a form of mobilities research.

References Archer, Neil. 2016. The Road Movie: In Search of Meaning. London: Wallflower. Archer, Neil. 2017. “Genre on the Road: The Road Movie as Automobilities Research.” Mobilities 12 (4): 509–519. Baudrillard, Jean. 1996. The System of Objects. Translated by James Benedict. London and New York: Verso. Borden, Iain. 2012. Drive. London: Reaktion. Brereton, Pat. 2005. Hollywood Utopia: Ecology in Contemporary American Cinema. Bristol: Intellect. Chaudhary, Zahid R. 2009. “Humanity Adrift: Race, Materiality, and Allegory in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men.” Camera Obscura 24 (3): 73–109. Chaudhuri, Shohini. 2012. “Unpeople: Postcolonial Reflections on Terror, Torture and Detention in Children of Men.” In Postcolonial Cinema Studies, edited by Sandra Ponzanesi and Marguerite Waller, 191–204. London and New York: Routledge. Clark, Timothy. 2015. Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Cronon, William. 1996. “The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” Environmental History 1 (1): 7–28. Eyerman, Ron, and Otar Löfgren. 1995. “Romancing the Road: Road Movies and Images of Mobility.” Theory, Culture and Society 12 (1): 53–79. Garrard, Greg. 2004. Ecocriticism. London and New York: Routledge. Grant, Barry Keith. 1999. “Sensuous Elaboration: Reason and the Visible in the Science Fiction Film.” In Alien Zone II, edited by Annette Kuhn, 16–30. London and New York: Verso. Klein, Naomi. 2008. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. London: Penguin Books. Laderman, David. 2002. Driving Visions: Exploring the Road Movie. Austin: University of Texas Press. Maltby, Richard. 2003. Hollywood Cinema. Malden: Blackwell. Merriman, Peter, and Lynne Pearce. 2017. “Mobility and the Humanities.” Mobilities 12 (4): 493–508.

306  N. ARCHER Mills, Katie. 2006. The Road Story and the Rebel: Moving Through Film, Fiction, and Television. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Monbiot, George. 2013. Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life. London: Penguin Books. Pearce, Lynne. 2016. Drivetime: Literary Excursions in Automotive Consciousness. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Power, Aidan. 2015. “Awakening from the European Dream: Eurimages and the Funding of Dystopia.” Film Studies 13: 58–72. Purse, Lisa. 2013. Digital Imaging in Popular Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Ross, Kristin. 1995. Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture. Cambridge: MIT Press. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. 1977. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century. Oakland: University of California Press. Scholes, Robert. 1975. Structural Fabulation: An Essay on the Fiction of the Future. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press. Suvin, Darko. 1979. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale University Press. Urry, John. 2007. Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity Press. Vint, Sherryl. 2016. “Biopolitics and War on Terror in World War Z and Monsters.” In Endangering Science Fiction Film, edited by Sean Redmond and Leon Marvell, 66–79. London and New York: Routledge. Williams, Raymond. 1973. The Country and the City. London: Hogarth Press. Wood, David. 2005. The Step Back: Ethics and Politics After Deconstruction. Albany: SUNY Press.

Index

A acceleration, 244, 245, 254 accessibility, 192 actor network theory (ANT), 8, 9, 260. See also Latour, Bruno; Law, John Adams, Ansel, 286 Adey, Peter, 7, 12, 17, 20, 118, 135, 139, 140, 192, 193, 201 aesthetics, 15, 20, 45, 214, 215, 229, 284, 285, 304. See also kinaesthetic affect, 13, 88–97, 99, 101–104, 106, 108, 109, 122, 140, 153 affective brutality, 89, 91, 93, 96, 100–102, 108. See also death tourism affordance, 16, 144, 145, 147 Africa, 18, 38 African, 3, 18, 19, 41–44, 51, 218 Agamben, Giorgio, 194, 221, 230 agency, 9, 15, 20, 92, 124, 128, 129, 131–135, 158, 166, 190,

194–197, 205, 207, 208, 219, 222, 242, 272 Aguiar, Marian, 3, 6, 11, 18, 19, 39 Aguirre, Robert, 19 Ahmad, Attiya, 207 Ahmed, Sara, 47, 57, 91, 105, 106 airspace, 11 air travel, 2, 48. See also flying Aldred, Rachel, 43, 57 Algeria, 223–225, 230 Algerian, 219, 223–225, 227 Alissa, Reem, 196 Allen-Collinson, Jacquelyn, 165. See also Hockey, John Alrefai, Taleb, 191, 195–197, 199, 203, 205–208 Althusser, Louis, 23, 270, 271 Alvarez, David, 47 Ambrose, Kathryn, 154 American, 1, 11–13, 18, 57, 65–71, 73, 76–78, 80–84, 91, 94, 96, 97, 101, 102, 104, 106–108, 174, 262, 281, 283, 286, 297,

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 M. Aguiar et al. (eds.), Mobilities, Literature, Culture, Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27072-8

307

308  Index 298. See also United States of America (USA) Amin, Galal, 196 anarchy, 70, 174. See also running gentle, 174, 175 Anderson, Ben, 92 Anthropocene, 287, 304 apartheid, 12, 19, 35–37, 40–44, 46–49, 51, 55–57 apocalypse, 24. See also post-apocalyptic Appel, Alfred, 67, 69–71, 74, 77–79 Arab Gulf States, 20 Archer, Neil, 22, 24, 25, 282–284, 298 Armstrong, Tim, 116 art, 167. See also installation; running; Situationist International; Walking Artists Network artistic interventions, 217 live, 164, 168 participant, 164 artist, 16, 70, 78, 82, 163, 164, 168, 181, 240 as mobile maker, 164 Asia, 18 Asian, 2, 18 Asimov, Isaac, 23, 261, 265–268, 271, 273, 276 attentiveness, 16, 116, 119–122, 124, 126–129, 131–135, 159. See also Forster, E.M. Augé, Marc, 81, 240, 241, 248 Auslander, Shalom, 13, 87–89, 97–101, 108 Austin, Mitchell, 165 automobility, 3, 7–9, 19, 23–25, 130, 135, 246, 247, 265, 268–271, 273, 275, 276, 284, 296, 300, 302, 303. See also cars; cycling; driving; post-automobility; running; walking

American, 19 autonomous vehicles (AVs), 9, 10, 23, 261, 263, 265, 266, 271, 274, 275. See also driverless cars B Babar, Zahra, 190, 191, 193, 194 Baker, Beth, 140 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 76, 146, 149, 253 Bal, Mieke, 145–147 Bann, Stephen, 177. See also Burgin, Victor; Lent, Michael Barnard, Rita, 37 Baudrillard, Jean, 81, 116, 117, 119, 129, 292 Bauman, Zygmunt, 212, 273 Beaumont, Matthew, 55 Beech, John, 109 Benjamin, Walter, 19, 176 Bennett, Ira, 260, 261. See also Miller, Clark Benyamin, 189, 191, 195, 196, 199, 205–207 Bergson, Henri, 6, 118 Bergvall, Caroline, 20, 213–216, 219 Bernard-Donals, Michael, 100, 101 Bertoncello, Michele, 272. See also Wee, Dominik Bhabha, Homi, 6, 228 bicycles, 238, 243, 245, 250, 251. See also cycling; tricycles and scorchers, 247 as tandems, 237 cycle touring, 240, 243 Bijker, Wiebe E., 259, 269 biopolitics, 284. See also kinopolitics Bissell, David, 23, 124 Blackbourn, David, 154

Index

Black Consciousness Movement (BCM), 45, 56 Blais, Allison, 104. See also Rasic, Lynn boat, 21, 155, 156, 211–216, 220, 296, 298. See also left-to-die boat; migrant; refugee body aged, 176 digital, 221 fragile, 176 gendered, 15, 164, 175, 176 mobilised, 231 sensory, 15, 163 body parts, 10, 21, 103, 222, 223. See also organ(s) Böhm, Steffen, 269, 275 Bond, Emma, 15 Bonnefon, Jean-Francois, 267 Borden, Iain, 283 border, 21, 36, 105, 190, 212–222, 224–231, 284, 300 border studies, 21 Bourdieu, Pierre, 271 Bowen, Elizabeth, 8 Bowlby, Rachel, 70 Bradshaw, David, 116, 118 Bramble, Dennis M., 175. See also Lieberman, Daniel E. Braun, Robert, 10, 22–25, 266 Brereton, Pat, 283, 286 Breuer, Miles J., 261, 263 Brigham, Anne, 82 Britain, 11, 18, 37, 38, 237 British, 3, 5, 6, 18, 245, 287 Brown, Bill, 9 Buehler, Ralph, 275 Burgess, Miranda, 150 Burgin, Victor, 177. See also Bann, Stephen; Lent, Michael Burnett, John, 122 Büscher, Monika, 163, 166–168, 174, 181 Butler, Judith, 91, 98, 102

  309

C camera techniques, 24, 172, 272, 286, 287, 291, 292, 294 Canclini, Nestor Garcia, 6 Canzler, Weert, 259, 272. See also Knie, Andreas capitalism, 37, 299, 300 Cardiff, Janet, 164 carriage (horse-drawn), 41, 154– 157, 243, 250. See also coach (horse-drawn); Goethe, Johann Wolfgang cabriolet, 150 dog cart, 243 cars, 7–9, 12, 19, 23–25, 71, 76, 78, 80, 83, 117, 120, 122, 127–130, 135, 147, 195, 202–204, 246, 247, 250, 252, 253, 260–276, 283, 292–296, 298, 300, 302, 304. See also automobility; driverless cars car-system, 9, 262, 270. See also Urry, John Castells, Manuel, 272 Cavaliero, Glen, 118 Chandler, Raymond, 70 Chaudhary, Zahid R., 292 Chaudhuri, Shohini, 292 Cheah, Pheng, 221 children’s literature, 4. See also Murray, Lesley; Overall, Sonia Chilvers, Ian, 83. See also GlavesSmith, John Choi, Yoonjoung, 253 Christopher, A.J., 41, 42 chronotope, 76, 146, 149. See also Bakhtin, Mikhail cinema, 77, 282, 284–289, 291, 292, 296. See also camera techniques; film; road movie Hollywood cinema, 283 cities, 12, 17, 35, 36, 39–44, 46, 47, 49, 53, 54, 69, 147, 154,

310  Index 164–168, 170–172, 175, 177– 179, 181, 198, 205, 248, 262, 276, 287, 293, 296, 301. See also urban mobilities citizenship, 11, 21, 212, 215, 217–223, 225–227, 231. See also nation civilisation, 75, 286 Clark, Christopher, 154 Clark, Laurie Beth, 93 Clark, Timothy, 304 Clarsen, Georgine, 6 class, 12, 15, 51, 67, 69, 77, 115, 192, 198, 205, 221, 222, 241 Clifford, James, 18 close reading, 25 Clough, Patricia T., 91 coach (horse-drawn), 46, 49, 51–54, 241, 242, 250, 252. See also carriage (horse-drawn); Goethe, Johann Wolfgang coach journeys, 242 Cochoy, Frank, 276 Cohen, Glenn, 226 Cohen, Maurice J., 259, 266 Coleborne, Catharine, 6 Collins, Francis Leo, 191 colonial, 3, 11, 18, 19, 39, 224, 226, 298 Comaroff, Jean, 56 Comaroff, John L., 56 commodification as ecstasy, 89 of memory, 89, 90, 92, 94, 101 commute, 35, 37, 40, 43, 44, 47, 48, 52, 53, 55 commuter, 3, 12, 19, 36, 42–44, 47, 48, 51–55, 166, 292, 295 commuting, 36, 43, 47, 48, 51, 52, 146 Conrad, Joseph, 252 consciousness, 10, 11, 38, 45, 55, 90, 94, 97, 122, 176, 270, 273

consumption, 7, 88, 99, 177–179, 192, 206, 262, 265, 293, 299 Cook, Simon, 165. See also Shaw, Jon; Simpson, Paul cosmopolitanism, 18, 129 courtship, 23, 25 Crary, Jonathan, 126 Cresswell, Tim, 4, 5, 10, 11, 14, 15, 17, 40, 140, 193, 216, 274, 275. See also Uteng, Tana Priya Cronon, William, 286, 299 Crystal, Jill, 194 Cuarón, Alfonso, 289 culture, 2, 9, 10, 13, 18, 19, 24, 25, 36, 46, 48, 65–68, 70–72, 77, 78, 91, 97, 116, 139, 140, 142, 194, 203, 247, 262, 265, 267, 268, 287, 304 American, 88, 90, 94, 98, 99, 104, 106, 108, 286 counter-, 248 cycling, 23, 25, 26, 237, 239, 241–245, 247–254. See also bicycles as learning process, 239 D Danius, Sara, 116 Dant, Tim, 9, 163, 259, 260, 262 Daoism, 167, 171, 181 Darby, David, 153 Davenport, T.R.H., 42 Davis, Clarence Baldwin, 39 death tourism, 13, 88, 89, 92, 93, 95, 96, 100, 107, 108. See also tourism Debord, Guy, 43, 171, 177 de Certeau, Michel, 7, 19, 43 decolonisation, 219, 225, 226 degeneration, 239 Deleuze, Gilles, 6, 9, 91. See also Guattari, Felix

Index

  311

Dennis, Kingsley, 7. See also Urry, John dérive, 171. See also Debord, Guy; running Derrida, Jacques, 242 Despotopoulou, Anna, 55 détournement, 172, 175, 179 diaspora, 17–19, 166 Diclemente, Jonathan, 266 distance, 43, 56, 132, 145, 146, 148, 149, 151, 153–156, 159, 272, 274, 275, 284, 292. See also proximity distributed consciousness, 9. See also posthumanism Doss, Erica, 87–89, 94, 96, 102, 104, 106 Doughty, Karolina, 140, 144. See also Murray, Lesley Dresch, Paul, 194 driver-car, 9. See also Dant, Tim driverless cars, 260, 261, 263, 265. See also autonomous vehicles (AVs) driving, 7, 71, 72, 123, 127, 165, 204, 227, 262, 267, 269, 273, 276, 281, 282, 288, 293, 300, 304 Dubow, Saul, 40, 42 dwelling, 18, 118, 159, 215, 268. See also dwelling-in-travel dwelling-in-travel, 18 Dwork, Deborah, 92. See also Van Pelt, Jan dystopia, 22–24, 120, 263, 271, 285, 288, 302. See also utopia

Elgot, Jessica, 220 Elliott, Anthony, 5, 9. See also Urry, John Elsheshtawy, Yasser, 196 embodied practices, 117, 119, 140, 141, 144, 153, 154, 157–159. See also mobility(ies), embodied emotional geographies, 15, 47 Empire, 17–19, 142, 148, 153, 154, 156 environment, 22, 26, 41, 69, 83, 116, 117, 119, 124, 126, 130, 131, 149, 158, 171, 189, 195, 200, 203, 241, 246–249, 251, 253, 254, 263–267, 281, 284, 285, 287, 289, 290, 292–294, 296, 299, 302, 304 environmental disaster, 24. See also Anthropocene; post-apocalyptic; road movie Erll, Astrid, 97 estrangement (visual), 247, 289, 299, 300, 302. See also film; perception Europe, 3, 5, 10, 18, 38, 68, 78, 81, 211, 220, 266, 272, 275–277, 284 European, 6, 18, 35, 41, 42, 70, 211, 213, 272, 275, 276, 284, 298 European Commission (EU), 260, 272, 275 extended mobile space, 9. See also Edensor, Tim Eyerman, Ron, 283. See also Löfgren, Otar

E Edensor, Tim, 9, 11, 43, 47, 146, 147, 241 eighteenth century, 150 elegy, 293. See also genre

F fabulation, 285. See also narration Fanon, Frantz, 39, 41, 43 fantasy, 24, 26, 75, 249, 271, 274, 285, 288, 290, 301–303

312  Index Featherstone, Mike, 269. See also Thrift, Nigel; Urry, John Felski, Rita, 141–144, 153, 158, 159 film, 7, 11, 12, 22, 24, 65, 67, 77, 78, 140, 143, 159, 164, 168, 263, 274, 282–304. See also cinema; estrangement (visual); genre adaptation, 66 Finch, Jason, 118 flânerie, 244 flows, 10, 17, 21, 40, 151, 159, 165, 171, 174, 190, 193, 195, 196, 199, 219, 220, 250, 272 Floyd, T.B., 41 flying, 7, 157, 165, 200. See also air travel focalisation, 141, 145, 146, 148–151, 155–157 Fontane, Theodor, 16, 141–143, 147, 153–159 Foot, Philippa, 267 Ford, Henry, 283 Forster, E.M., 16, 17, 115, 116, 118– 122, 124, 125, 130, 132–135, 250 Fortier, Anne-Marie, 192, 193 Foucault, Michel, 77, 81, 269, 271 Frank, Robert, 79 Fraser, Benjamin, 37 freedom, 7, 11, 13, 21, 25, 46, 50, 51, 66, 76, 124, 134, 140, 191, 195, 200, 205, 225, 229, 286 Freeman, Lindsey A., 92 Freuh, Jamie, 40, 41 Furness, Zack, 246, 247 future(s), 6, 13, 21–26, 56, 151, 212–215, 219, 222, 224–231, 259–261, 263, 264, 266, 268–272, 275–277, 287

G Gardner, Andrew M., 190–192, 194, 197, 207. See also Nagy, Sharon Garrard, Greg, 286, 287, 290, 299 Garrington, Abbie, 116 gaze, 52, 93, 95, 97, 99, 175, 197, 214, 246. See also film mobile, 281 Geels, Frank W., 275 gender, 12, 15, 53, 54, 94, 104, 163–166, 175, 176, 192, 267, 268, 275, 286, 290 Genette, Gérard, 145, 147 genocide, 93. See also war genre, 22, 36, 37, 46, 65, 69, 103, 147, 260, 261, 263, 282, 283, 286–291, 298, 301, 304. See also elegy; film; pastoral; road movie; science fiction geocriticism, 4 geography, 1–5, 8, 9, 14, 39, 55, 100, 105, 195, 199, 240, 249, 253 geohumanities, 4 geopolitics, 4, 17, 21, 212, 223, 285 German, 16, 141, 142, 147, 153, 154, 156 Germany, 155, 222 Gibson, William, 178 Gilroy, Paul, 18 Glaves-Smith, John, 83. See also Chilvers, Ian globalisation, 191, 205 Global North, 17, 40, 214, 218, 220, 221, 223, 225, 284 Global South, 17, 19, 40, 213, 220, 221, 223, 227, 231 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 16, 141, 142, 147–150, 152, 159 Goodall, Noah J., 267 Gordon, Ruthanna, 260 Gqola, Pumla Dineo, 45, 46, 53

Index

von Graevenitz, Gerhart, 153, 158 Grant, Barry Keith, 291 Green, Herndon, 262 Greenblatt, Stephen, 142 Green-Simms, Lindsey B., 19 Gregg, Melissa, 91. See also Seigworth, Gregory J. Grewal, Inderpal, 19. See also Kaplan, Caren grievability, 91. See also Butler, Judith Gros, Frederic, 131 Gruber Garvey, Ellen, 241 Guattari, Felix, 6, 9, 91. See also Deleuze, Gilles Guelke, Adrian, 40–42 Gunne, Sorcha, 53 Gwala, Mafika, 46 H Hannam, Kevin, 4, 10, 12, 81, 82, 92, 215, 217. See also Mostafanezhad, Mary; Rickly, Jillian Hansard, John, 8 Hansson, Niklas, 260, 272, 276 Haraway, Donna, 260 Harber, Jesse, 41, 43 Harman, Graham, 276 Hartelius, Johanna, 108 Hasian, Marouf, Jr., 93 Hatt, Michael, 116. See also O’Neill, Morna Hayles, Katherine, 9 Highway, 66, 72, 77, 202, 286, 296, 302, 303. See also roads American, 69, 81 Hirsch, Marianne, 89, 92, 93, 99 historical geography, 44 Hitchcock, Alfred, 70 Hitchhiking, 72 Hochstadt, Steve, 153, 154

  313

Hockey, John, 165. See also AllenCollinson, Jacquelyn Hodges, Graham R., 262 Holocaust museum, 100, 101. See also museums Hopper, Edward, 82, 83 hospitality, 67, 69, 150 hotel, 42, 70, 71, 73, 75, 78, 81, 82, 84, 243 Hsieh, Tehching, 164 Hulme, Peter, 18. See also Youngs, Tim humanity, 7, 127, 134, 217, 219, 263, 289 Hutcheon, Linda, 98, 108 I Ibrahim, Saad Eddin, 196 Ideological State Apparatus (ISAs), 23, 270, 271. See also Althusser, Louis ideology, 13, 14, 40, 41, 51, 270, 286 Ignatieff, Michael, 220, 221 imagination, 7, 13, 25, 39, 77, 148, 153, 167, 179, 181, 198, 226, 228, 231, 266, 268, 269, 274, 283 imagined community, 37. See also Anderson, Ben imperial, 118 India, 11, 18, 38, 204, 206 Indian, 41, 198, 204, 205 Indochina, 19 industrialisation, 39, 153, 287 installation, 164, 168. See also art integrated transport, 24 intentionality, 89, 90, 94–97, 100, 104, 105, 108, 109 interruptions, 250, 254, 272 irony, 87, 98, 100, 101, 154, 200, 202, 268

314  Index J Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 148 Jain, Sarah S., 267 Jakle, John A., 67, 71, 76. See also Rogers, Jefferson S.; Sculle, Keith A. Jameson, Fredric, 67, 70, 71, 116– 118, 131 Jasanoff, Sheila, 259, 261, 268, 269. See also Kim, Sang-Hyun Jeffries, Matthew, 154 Jensen, Ole B., 93, 276 Jones, Megan, 37, 55 Juncker, Jean-Claude, 275 K Kafāla system, 20, 21, 193, 197, 199, 206 Kanna, Ahmed, 194, 207 Kaplan, Caren, 6, 19, 57. See also Grewal, Inderpal Kathiravelu, Laavanya, 194, 198 Keightley, Emily, 140. See also Reading, Anna Keller, David, 23 Kendall, David, 195, 203 Kennard, Mary E., 239, 240 Kern, Stephen, 116, 245 Kerouac, Jack, 13, 66, 71, 72, 77 Kerr, Joe, 7. See also Wollen, Peter Khalaf, Sulayman, 204, 205 Kiernan, J.P., 44 Kim, Sang-Hyun, 259, 261, 268, 269. See also Jasanoff, Sheila kinaesthetic, 14, 20, 119, 124, 214, 216, 219, 226–231 Kincaid, Jamaica, 20 Kington, Tom, 218 kinopolitics, 227. See also biopolitics Kirkwood, Mike, 44, 46 Klein, Naomi, 300

Klintworth, P.J.W., 39 Knie, Andreas, 259, 272. See also Canzler, Weert Koch, Natalie, 207 Kröger, Fabian, 262, 263 Kruger, Loren, 39, 44 Kubrick, Stanley, 66, 69, 70, 77–79 Kuwait, 190, 195–199, 201, 204–207 L labour, 17, 35, 190, 194, 196, 200, 201, 204, 205, 207, 220, 221, 223, 284 migrant, 41, 42, 48, 55, 57, 190, 198 Laderman, David, 290 Lamprecht, Karl, 245 landscape, 15, 24, 38, 47, 55, 65, 67, 70, 77, 78, 81, 95, 120–127, 129–131, 148, 149, 158, 167, 241, 271, 281, 286, 291, 293, 299–301, 303, 304 Laozi, 171, 174 Larsen, Jonas, 99, 146, 156 Latham, Alan, 165, 169 Latin America, 18, 38 Latour, Bruno, 8, 9 Laurier, Eric, 7, 259, 260, 267, 273 Law, John, 8 Leblanc, Maurice, 23, 25, 237 Lefebvre, Henri, 7, 8, 12, 19, 37, 43, 146, 157 left-to-die boat, 211–214, 216, 220, 231 Lent, Michael, 177. See also Bann, Stephen; Burgin, Victor Levine, Caroline, 141, 144, 146, 147 Lieberman, Daniel E., 175. See also Bramble, Dennis M. literary criticism, 4 literary geography, 241

Index

living monuments, 97. See also memorials Löfgren, Otar, 283. See also Eyerman, Ron Longhurst, Robyn, 14 Lorimer, Haydn, 165 Lotman, Yuri, 89–91, 94, 105 Lucas, Karen, 40 Lukács, György, 250 M MacKenzie, John M., 42 Malkki, Lisa, 19 Maltby, Richard, 288 Manase, Irikidzayi, 36, 37 Manderscheid, Katharina, 140 Massey, Doreen, 14, 15, 40, 118, 140, 144, 193, 276 Massumi, Brian, 91 Mathieson, Charlotte, 3, 11, 15, 38 Mbembe, Achille, 36, 41, 44 McCall, Carali, 168 McCaul, Colleen, 36, 43 McClintock, Anne, 37, 45 McCormack, Derek P., 165 McCormack, Donna, 219, 226 McCracken, Donald P., 38 McDowell, Linda, 14 mediated communication, 156 Mediterranean, 3, 18, 21, 211, 216, 230, 231 Meerzon, Yana, 109 Meiner, Carsten Henrik, 242, 250 memorials, 13, 88, 90–97, 100–102, 105, 106, 108. See also living monuments; war memorials; Vietnam memorial 9/11, 88, 89, 95–97, 101, 104, 106, 107 memory, 9, 10, 13, 83, 87–89, 92–95, 97–101, 107–109, 215, 293 cultural, 90, 98

  315

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 119 Merriman, Peter, 3, 4, 11, 15–17, 20, 23, 69, 82, 117–119, 123, 139, 141, 142, 282, 283. See also Pearce, Lynne metaphor, 12, 37, 49, 165, 167, 181, 240, 241, 251 migrant, 3, 12, 20, 21, 35, 36, 41–44, 48, 166, 189–193, 198–208, 211, 212, 214, 216–218, 220, 221, 225, 227, 228, 231, 284, 299. See also labour; refugee migration, 2–4, 6, 17, 18, 20, 21, 26, 190–193, 195, 196, 199, 212, 214, 217, 218, 228. See also slave migration migration studies, 6, 192 Miller, Clark, 260, 261. See also Bennett, Ira Miller, Wayne G., 263 Mills, Katie, 66, 284 mimesis, 288, 290, 296 Mitchell, Allan, 154 mobile lives, 5. See also Elliott, Anthony; Urry, John mobile methods, 17, 181. See also Büscher, Monika mobile technologies, 10 mobility(ies) accelerated, 121 affective, 88, 89, 93 autonomous, 130, 246, 260, 261, 263, 265, 266, 269, 271–274, 276 cultural, 3, 11, 15, 17, 141, 142 embodied, 15, 16, 116, 119, 121, 125, 129, 133, 135 of empire, 18 ethical, 260, 282, 305 event, 92, 93 experiential mobilities, 16, 90, 108, 139–141 fantasy, 289, 290, 300

316  Index and freedom, 11 futures, 4, 22 global, 2, 17, 20, 165, 167, 179 and the humanities, 2, 4, 24, 119, 282 and immobility, 20, 200 individualised, 246 mediated, 140 micro-mobilities, 118, 124 mobility-systems, 21, 155, 192, 201, 202, 205, 207 mundane, 158 paradigm, 6, 8, 10, 14, 22, 26, 40, 191, 192, 247 quotidian, 303 racialised, 12, 36, 40, 43, 47, 55 railway-based, 40 solitary, 302 systems of, 140 transformations, 26 turn, 4, 6, 7, 19, 26, 88–90, 97, 108, 260, 261, 274 modernity, 10, 18, 19, 37, 39, 44, 48, 116, 118, 119, 121, 126, 133, 244, 247, 248, 250, 254, 286, 300, 302 Mofokeng, Santu, 56 Mohammad, Robina, 194. See also Sidaway, James D. Mokeddem, Malika, 214, 219, 223–226, 228–231 Mom, Gijs, 7, 25, 38, 46 Monbiot, George, 299 Moore, Jack, 218 Moretti, Franco, 154 Morley, David, 37, 146, 159 Moss, Glenn, 36 Mostafanezhad, Mary, 92. See also Hannam, Kevin; Rickly, Jillian motel, 12, 13, 65–81, 84 motor-flight, 8. See also driving mourning, 91, 94, 101, 102, 107 public, 101

movement bodily, 116, 214 corporeal, 14 freedom of, 21, 42, 43, 56 interrupted, 250 Muir, John, 286 Mukařovský, Jan, 90, 95, 96, 100, 108 Murakami, Haruki, 165 Murray, Lesley, 4, 8, 140, 144. See also Doughty, Karolina; Overall, Sonia museums, 88. See also death tourism Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, 99 Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum, 87, 100 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 88, 89, 93 war museums, 88, 89 Mutloatse, Mothobi, 45, 51 myth, 39, 67, 84, 212, 220, 283, 304 Mzamane, Mbulelo Vizikhungo, 45 N Nabokov, Vladimir, 12, 13, 66–69, 72, 79, 81, 82 Nagy, Sharon, 192. See also Gardner, Andrew M. Nail, Tom, 21 narration, 142, 147, 150, 153, 154, 157, 158, 228, 237. See also fabulation narrative form, 145, 149, 239, 244, 283 nation, 4, 11, 12, 20, 21, 35–38, 45, 55, 56, 101–106, 115, 154, 224, 230. See also citizenship nation-state, 10–12, 14, 212, 214, 217–224, 226, 227, 229, 231 NATO, 211–213, 216 nature, 38, 131, 149, 171, 285–287, 292–294, 299, 300 Ndebele, Njabulo S., 46

Index

neocolonial, 218, 222 Ngugi wa Thiong’o, 221, 222 Nguyen-Hatsushiba, Jun, 165 Nicholson, Judith A., 39, 40 non-representational space, 5. See also space non-representational theory, 5. See also Thrift, Nigel nostalgia, 293, 302 Nuttall, Sarah, 35, 44 Nyamnjoh, Francis B., 35 Nye, Edward, 240 O O’Keefe, Linda, 164–166. See also Rose, Emma; Southern, Jen Oliphant, Andries Walter, 36, 45 O’Neill, Morna, 116. See also Hatt, Michael ontology, 9, 20, 119, 139, 159, 216, 273, 282 organ(s), 21, 214, 218, 221–227, 230, 231 trafficking, 10, 218 orientalism, 18 Osella, Caroline, 199 Osella, Filippo, 199 Overall, Sonia, 4. See also Murray, Lesley P Palestine, 165 Papastavridis, Efthymios, 212 paradox, 66, 133, 179, 250, 288, 292 parody, 73, 75, 98 participation, 225, 253 passengering, 7, 123, 135, 267, 273, 276. See also Laurier, Eric pastoral, 143, 148, 149, 152, 159, 242, 293, 302. See also genre Paulin, Roger, 148

  317

Pearce, Lynne, 3, 4, 7–11, 15, 17, 23, 25, 69, 82, 116, 119, 122, 139, 141, 142, 216, 273, 282, 283, 303. See also Merriman, Peter pedestrians, 47, 54, 170, 203, 245, 247, 293 Pendleton, Mark, 93 Penfold, Tom, 36, 45 perception, 7, 10, 11, 15, 20, 69, 70, 91, 102, 115–117, 122–124, 126, 129, 130, 133, 135, 145, 148, 149, 171, 190, 191, 194, 203, 205, 206, 212, 213, 219, 225, 244, 253, 291, 292, 301, 304. See also estrangement (visual) Perera, Suvendrini, 214, 230, 231 performance, 1, 13, 88, 89, 93, 94, 97, 99, 108, 116, 132, 168, 201, 204, 262 von Petersdorff, Dirk, 148, 152 phenomenology, 9, 15, 273 Pirie, G.H., 35–37, 39–44, 46, 47 place, 2, 9, 12, 14, 15, 18, 20, 21, 37, 38, 42, 44, 65, 72–74, 76, 79–84, 88, 92, 99, 105, 108, 118, 120–124, 126, 130–132, 142, 146–150, 152, 153, 156, 165, 167, 175, 179, 190–193, 195–197, 199–201, 204, 206– 208, 212, 215, 218, 224, 228, 231, 240, 241, 243, 245, 246, 248, 252, 264, 266, 286, 299 place-making, 145, 147, 152 play, 76, 95, 170–172, 175, 177, 229, 287, 292 as mobile method, 181 pollution, 24, 304 Ponsavady, Stéphanie, 19 Popan, Ioan-Cosmin, 135 post-apocalyptic, 24. See also Anthropocene; apocalypse post-automobility, 24, 267, 271, 273– 275, 277. See also automobility

318  Index postcolonial, 3, 4, 6, 17–19, 219, 221, 228 postcolonial theory, 6 posthumanism, 5, 8–10 postmemory, 13, 88, 89, 91–93, 95, 97–100, 103, 108. See also traumascapes poststructuralism, 4–6, 8 Power, Aidan, 284 Pratt, Mary Louise, 6, 18 protest, 48, 174, 176, 177, 179, 217. See also running proximity, 38, 48, 81, 131, 146, 156, 292, 305. See also distance Purse, Lisa, 291 R race, 12, 15, 39, 42, 56, 104, 192, 194, 224, 266, 293 racialised, 12, 36, 40, 41, 43, 44, 47, 55, 104, 107, 163–166, 176 racism, 40, 41 Radia, Pavlina, 11, 13 Rahman, Anisur, 190 railing, 12, 37, 38, 44, 46–48, 51, 56, 174. See also Staffrider railways, 3, 11, 12, 18, 19, 35–44, 46–48, 51, 54–56, 116, 121, 142, 154, 157, 243, 245, 246, 253, 267. See also Staffrider; trains commuter, 43 Randell, Richard, 260 Rasic, Lynn, 104. See also Blais, Allison Reading, Anna, 140. See also Keightley, Emily realism, 46, 67, 68, 239, 288–291, 296, 304 refugee, 3, 17, 19, 21, 166, 212, 216–218, 221, 230, 298. See also migrant

relationship, 3, 23, 25, 69, 75, 119, 122–124, 126, 128, 130–133, 135, 151, 190, 202, 205, 208 representation, 3, 5, 7, 8, 12–14, 16, 19, 20, 23–25, 37, 40, 46, 47, 67, 82, 96, 105, 107, 119, 141, 144, 145, 147, 154, 164, 195, 212, 215–219, 222, 260, 261, 270, 272, 274, 275, 284, 288, 289, 291, 299, 300, 303–305 representational space, 7, 12. See also Lefebvre, Henri response-abilities, 17, 166, 167, 180, 181 Revill, George, 38, 42, 140, 141 rewilding, 299. See also wilderness rhythm, 9, 16, 23, 72, 117, 142, 143, 146–148, 151–153, 156–159, 172, 241, 242, 245, 251–254, 263, 275, 276 Richards, Jeffrey, 42 Richter, Amy G., 57 Rickly, Jillian, 92. See also Hannam, Kevin; Mostafanezhad, Mary Ridge, Pett, 245 riding (horseback), 37, 46, 48, 49, 52, 150, 154, 157, 158, 238–240, 244, 248, 267. See also Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Rigney, Ann, 108 road movie, 24, 282–294, 296, 298–304. See also film; genre roads, 2, 8, 9, 11, 13, 41, 65–69, 71, 72, 75–78, 81–84, 117, 122, 123, 128, 129, 134, 171, 172, 197, 202, 203, 238, 241, 242, 246, 248–250, 262, 263, 269, 275, 281, 283, 286, 290, 296, 298, 302, 305 roadside, 12, 66, 67, 69, 70, 72, 77, 78, 80–84, 272, 293, 301

Index

road trip, 24, 65, 68, 72, 75, 80 robot, 262, 263, 274 robotics, 23, 261, 263 Rodway, Cara, 66 Rogers, Jefferson S., 67. See also Jakle, John A. Rose, Emma, 164–166. See also O’Keefe, Linda; Southern, Jen Rose, Gillian, 14 Ross, Kristin, 292 routine, 36, 43, 52, 55, 108, 152, 157, 159 Royle, Nicholas, 121 running, 15, 54, 102, 164, 165, 168, 170–172, 175, 176, 178, 180, 181, 202, 215. See also art as anarchy, 174 running art-fully, 16, 166, 174, 177, 179, 181 S Saad, Reem, 205 Said, Edward, 6, 17, 18 Salazar, Noel B., 177 Saudi Arabia, 189, 190, 195, 199, 203, 206, 207 Savage, Michael, 42 Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, 222 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 38, 43, 142, 246 Scholes, Robert, 285, 286 Science and Technology Studies (STS), 8–10, 259, 260, 267, 268 science fiction, 9, 10, 22, 260, 261, 263, 274, 281, 282, 284–292, 300, 304. See also genre Sculle, Keith A., 67, 76. See also Jakle, John A.; Rogers, Jefferson S. sea, 2, 3, 11, 51, 134, 218, 230, 231 sedentarist philosophy, 5, 215 Seigworth, Gregory J., 91. See also Gregg, Melissa

  319

Seiler, Cotten, 40, 55, 56 Seltzer, Mark, 116 semiotics, 90, 91, 94, 96, 101–103, 105, 106, 141, 290 semiosphere, 90, 94, 97, 108 Senf, Carol A., 255 sensescapes, 14, 139, 163, 164, 167, 180, 181 Seroke, Jaki, 37 Setuke, Brian, 12, 51–53 sexuality, 15 Shaffer, Marguerite S., 75 Shaming, Mark, 103 Sharpley, Richard, 92. See also Stone, Philip R. Shaw, Jon, 165. See also Cook, Simon; Simpson, Paul Sheller, Mimi, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 12, 13, 15, 17, 22, 26, 39, 40, 81, 82, 159, 215, 260, 273. See also Urry, John Shenker, Jack, 211 Shepard, Todd, 225 Shulan, Michael, 96 Sidaway, James D., 194. See also Mohammad, Robina Sillitoe, Alan, 165 Siluma, Michael, 12, 37, 49–51 Simons, Harold Jack, 41 Simons, R.E., 41 Simpson, Paul, 165. See also Cook, Simon; Shaw, Jon Singapore, 3, 174, 178, 179 Sion, Brigitte, 92, 93 Situationist International, 163, 167, 171, 174, 181. See also art slave migration, 18, 19 slowness, 121, 130, 131, 274 social exclusion, 196, 198, 200 sociology, 5, 8, 165 sociotechnical imaginary, 23, 269, 270 Sodaro, Amy, 94, 95, 103, 105–107 Soderstrom, Ola, 216

320  Index solipsism, 76 Sontag, Susan, 98, 108 South Africa, 1, 3, 11, 12, 19, 35–46, 48, 49, 53, 55–57 South African, 35–42, 44, 46, 47, 57 Southern, Jen, 164–166. See also O’Keefe, Linda; Rose, Emma space mechanised, 248 railway, 11, 38, 47, 54, 55 semiotic, 94, 108 Spalding, Stephen D., 37 spatial theory, 4 speed, 23, 44, 50, 51, 116–121, 123, 124, 128, 129, 131, 132, 134, 135, 147, 152, 164, 170, 172, 241–244, 247–249, 274, 275 Spinney, Justin, 248 Spivak, Gayatri, 6 Squire, Vicki, 177 Staffrider, 12, 36, 37, 45–49, 51–53, 55, 56. See also railing; railways; Staffrider magazine Staffrider magazine, 36, 44, 45 state, 10, 20, 21, 72, 84, 90, 91, 103, 171, 173, 190–193, 205, 207, 215, 218, 220–222, 224, 226, 230, 260, 275. See also nation Stone, Philip R., 92. See also Sharpley, Richard Stone, Wilfred, 118 strolling, 151 subject, 8–10, 18, 25, 26, 55, 74, 83, 91, 119, 120, 123, 124, 129, 130, 140, 149, 154, 155, 190, 192, 207, 213, 217, 219–222, 224–226, 246, 247, 269–271, 274, 276, 282, 300, 303 subjectivity, 8, 15, 16, 140, 141, 143–145, 147, 148, 153, 159, 168, 171, 218, 224 mobile, 10, 246 Sullivan, Heather I., 148, 149

sustainability, 299 sustainable transport, 22, 23, 26 Suvin, Darko, 289, 290, 296, 299 sympathy, 16, 115, 116, 119, 124, 125, 128, 131–133, 135, 150 T Tambling, Jeremy, 118, 121 tandems, 244. See also bicycles Tan, Kai Syng, 16 Teer-Tomaselli, Ruth, 38 temporality, 13, 214–216, 229, 231, 244, 249. See also rhythm; routine clock time, 249 fragmented, 249 textual criticism, 4 Thacker, Andrew, 116, 118, 120 thing theory, 9. See also Brown, Bill Thomas, Peter, 38, 55 Thompson, Christopher, 239 Thomson, Judith, 267 Thrift, Nigel, 5, 268, 269, 273. See also Featherstone, Mike; Urry, John timetables, 44, 52. See also railways; Schivelbusch, Wolfgang; temporality Tlali, Miriam, 12, 37, 53–55 tokenism, 93 ethnic tokenism, 89 racial tokenism, 89 Torres, Alissa, 96–98, 101, 102, 108 tourism, 26, 91, 122, 213, 218 death, 13, 88, 89, 92, 93, 95, 96, 100, 107, 108 thanatourism, 92 township, 11, 12, 19, 35–37, 40, 41, 43, 44, 46–49, 51–57 trains, 3, 12, 19, 36, 37, 42–44, 46–49, 51–56, 124, 126, 147, 153–155, 157, 243, 244, 295. See also railways

Index

transculturalism, 6 transnationalism, 19, 21 transport, 10, 12, 13, 16, 23, 25, 41, 43, 44, 49, 57, 116, 129, 135, 142, 157, 203, 237, 243, 253, 254, 266, 274, 283, 284, 292, 295, 298, 300 technologies, 2, 3, 116, 121, 126, 132, 133 traumascapes, 93, 94, 99. See also postmemory travel, 2, 3, 6, 12, 13, 15, 18, 19, 26, 42, 43, 46–48, 55, 57, 72, 76, 79, 82, 101, 116, 120, 124, 128, 135, 147, 150, 155, 166, 193, 241, 245, 247, 249, 250, 253, 262, 264–266, 290, 298 Treadwell, Sarah, 66, 67 tricycles, 244. See also bicycles Trilling, Lionel, 121 Tshabangu, Mango, 12, 36, 37, 47–49 Tucker, Brian, 145 twentieth century, 13, 16, 22, 23, 25, 38, 39, 65, 77, 81, 116, 122, 245, 246, 252, 259–261, 270, 283 twenty-first century, 11, 68, 116, 266, 270, 272, 274, 283, 290 U unconscious, 26, 97, 100 United Arab Emirates (UAE), 178, 190 United Kingdom (UK), 3–6, 164, 166, 179, 281, 301, 302. See also Britain; British United States of America (USA), 11, 283, 296, 298 urbanisation, 39, 44, 203. See also cities urban mobilities, 276

  321

Urry, John, 2, 4–15, 17, 21, 22, 24, 26, 37, 38, 40, 46, 81, 82, 88–90, 99, 108, 139, 144, 165, 191, 192, 199, 201, 204, 207, 215, 246, 247, 260–262, 265, 268, 269, 272, 273, 283. See also Dennis, Kingsley; Elliott, Anthony; Featherstone, Mike; Sheller, Mimi; Thrift, Nigel Uteng, Tana Priya, 15, 40. See also Cresswell, Tim utopia, 22, 23, 293. See also dystopia V Vannini, Phillip, 121, 131, 135, 247 Van Pelt, Jan, 92. See also Dwork, Deborah Vaughan, Michael, 37, 44–47, 55 Vellusig, Robert, 147, 148 Victorian, 9, 11, 18, 39, 55 Vietnam memorial, 88, 95, 104, 105. See also memorials Vint, Sheryl, 284 violence, 54, 103, 107, 227, 267, 303. See also war Virilio, Paul, 11, 116, 117, 119, 131, 247, 248 Vladislavic, Ivan, 36, 45 Vora, Neha, 207 W Wade, Michael, 37, 39 Waldman, Amy, 13, 88, 89, 97, 98, 104–108 Walker-Smith, Brian, 267 walking, 16, 25, 47, 121, 125, 130– 133, 135, 152, 154, 158, 163, 165, 170–172, 176, 179, 181, 195, 202–204, 249, 253, 276. See also automobility; strolling; wandering

322  Index Walking Artists Network, 164 wandering, 148, 150, 172, 276, 281, 282 war, 13, 81, 91. See also affective brutality; genocide; violence war memorials, 13, 89. See also memorials Wee, Dominik, 272. See also Bertoncello, Michele Wells, H.G., 23, 237, 238, 241, 243, 244, 247, 248, 250, 252, 253 Whaley, Joachim, 148 wilderness, 82, 286, 287, 299, 304. See also rewilding Williams, Raymond, 143, 287 Wittler, Kathrin, 150

Witulski, Udo, 36 Wollen, Peter, 7. See also Kerr, Joe Wolmar, Christian, 38 Wood, David, 285 Woodford, Charlotte, 153, 154 Wright, Laurence, 37, 39 Y Youngman, Paul, 155 Youngs, Tim, 18 Z Zander, Horst, 37 Zemka, Sue, 245, 252