Speaker
Description
Curiously, America’s mid-twentieth-century Civil Rights Movement unfolded concurrently with the construction of its extraordinary interstate highway system. Today, these parallel events represent massive social transformation initiatives that might contradictorily both inspire and disappoint as their real results and destructive consequences are thoroughly enumerated now. At the time, the slick travel writing and tourism magazine, Holiday, which had nearly a million subscribers, regularly featured road trip pieces. Both John Steinbeck, who is white, and John Williams, who is black, wrote American tour serials that were later compiled into books, Travels with Charlie and This is my Country Too, respectively. Both texts start with the same premise, the writer setting out to (re)discover America, and both grapple with the intersectional problems of racial injustice and mobility. While Steinbeck’s text would become a classic of American literature, Williams’ book fell out of print and has gone largely forgotten. This presentation will center Williams’ text, yet read it against Steinbeck’s, in order to map out these two writer’s divergent experiences of the American landscape. Whereas Steinbeck makes some effort to bear witness to the ugly backlash confronting school integration efforts in Louisiana, among other instances of racial discrimination, his progressive nostalgias speed past any sustained reflection on the scale and complexity of America’s legacy of civil rights abuses. Williams, however, is not able to avoid the issue. As he travels he is profiled, intimidated, threatened, and terrorized. While he thoughtfully examines American promises and problems, the anxieties over his safety build toward visceral consequences. For Williams, America remains brutally segregated in spite of the labor towards unification through personalized mobility. A close comparison of these two texts sheds light on blind spots (pun very much intended) within the American progressive political agenda of the 1960s, and it thereby contributes some historical context for confronting persistent mobility-justice concerns within the urgent contemporary need to address both the social and ecological consequences of our travel infrastructures.
Biography
Andrew Vogel is a Professor of English and the Honors Program Director at Kutztown State University of Pennsylvania. Concentrating on American road narrative, he has published research in Studies in American Naturalism, Studies in Travel Writing, American Studies, and elsewhere. His monograph, Narrating a New Mobility Landscape in the Modern American Road Story, 1893-1921: Aspiration and Ambivalence, was published by Palgrave MacMillan in Summer 2024.
