Conveners
Narrative Representations of Mobility
- Jinhyoung Lee (Konkuk University)
This paper explores the trope of the road in two contemporary Francophone African literary texts, Marc Alexandre Oho Bambe’s Les Lumières d’Oujda (2020) [The lights of Oujda] and Felwine Sarr’s La Saveur des derniers mètres (2021) [The taste of the last metres]. Both texts revolve around the theme of mobility that also has a role in structuring the narrative (cf. Peterle 2016). The texts...
The paper adopts a critical Black mobilities paradigm and argues that contemporary Afro-diasporic historiographic metafictional novels, through speculative re-narration of slave history, contest racialised, hegemonic, and gendered mobilities. Their aesthetic manoeuvres enable captive characters and their progeny agency to map alternative routes towards freedom and mobility justice (Sheller)....
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...
