2024 T2M Annual Conference | Mobilities and Infrastructures: Transitions and Transformations

Session

Narrative Representations of Mobility

PS 8

Sep 25, 2024, 4:30 PM

Leipzig, Germany

Conveners

Narrative Representations of Mobility

• Jinhyoung Lee (Konkuk University)

18. The Road in Contemporary Francophone African Narratives of Mobility

Anna-Leena Toivanen (University of Eastern Finland)

9/25/24, 4:30 PM

Paper

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...

14. Alien Encounters with the Past, Present, and Future: Mobility Justice in South African Science-Fiction

Sophie Kriegel

9/25/24, 4:45 PM

Paper

The proposed paper discusses representations of embodied mobility practices in recent South African science-fiction tracing the ways in which cultural representations of enforced mobilities are constructed. Engaging with Sheller’s theorization on Mobility Justice (2018) and critical Black Mobilities, the paper addresses the construction of (im)mobilities as well as their inherent potential to...

12. Transatlantic Slavery and the “Ghostly Afterlives” of Black Im/Mobilities

Marian Ofori-Amoafo (University of Bayreuth)

9/25/24, 5:00 PM

Paper

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)....

42. Unified Segregation on the American Interstate: Comparing Civil Rights Era Road Narratives by John Williams (This is My Country Too) and John Steinbeck (Travels with Charlie)

Andrew Vogel (Kutztown State University of Pennsylvania)

9/25/24, 5:15 PM

Paper

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...