Introduction Excerpt for Cartographies of Empire
Introduction
WHEN NOT SIMPLY DISMISSED AS that most mundane, tired, and boring of genres (Jack and Sal and countless other tedious white men on the road trying to recapture an authentic youth and American past that never existed), the road novel is often read as exemplifying the Americanness of automobility. Drawing on the mobilities/automobilities frameworks of Mimi Sheller and Tim Cresswell and John Urry, who defined automobility as “a self-organizing autopoietic, non-linear system that spreads world-wide,”1 road novel scholars have analyzed the genre’s investments in and challenges to the system of automobility and/as Americanness. To take just three examples, Cotton Seiler’s Republic of Drivers argues that the “affect generated by driving” has played an outsized role in shaping the way “Americans feel, think, and act,” drawing particular attention to the characteristics of “agency, self-determination, entitlement, privacy, sovereignty, transgression and speed.”2 Similarly, in American Road Narratives, Ann Brigham writes that “the road trip is not merely the means but the actual manifestation of an authentic American experience. Deemed a democratic undertaking, it both directs and projects an experience of Americanness. . . . Most importantly, it reasserts the American as a mobile subject.”3 And Katie Mills in The Road Story and the Rebel argues that the road novel “offers a glimpse not only of contemporary automobility but also of the revolution in authority between people clinging to pre-war social privileges . . . and those who turned the story of America’s open road into a declaration of independence.”4 For Seiler, Brigham, and Mills, the road novel is best understood as an expression of the experience of driving and travel, which (like the road itself) symbolically constitutes Americanness and the American mythos of mobility. Starting from this basis, all three critics root the potential of the road novel in its projection of the boundaries of national culture—who is and isn’t mobile, whose immobilization is the precondition of others’ mobility, whose mobility is celebrated and whose is degraded, controlled, and policed—and its questioning of how certain groups are incorporated or expelled from the nation-state and national identity.
And yet rarely a month goes by without a periodical like the New Yorker, the LA Review of Books, or The Atlantic raving about a road novel that, it claims, breaks all the rules, tackling new questions, and spanning geographies we didn’t think possible. In the past two decades, we have witnessed an explosion of road novels from Mexico, Latin America, Western Europe, the former socialist world (from Bulgaria to Ukraine, former Yugoslavia, and China), and the United States that don’t fit into the mold of this supposedly “inflexible genre” of “American delusion” and aren’t interested in negotiating questions of Americanness.5 We can think, for instance, of the postapocalyptic plague road novels of Ling Ma, Lauren Beukes, Emily St. John Mandel, and Robert Penner; the historical road novels of Valeria Luiselli, Héctor Tobar, and Gina Apostol that excavate sites of American Empire; the gothic Latin American neoextractivist road novels of Carol Bensimon, Samanta Schweblin, and Selva Almada; the post-Yugoslavia civil war road novels of Olivia Sudjic, Lana Bastašić, and Srđan Srdić; and Serhiy Zhadan’s surrealist eastern Ukrainian deindustrialization road novel, to name just a few.
Dominant theories of the genre cannot make sense of these novels, and this suggests our current models aren’t able to capture the genre in a satisfying way: to fully explain what the genre is, what it actually does, and why it has persisted and traveled as widely as it has. That is what Cartographies of Empire aims to do by offering the first global study of the road novel.6 Eschewing common definitions of the road novel that forefront long-distance travel and the exhilarating experience of the open road, I started with a definition of the road novel as any novel in which a journey on or through automotive infrastructure that partially exceeds what Marx termed the realm of necessity plays a central role in its formal structure.7 From this, I created and read my way through a database of over 140 road novels from over twenty countries, coding for gender, nationality, age, and job of the protagonists as well as key locations, highways, and automobile types.8 What my research revealed is that the road novel tends to show up in specific locations, under specific historical coordinates. While its locus par excellence is undoubtedly the United States in the post-45 period, the genre itself globalizes. At first, it begins to emerge and develop in regions undergoing rapid capitalist development under the sphere of US economic, cultural, and military influence and where the promise of achieving US-style capitalist development, and especially the model of suburban modernity, appears within reach. This is why the road novel initially tends to appear in Mexico, Latin America, Europe (especially Germany), and after the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, but not, for instance, in the Soviet Union itself or newly postcolonial West Africa. Later, as the project of US hegemony enters into crisis, the mask of development is ripped off, revealing the naked realities of capital accumulation (debt, dispossession, displacement, loss of community, eruption of ethnic rivalries), and the road novel becomes a genre linked not to the promise of development but rather to de-developmentalism, crisis, and decline, the genre truly globalizes.9
Following the trajectory of the genre, I offer a new set of spatial and temporal coordinates for our understanding of it.10 Spatially, I argue that the road novel is not a genre of Americanness, or one primarily focused on the experience of driving or travel, but rather a generic product of US hegemony (what Giovanni Arrighi refers to more precisely as the “US systemic cycle of accumulation”11). By taking up the tropes of automobility and travel, the genre is able to map out the violent and vertiginous processes of capitalist modernization while obfuscating these harsh truths through seductive narratives of individual success and failure to achieve the so-called American way of life. Temporally, Cartographies of Empire reperiodizes the road novel’s arc as following that of US hegemony’s expansions, crises, reconsolidation, and ultimate decline both domestically and internationally. I periodize this arc as follows: (1) the emergence and roll-out of the United States’ informal empire across Mexico, Latin American, and North Africa in the 1950s alongside its revolutionization of urban and agricultural space domestically; (2) the deindustrialization and rebellion of American cities in the 1970s in tandem with a crisis of US hegemony marked by humiliation in Vietnam and the rising power of Japanese and German manufacturing and the United States’ incursions into Central America, which, as Greg Grandin notes, worked to “exorcise the ghost” of America’s defeat in Vietnam and pave the way for the new “idealism that [would] define the ‘war on terror’ as a world crusade of free-market nation building”;12 (3) the collapse of the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc, which enabled the expansion of US military and economic power into former Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe, and the unprecedented creation of a unipolar world; (4) the erosion of US hegemony in the wake of the failed War on Terror and the 2008 financial crisis, and the emergence of an increasingly multipolar world system, as evinced by the China-backed commodity boom across Latin America; and (5) the post-2017 terminal crisis of US hegemony symptomatized by the United States’ disastrous entanglement in the Russia-Ukraine war and Israel’s post–October 7 genocidal incursions into Gaza and the West Bank.
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To illustrate some of these claims, let’s start with brief excerpts from three diverse road novels from three different contexts—Toby Olson’s Seaview (1984); Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017); and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Albina and the Dog-Men (2016 [1999]). Taken together they show the road novel’s interest in mapping out violent and vertiginous processes of capitalist modernization, both domestic and international, within the frame of an individual journey of self-development or discovery.13 Toby Olson’s Seaview traces the journey of three unlikely companions: Allen, a golf shark escaping his childhood friend, a drug dealer he double-crossed; his terminally ill wife Miranda trying to return to her childhood home in Cape Cod so she can die by the sea; and Bob, a Pima Indian from a copper-mining town in Arizona, who hitches a ride with the couple in order to (unbeknownst to them) help his cousin lay siege to and reclaim a golf course on ancestral Quahog land. Midway through the novel, before we get to the final showdown between Allen and his drug dealer friend-turned-enemy, Miranda and her fate, and the settler golf course owners and Pimas looking to reclaim it, our trio stop in a motel just outside Sioux City, Nebraska, where they stumble on an aquatic-themed mini-golf course. Here is the description:
This place too was at the edge of things, the course in a kind of exaggerated instance of the slow ruin of the [mining] town that had been passed by. Beyond the course were the waste grainfields moving in from the hum of the highway, a good three miles away, and the fields seemed to be reclaiming the ground the course stood on. The weeds and obscure offshoots of the dead stalks of old corn had crept back into and over the course, and they were touching up against the back of the cinder blocks of the motel itself. The jaw of the whale was pinioned with a large bolt where the wishbone joined at its top; the head of the galvanized bolt protruded on one side, the nut on the other. The entire surface of the jaw was marked with initials carved into its bone and the peeling remnants of fingernail polish. . . . Weathering had turned the carvings into signs and emblems, and away from words, and when they stepped into the tortured archway, Melinda thought of the mutilation of goosefish on the bay beaches of the Cape. . . . The difference was in the bone quietness of the whale’s jaw and the fact that it was in Nebraska.14
Olson’s sentences work through a slow, descriptive accretion of spatial juxtapositions that offers a longue durée history of the region: the frontier town stripped of its former mining industry, the exhausted agriculture that butts up against the highway, the concrete motel at the side of the road, all of which brings us improbably to the image of the aquatic-themed golf course far away from any body of water. The site reminds Allen of Tombstone, the copper-mining frontier town he’s from, formerly Pima land, which has become a western-themed Disneyland. In contrast, it reminds Melinda of the whaling town in Cape Cod where she comes from. Taken together, their seemingly goofy excursion to an aquatic-themed mini-golf pitch in middle America unearths the longer material histories of the boom-and-bust frontiers of nineteenth-and twentieth-century US expansion: histories of whaling and the sea frontier, western expansion, mining, agriculture, industry, and roadside tourism are joined in the final juxtaposition of the mystical, yet mechanical whale, whose likely defacement by local teenagers transforms it into one more ruin within this landscape of other postindustrial ruins. These longer histories suggest the ways that the contemporary dramas driving the novel—a drug crisis in Los Angeles and an Indigenous uprising on a golf course in Cape Cod—too offer a refracted picture of Olson’s own moment: the wake of the 1970s era of Black and Indigenous uprisings in urban centers and reservations, which was decimated by a combination of state policy such as the War on Drugs, as well as the AstroTurf suburban rebellions of the 1970s that fomented the rise of the New Right (which found its ideal symbol in that private space of the golf course). What has been read as a relatively historically uninteresting novel that offers a gentle “parody” of the road novel’s search for experience,15 in fact offers an astute account of neoliberalism’s onslaught within a longue durée of American territorial expansion.
Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing tells the story of Leonie, her son Jojo, and her baby daughter Michaela who live in rural Mississippi and who, along with Leonie’s friend Misty, take a road trip to the notorious Parchman prison (a former plantation) to collect her white lover, Michael, who has been incarcerated for dealing drugs, in the hopes of reuniting her family and starting anew. En route to the prison, Leonie agrees to make one last drug run to earn enough for them to move out of her parents’ house. As they’re driving back from the prison with the drugs, the cops pull them over. Terrified that if the police find the drugs, Michael will get locked up again, Leonie swallows the entire bag of meth to save him, triggering a toxic reaction. Here is the scene as she fights her way back to consciousness:
When I wake, Michael’s rolled all the windows down. I’ve been dreaming for hours, it feels like, dreaming of being marooned on a deflating raft in the middle of the endless reach of the Gulf of Mexico, far out where the fish are bigger than men. I’m not alone in the raft because Jojo and Michaela and Michael are with me and we are elbow to elbow. But the raft must have a hole in it, because it deflates. We are all sinking, and there are manta rays gliding beneath us and sharks jostling us. I am trying to keep everyone above water, even as I struggle to stay afloat. I sink below the waves and push Jojo upward so he can stay about the waves and breathe, but then Michaela sinks and I push her up, and Michael sinks so I shove him up to the air as I sink and struggle, but they won’t stay up. . . . We are all drowning.16
Set within a car on the side of a highway, the dream contains two oceanic catastrophes. The first is the Middle Passage and the myriad stories of slaves who were thrown overboard for insurance money or who jumped to escape servitude and drowned. The slave trade and its aftermath suffuse every facet of the novel: from the plantation history of Mississippi to the former plantation turned prison, Parchman, which housed Leonie’s father and now her boyfriend, to the death of her brother, at the hands of Michael’s racist redneck cousin who killed him in a “hunting accident.” All of this is played out in Leonie’s attempt to rescue them in her dream, as she fails to keep them afloat. The second oceanic catastrophe registered here is the 2010 explosion of Deepwater Horizon. We find out Michael had worked on the rig previously and that his unemployment, resulting from the explosion, is what forces him to deal drugs in the first place. In the novel’s repeated use of water, drowning, and parchedness, we are encouraged to draw a line from the slave ship to the oil well and the prison, as the ship itself is transformed into the car. Sing has recently been read as revealing “the dangerous qualification of automobility for black drivers”17 in the United States, but it too offers a way to map the coordinates of an expanded, global history of Mississippi and its various extractive regimes—from the Atlantic slave trade and plantation economy to the growth of the prison industrial complex, and back to the sea, through catastrophic oil extraction on the Gulf Coast.
Finally, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Albina and the Dog-Men is a surrealist road novel about two women, an alabaster white, amnesiac goddess whose ridiculous sex appeal turns men into monstrous dogs, and her protector, the Yiddish-Lithuanian migrant “Crabby.” The two, alongside Crabby’s suitor (who is also at risk at being swallowed up by Albina’s charms) are in search of a magical cactus with roots back to the Incan Empire that will cure Albina and the men whose hearts she sets afire. The journey takes them up through the desert to a “meager stream” near the Camarones River where they find a peculiar object. A ship:
The delirium of sunstroke deposited him opposite a Spanish caravel. He rubbed his eyes. No, he was not dreaming! The ship, about eighty feet long and twenty-five feet wide, had three masts, all of them transformed into crosses where three Saint Peters were nailed up like Christs. On the bow a name was inscribed: SANTA MARÍA. It was an exact copy of Columbus’ ship in reinforced concrete.18
And near the ship,
a cargo truck carried a flag with the emblem of the Chuquicamata mine. Police, armed with cattle prods and rifles, guarded those worn-out workers as if they were criminals or slaves. Among them strolled a skeletal dark man wearing English-style jodhpurs and a military cap with a neck protector, with a short whip hanging from his wrist, a revolver in his belt, hair dyed a urine color, face covered with pale makeup, and high-pitched voice spewing orders and insults in a US accent.19
Who is this “skeletal man”? English jodhpurs, military cap, short whip, US accent, pale makeup? We have in this figure a dizzying and spectral accretion of imperialist figures—the British nabob, plantation overseer, American imperialist—that span centuries, compressed into a single moment. This temporal collapsing finds its explanation in two images. First the flag with the emblem of the Chuquicamata copper mine. Chuquicamata was owned by the US corporation Anaconda Copper before being fully nationalized under the socialist government of Salvador Allende, part of the chain of events that catalyzed the CIA-backed Pinochet coup to protect US corporate interests. Second is the ship—that symbol of mercantile capitalism and the plantation system of the Atlantic, only now composed of concrete, that crucial material for the massive industrialization and urbanization of the twentieth century. Jodorowsky cleverly takes up this supposed genre of Americanness to link together the older forms of Spanish and Portuguese imperialism and contemporary US neocolonialism.
In each case, the novel takes up the trope of an automotive journey, which offers the promise of self-discovery and of some material benefit, to excavate histories of colonization and capitalist expansion etched into the surrounding landscapes. The shared connection all three authors draw between the road and the sea, and generically between the road novel and the nineteenth-century sea narrative, further invites us to consider the road novel’s place in a longue durée story of global hegemons and expanding frontiers of capital.20 That they, like many road novels, persistently draw on the signs, symbols, and technologies of automobility to undertake these mappings is no more accidental than the importance of the ship in earlier sea narratives. This is Ross’s striking insight in Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, her study of post–World War II French modernization. Here, she makes the claim that the automobile is “the central vehicle of all twentieth century modernization” because the automobile industry is “exemplary” of dominant regimes of commodity production, distribution, and finance, and “indicative” of where a given country or region stands in relationship to the global economy. The “presence or absence” of the automotive industry “in a national economy,” Ross argues, “tells us the level and power of that economy” within the world system.21 Ross’s account of automobility as an index of capitalist modernization, which throughout the twentieth century increasingly assumes an American face, helps us make sense of why the road novel appears as a hegemonic genre of automobility in certain places and times and why the automobile lends itself to other generic guises in different times and places.
This link between automobility and capitalist modernization becomes easier to see if we consider the role that automobility and automobile culture plays in different economic systems, and the kinds of literary and cultural automotive genres that result. Three examples will suffice: postwar France, the Soviet Union, and postcolonial West Africa.
In postwar France (especially from the 1950s to the 1970s), where the automobile was “poised” but had not yet “become commonplace, an object of mass consumption,”22 it came to dramatize debates over a shift from the management of the colonies to an internal, state-led modernization process that saw the restructuring of space, daily life, and the national economy (which was nonetheless, as Lefebvre notes, still reliant on former colonies for both manpower and raw materials).23 France was one of the birthplaces of the automobile and intensive road building and car expeditions, such as Ferdinand D’Orléans’s expedition from Saigon and Angkor, Citroën’s “Black Cruise” across Africa in 1925, and the “Yellow Cruise” that traversed Central Asia, were central in the entangled processes of developing and administering of the French Empire and bolstering the automobile and tourist industries.24 However, in the post–World War II era, the meaning of and discourse surrounding the automobile transformed and came to be aligned with, somewhat paradoxically given its connections to state-led modernization, the Americanization of French society. Not only did Marshall Plan loans and “labor-management ‘missions’” from the United States enable the development and expansion of the automobile industry,25 but intellectuals from Henri Lefebvre to Guy Debord and the Situationists argued that cars were colonizing French society, as small agricultural villages and farms were decimated and replaced with the automotive landscapes of highways, shopping centers, and parking spaces typically associated with the American way of life. Guy Debord pointed to the link between automotive expansion in France and American global power in “Situationist Theses on Traffic,” when he pithily commented that “it is generally being said this year that American economic prosperity is soon going to depend on the success of the slogan ‘Two cars per family.’”26
Within this context, postwar French culture fixed its gaze less on the journey than the commodity-object of the automobile itself. Films such as Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle (1958) and Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967) and novels like Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse (1955) and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie (1957) imbued the car (in Sagan an American convertible and in Robbe-Grillet a blue sedan) with magical or auratic properties, as both an object of intense sexual desire and an ominous harbinger and cause of death.27 While both novels and films took up this fascination with the car, Ross argues that French cinema’s take-up of the car was particularly important. Not only, she argues, did automotive cinema pave the way for the “motorization of Europe,” but these films’ fascination with the desirable yet deathly automobile (often American automobiles) was entangled with their own reckoning with the hegemony of Hollywood film studios, which threatened France’s own cinema industry while relentlessly pumping out propaganda for the American way of life.28 In other words, a whole set of economic concerns about France’s loss of its colonies and increased subordination to US economic power was mediated through narratives about the commodity object of the automobile. It is revealing to read these accounts in relationship to Ponsavady’s account of the role of French automobility in French Indochina. Stéphanie Ponsavady argues that in 1930s short stories like Vū Trong Phung’s “To Be a Whore,” “the growth of colonial capitalism” that disrupted “traditional Vietnamese class relations and gender relations” was symbolized through the automobile that “function[ed] both as material signifier of new wealth and as a narrative device that announces disruptions, accelerations, and upsets in the plot.”29 The automobile played a similar role in postwar French culture (signifying the seductive yet deadly disruptions and erosions of traditional social, spatial, and gendered dynamics), but with an American instead of a French face.
In the Soviet Union, the automobile stood as a symbol of the struggle to catch up to and out-industrialize capitalist countries throughout the 1920s. Then in the 1960s and 1970s, spurred on by an oil gas boom, it became a symbol of the Soviet Union’s ability to offer a what Luminita Gatejel terms a “plentiful socialist way of life” that could compete with the American way of life.30 The struggle to replicate the kinds of cars being produced in the United States and Europe had a profound impact on all facets of Soviet life. As Nordica Nettleton notes, in addition to requiring new forms of partnerships with European car companies like Fiat as it had done earlier with Ford, catch-up also required Soviet engineers to produce new kinds of petrochemicals ranging from plastics, petrol, to the other petrochemicals necessary for “quality door seals, packing glands, brake seals and other rubber articles.”31 It also required the construction of entirely new factory-oriented, automotive cities like Togliatti, “Russia’s motor city,” which was built around the Avto VAZ factory, and which replicated the privatized, suburban modernity of the United States in order to entice workers. This became a significant problem for the Soviet Union because, as Lewis Siegelbaum argues, the automobile itself and the particular cultures of private automobility sat uncomfortably with the collectivist ideology at the heart of the Soviet Union and its flagship program of expanding public transportation.32 As a result, official discourses of automobility tended to focus on the heroism of its production, its use in the Great War, and their role in helping circulate goods, rather than as a commodity object itself, while popular discourse around cars produced divergent meanings. “Cars,” Siegelbaum writes, “were associated with the privileged world of officialdom—including the dreaded NKVD which employed ‘Black Marias’ or ‘Ravens’ on nightly round ups, immortalized in Anna Akhmatova’s poetry cycle ‘Requiem’—as well as with the frequently fantasized living conditions abroad, especially in the United States.”33
It is this ambivalence around the automobile, the predominance of public transportation, and the lack of automotive infrastructure in general, and tourist infrastructure specifically (themselves indexing a commitment to noncapitalist modernization as a well as anxieties about their own ability to compete with the United States’ technological and economic power), that helps explain why the most well-known Soviet road novel, Ilf and Petrov’s One-Storied America (1937), is not really a road novel at all, but a humorous travelogue about a state-funded road trip across the United States. Domestically the closest we get is Anatolii Rybakov’s novel Drivers (1950), a novel not about the road as freedom but about the labor of long-distance truck drivers, and later a beat-inspired road novel written by one of the informal leaders of the so-called Shestidesyatniki, or sixties generation, which were fascinated by American culture, Vasily Aksyonov’s In Search of a Genre (1978).34 It is equally notable that the Soviet Union, or at least a Soviet writer living in France, would produce the great antiroad novel epic, Ilya Ehrenberg’s The Life of the Automobile (1929). Bookended by the fatal car crashes of a French cigarette paper dealer and a Soviet oil dealer, the novel is a montage of historical figures from financiers, French automobile and English oil magnates, Soviet bureaucrats, assembly line workers in Detroit, and rubber plantation laborers in Indonesia. Neither fixated on the auratic object of the car nor the fantasies of freedom, Ehrenberg hollows out its characters, turning them, as Timothy Brennan perceptively notes, into “cardboard cut-outs,” and takes up the car as that “commodity of commodities,” whose production, consumption, and finance pulls everyone and everything, including the revolutionary project of the Russian Revolution, into the brutal, dehumanizing machine of global capital accumulation.35 In this, we might consider Ehrenberg as a model for the kind of revolutionary antiroad novel that begins to emerge as the phantasmatic power of the automobile and/as Americanness begins to falter.
Finally, in postcolonial West Africa too, the automobile took on a quite different meaning than in the United States, owing to the lack of automobile production capacity, the small number of privately owned automobiles, and a largely underdeveloped and uneven system of road infrastructures,36 all of which reflected the forms of neocolonial indebtedness and extreme inequality that made national development impossible. As Lindsey Green-Sims argues in Postcolonial Automobilities, automobile ownership was primarily restricted to postcolonial elites; the automobile thus functioned as a “sign of the divide between the postcolonial elite and the masses.”37 The majority of the population’s experience of the automobile was as passengers, riding around in various forms of informal shared taxis, like the mammy wagon in Nigeria in which homemade wooden structures were built onto old, imported lorry bodies.38 Given the lack of privately owned automobiles and highway infrastructure, it makes sense that while numerous postcolonial “novels of disillusionment,” as Neil Lazarus puts it,39 took up the automobile as a symbol of this divide, the novel focused more on the status and financing of the automobile, as opposed to the journeys it enables. We can think, for instance, of Chinua Achebe’s No Longer at Ease (1960) and Ousmane Sembène’s Xala (1973), which as Green-Sims notes, take automobility as a symbol of the corrupt new postcolonial elite, and their own precarious position. While road trips in the novel have significance (in terms of the daily trips around the city as well as a few journeys farther afield), they are notably brief. In No Longer at Ease, there is Obi’s five-hundred-mile trip from his childhood home in Umofi to Lagos in his Morris Oxford, bought on advance with a letter confirming his new position as a senior civil servant, which is telegraphed into a few sentences about being sent off the road into the bush to avoid a collision with two mammy wagons, and his brief attempt to chase an abortion doctor who has taken his girlfriend, which leads him the wrong way up a street. And in Xala there is El Hadji Abou Kader Beye’s journey in his Mercedes from Dakar to the remote village of the healer, Seren Mada, who promises to cure him of his impotence.
In both cases, however, the automobile’s main narrative power doesn’t derive from mobility (as it initially appears), but rather from the problem of financing and debt, which become crucial to the moment of reversal or peripeteia in the protagonists’ journeys, bringing them into confrontation with the populations whose own dispossession is often the prerequisite for their prosperity. Obi loses the fifty pounds his girlfriend gives him to pay off his car insurance when it’s stolen from his glove box by a group “half-clad little urchins” and ultimately turns to accepting bribes to make his car payments, leading to his arrest, which begins and concludes the novel.40 In Xala, El Hadji is increasingly tapped for money he no longer has by his wives and children as he is shuttled back and forth between their villas, and is ultimately unable to keep up on his car payments, leading to a threatening visit from the white “European” from “Automobile Credit.” The novel concludes with him at the mercy of a chorus of lepers, unemployed slum dwellers, and landless peasants, seeking repayment for the land and life taken from them by the postcolonial elite (an echo of the heroic collective of striking railway workers and their community in his earlier novel God’s Bits of Wood [1962]). In both these instances, the automobile novel is not and cannot be a road novel, nor can it hold any fantasy of national redemption, but rather becomes allegorical of the new class hierarchies within the country as well as emerging neocolonial relationship of debt.
There are two insights we can glean by bringing these accounts of automobility, levels of capitalist development, and cultural production in France and French Indochina, the Soviet Union, and postcolonial West Africa to bear on the context of the emergence of the road novel as a genre. First, it makes clear that the precondition for the road novel’s emergence as a hegemonic genre in the postwar period is the thorough integration of the automobile into everyday life: namely, the private ownership of automobiles on a mass scale and highly developed automobile infrastructures (for example, a nationwide system of highways, frequent gas stations, auto body shops, and other roadside services). The everydayness of the privately owned automobile is required for the road trip to appear as a universal and democratic activity, as opposed to the marker of an elite and hierarchical society, and thus for the trip to offer an allegorical fantasy of evenness in which everyone can become a successful entrepreneurial subject within a democratic, modernized capitalist nation-state. In places where, in the 1950s and 1960s, the automobile was not readily available for private consumption or where automotive infrastructures are sparse or uneven, which is generally to say in more peripheralized regions of the world, this fantasy was not readily available, and the automobile catalyzes a range of different, more antagonistic forms, and the road narrative is relegated to a latent or minor current.
While this might seem to support accounts of the road novels as merely a genre of automobiles and automobility, this isn’t the case. Because, as Ross notes, the automotive industry is “exemplary” of both the strength of the national economy in relation to the global economic system and the achievement of a society of mass consumption, the presence of an automotive industry, and the proliferation of privately owned automobiles was, for much of the American century, a barometer of capitalist development.
Second, these divergent histories of automobility help us see that automobility is not inherently imbued with or linked to Americanness as such, but rather with the vision of modernization that consolidated around the so-called American way of life, that postwar oil-fueled suburban model of mass consumption that became a key export product and key tenet of US cultural, economic, and military hegemony as it unfolded domestically and internationally. This expanded context can also help us clarify how even within the United States, depictions of the experience of driving and traveling, too, should not be read as negotiating abstract conceptions of Americanness but rather as more material processes of modernization. This becomes particularly evident when we compare the “western” road novels of Jack Kerouac or Patricia Highsmith with the gothic, horror-tinged road novels of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, produced in the US South. As I will argue in chapter 1, instead of charting long distance journeys of endless growth, development, and experience, these southern road novels have a far more compressed, condensed, and haunted character. Here, the road novel clearly does not serve as a tool for meditation on the American self or social and political orders, but rather for making sense of the traumatic, rapid modernization and petrocapitalization of the southern economy. As such, the road novel, like the southern roads themselves that always threaten to dissolve back into the mud, is at risk of dissolving into or being overtaken by the genres of gothic or horror. The US southern road novel is not unique in this matter. Rather, drawing on Fredric Jameson’s argument about the “primal generic opposition between epic and romance,” I argue that because the road novel is a genre of capitalist modernization that produces “epic” fantasies of entrepreneurial freedom, while also limning processes devastation and ruin, it is always haunted by these “romance” gothic-horror undercurrents, and that this tension between the two genres is constitutive.41
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If the road novel emerges as a dominant genre alongside US hegemony, the question then is what work does the road novel do? Or to posit the question in the terms posed by Michael McKeon, what “intractable problems” does the genre mediate and what are “explanatory and problem-‘solving’ capacities”?42 In “Modernism and Imperialism,” Jameson argued that imperialism poses the representational problem that modernism must address. “Colonialism,” he writes,
means that a significant structural segment of the economic system as a whole is now located elsewhere, beyond the metropolis, outside the daily life and existential experience of the home country, in colonies over the water whose own life experience and life world—very different from that of the imperial power—remains unknown and unimaginable for the subjects of the imperial power, whatever social class they may belong to.43
Faced with this problem, Jameson argues, “one’s simplest first thought, . . . is no doubt to make a map.”44 It is this map, and the emergence of what he terms “a new spatial language,” that undergirds much great modernist writing, from James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899).45 And yet, Jameson warns, “cartography is not the solution, but rather the problem, at least in its ideal epistemological form as social cognitive mapping on the global scale.”46 The map produced by modernism emerges from “the demands and constraints of the spatial perceptions of the individual”47 and is thus necessarily “incomplete” and “epistemologically distorted and misleading,” reflecting the historical blind spots and displacements of its contemporary moment.48 In the case of modernism, this blind spot takes the form of the displacement of the relationship of domination between first and third worlds into a relationship “between First World powers of the holders of Empire.”49
The primary example that Jameson offers is E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End (1910), particularly the opening pages, which tracks the ill-conceived train trip of the nosy and slightly incompetent aunt, Mrs. Munt, which takes her alongside the Great North Road, as she travels from London to the country house of Howard’s End. “At times the Great North Road accompanied her, more suggestive of infinity than any railway, awakening, after a nap of hundred years, to such life as is conferred by the stench of motorcars, and to such culture is implied by the advertisement of antibilious pills.”50 While initially the terms appear to be “the ancient highway” against “the modern railway,” it also, as Mike Niblett notes, registers “the emerging competition between coal and oil as hegemonic energy sources.”51 And indeed, as the novel continues, it is not the train, but the motorcar that moves to the fore—as the figure of modernity, that which undergirds its modernist style, and as the metonymy for imperialism. It is through the automobile, particularly its rubber tires, that the novel implicitly connects the wealth and luxury of the core with the extraction and exploitation of the peripheries, namely, through the son, Charles Wilcox, who works for his father’s Imperial and West African Rubber company in Uganda.
What interests us here is Jameson’s implicit link between the nascent road novel (that is, the use of automobile trips as narrative apparatus) and the attempt to create a map that emerges from “the demands and constraints of the spatial perceptions of the individual.”52 In Howard’s End, the automobile poses a problem to such a map. It is an object that psychologically and epistemologically confounds the two protagonists at the same time as it symbolizes most clearly the relations of imperialism that undergird their own wealth, moral system, and so forth. And yet, when “the problem of imperialism is as it were restructured,” as Jameson puts it, in the post–World War II era as questions of neocolonialism and decolonization domestically and internationally come to the fore,53 the car ceases to be a narrative problem for the cognitive map and transforms into the organizing principle for mapping this “restructured” problem.
The road novel inscribes the limitations of its vision into the object producing the narrative vision. The automobile is the exemplary commodity of Fordism; that is, it obscures the now globalized class relations of its production (for example, the tapping and extraction of rubber, aluminum, and oil, alongside the assembly line labor producing the automobile and the logistical labor involved in transporting it) through its proliferation of ostensibly individual styles and its production of private spaces that seemingly contained the potential for true, individual experience. In the road novel, the automobile is that which enables the protagonist to see how the very system of automobility is breaking apart and transforming older life worlds, while at the same time the automobile’s phantasmagoria itself constrains the ability of the protagonist and often the novel to properly register these changes, transforming the journey into a privatized one of developmental automobility.
That the automobile and particularly the petroleum-saturated automobile journey should transform from a problem or blockage to the maps of a waning British upper class to the main provider of such a map for an emergent hegemonic American middle class makes sense, considering the transitions from coal to oil as undergirding the shift from British to US hegemony. And indeed, recent work on the road novel has taken up the genre as a crucial one for thinking through petromodernity. Since Patricia Yaeger’s 2011 introduction to the PMLA essay cluster on literature and energy regimens, where she asked the question, “How often do Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise stop for gas?,”54 the road novel has been considered a privileged genre in the fields of “energy humanities” or “petrocultures.”55 Addressing the question first posed by Amitav Ghosh and later developed by Graeme Macdonald and Imre Szeman—namely, “Why do so few literary texts in the period of world energy literature address the power of energy to shape the ‘world’ in which they circulate?”56—scholars have begun to consider how the road novel might provide insight into, or even embody, oil’s simultaneous “catastrophe” and “exuberance,”57 its privatized “petroaffect” and “petroanxiety.”58 And a generalized “petromelancholia” that has developed around oil.59 In these accounts too, however, the road novel’s meaning is seen as reflecting the experience of driving. “Road Fiction,” as Stephanie LeMenager wrote in her pathbreaking article “The Aesthetics of Petroleum after Oil!,” “invites a confusion of driving and narrative itself as modes of movement and the enactment of time, as if driving were a fundamental cognitive process, like narrative, as well as a fundamental physiological experience of being human, in time.”60 More recently, Scott Obernesser has argued that road narratives divulge “the ways in which oil and oil culture shape and reshape human interiority, reveal[ing] how people are in a sense manufactured by oil as psychological or even spiritual beings.”61
These accounts have revivified critical attention to the road novel, opening up more capacious and materialist accounts of the road novel as not just a symbolic genre in which questions of national belonging play out, but one that is rooted in and mediates the petroleum-based energy system fueling US hegemony. And yet, many of these accounts misrecognize the meaning of the road trip for (some of) its protagonists as well as the role the road trip plays for the narrative. In particular, as with earlier automobility readings, these accounts tend to focus so narrowly on the protagonists and the experience of driving that they largely efface the landscapes through which the road novel travels, and the numerous characters not in the car, that are equally important to understanding oil’s remaking of the modern world and its subjects. Moreover, these accounts tend to replicate much of the contemporary scholarship on oil, which, as Adam Hanieh argues, treats it only as an “energy source or transport fuel,” thus ignoring what he describes as “the other aspect of oil’s mid-20th century emergence as the dominant fossil fuel: the birth of a world composed of plastics and other synthetic products derived from petroleum,” which come to replace naturally derived substances like wood, glass, and rubber, and which transformed oil into “substance of daily life” and the “feedstock, the literal raw material of commodity production itself.”62
This “other aspect” has been taken up by scholars examining a range of other petrogenres that have emerged concurrently with the road novel—from the suburban novel to the noir, and from what Jennifer Wenzel terms the “petromagic realism” of Nigeria to the vampiric and lycanthropic “petropoetics” of contemporary Russia.63 Read in relationship to both Jameson’s account of the new spatial language that emerges in the period of imperialism and this broader petrocultural turn, we can begin to see that the road novel’s take-up of driving does not offer an unmediated account of oil’s shaping of the subject, but rather a specific strategy for mapping the emergence and transformations of a new petrobacked American hegemony, from a certain limited subject position.
The road novel is a genre that emerges and flourishes because of, to return to Jameson, its ability to create a map that satisfies “the demands and constraints of the spatial perceptions” of the kind of developmentalist subject, being forged by the so-called American way of life: not the actual ways that Americans lived, but the fantasy of the entrepreneurial life everyone could have, which was forged through the deliberate creation of the single-family suburban dwelling, mass consumption, and wide-spread automobility. The road novel takes as its structure the fantasies and desires of automotive individualism and developmentalist self-discovery but does so in order to tour and make sense of violent and vertiginous sites of (petro)modernization that buttress this way of life: the destruction of old life worlds and ways of being and the wrenching open of new commodity frontiers, the production of new infrastructures and built environments, and the colonization of everyday life.
This is both the nature of its narrative success and its political limit: while the road trip offers a powerful mode and way of linking together and revealing the seemingly disparate processes that produce the so-called American way of life, its mode necessarily upholds the phantasmagoria of automobility and its promise of endless expansion, self-development, and mass consumption. In contrast to a genre like horror, which has been recently returned to as a revolutionary genre able to map and challenge the violences of contemporary capitalism, particularly the violence lurking beneath the promises of capitalist modernization, the road novel holds no such promise.64 The road novel is a genre relentlessly tethered to fantasies of capitalist modernization and individualism and entrepreneurial development. The road novel is, in a sense, horror’s other. If the horror genre “show[s] the horrors of contemporary social forms and unleash[es] dark, but ultimately utopian fantasies of fighting back,”65 the road novel stands as a useful barometer for the durability or erosion of an Americanized capitalist fantasies of developmentalism and entrepreneurialism. But these limits are themselves where the value of the road novel lies for us as critics: it is a genre that registers the robustness of such fantasies at different moments, and how they are made, challenged, and unmade at different moments and locations of crisis. Taken together, this book argues that short of being a nostalgic genre of Americanness, the road novel is instead a form whose rise and fall illuminates the globalizing trajectories of US-backed petromodernity.
Notes
1. John Urry, “The ‘System of Automobility,’” Theory, Culture, and Society 21, no. 4–5 (2004): 27. See also Tim Cresswell, “Mobility as Resistance: A Geographical Reading of Kerouac On the Road,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 18, no. 2 (1993): 249–62; Tim Cresswell, On the Move: Mobilities in the Modern Western World (London: Routledge, 2006); and Mimi Sheller, Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes (New York: Verso, 2008).
2. Cotton Seiler, Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 2, 41, emphasis in original.
3. Ann Brigham, American Road Narratives: Reimagining Mobility in Literature and Film (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2015), 3, 61, emphasis added.
4. Katie Mills, The Road Story and the Rebel (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press), 2.
5. Sarah Blackwood, “In The Golden State, Lydia Kiesling Brings Motherhood to the Road Novel,” New Yorker, September 3, 2018, www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/in-the-golden-state-lydia-kiesling-….
6. There has been a more global approach to the road movie, leading to a reevaluation of the “once generally assumed North-Americanness of the genre,” as Nadine Lie put it in The Latin American (Counter-)Road Movie and Ambivalent Modernity (Cham: Springer, 2017). See, for instance, Eda Mazierska and Laura Rascaroli, Crossing New Europe: Postmodern Travel and the European Road Movie (London: Wallflower, 2006); Sara Brandellero, The Brazilian Road Movie: Journeys of (Self) Discovery (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013); Natália Pinazz, Journeys in Argentine and Brazilian Cinema (Cham: Springer, 2014); Verónica Garibotto and Jorge Pérez, eds., The Latin American Road Movie (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Michael Gott, French-Language Road Cinema: Borders, Diasporas, Migration, and “New Europe” (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016); José Duarte and Timothy Corrigan, eds., The Global Road Movie: Alternative Journeys around the World (Chicago: Intellect Press, 2018); and Neil Archer’s The French Road Movie: Space, Mobility, Identity (London: Berghann Books, 2022). However, these works tend to focus on road novels of a certain region or case studies of different kinds of road novels as opposed to trying to redefine what the road movie does or how it works. Discussions of the road novel in international contexts are fewer and farther between. There are a few excellent individual studies of road novels in other geographical and national contexts. See, for instance, Laurence Codere’s “Meaningful Mobility and the Ties That Bind,” which tracks how the road novel emerges to grapple with post-socialist China. Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 26, no. 2 (2014): 1–37. See also Jorge Pérez’s “The Spanish Novel on the Road: Mobile Identities at the Turn of the Century,” which reads the road novel as emerging in response to the crisis of the social welfare system, Anales de la literatura española contemporánea 33, no. 1 (2008). However, these examples are regionally specific and not comparative.
7. In Capital, volume 3, Marx famously wrote that, “The realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases. . . . Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite” (Marx and Engels Collected Works, Vol 37: Karl Marx Capital; Volume 3 [London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1998], 799–800). My argument is that the promise of a specifically developmentalist freedom embedded within the road novel requires that the journey, at least momentarily, exceeds the purpose of mere labor and survival.
8. See the appendix, “List of Road Novels,” for an excerpt of this database. Some of these books are still untranslated and others I couldn’t get hold of through my library. In these cases, I relied on articles or reviews where possible.
9. “Take off” comes from W. W. Rostow’s Cold War Development model, “Rostow’s Stages of Growth,” and describes the stage in which a more traditional society becomes modern and industrial. See Molly Geidel’s excellent Peace Corps Fantasies: How Development Shaped the Global Sixties (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).
10. Kristin Ross, Clean Bodies: The Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).
11. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1994), 6.
12. Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), 5.
13. Toby Olson, Seaview (Portland, OR: Hawthorn Books, 2006); Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing (London: Bloomsbury, 2017); Alejandro Jodorowsky, Albina and the Dog-Men, trans. Alfred MacAdam (Brooklyn, NY: Restless Books, 2016).
14. Olson, Seaview, 148–49.
15. Ronald Primeau, Romance of the Road: the Literature of the American Highway (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1996), 10–11.
16. Ward, Sing, 195.
17. Nicole Dib, “Haunted Roadscapes in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing,” MELUS 45, no. 2 (2020): 135.
18. Jodorowsky, Albina, 102.
19. Jodorowsky, Albina, 102.
20. I’m grateful to Robert Spencer for first raising the link between the road novel and sea narrative.
21. Ross, Fast Cars, 19.
22. Ross, Fast Cars, 33.
23. Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, trans. Sascha Rabinovitch (London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 1971), 58.
24. See Peter J. Bloom, French Colonial Documentary: Mythologies of Humanitarianism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008) and Stéphanie Ponsavady, Cultural and Literary Representations of the Automobile in French Indochina: A Colonial Roadshow (Cham: Springer, 2008).
25. Ross, Fast Cars, 24.
26. Guy Debord, “Situationist Theses on Traffic,” Internationale Situationniste 3 (November 1959), www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/traffic.html.
27. David Inglis, “Auto Couture: Thinking the Car in Post-War France,” Theory, Culture, and Society 21, no. 4–5 (2004): 197–219, and Ross, Fast Cars.
28. Ross, Fast Cars, 28.
29. Ponsavady, Cultural, 154.
30. Luminita Gatejel, “The Wheels of Desire. Automobility Discourses in the Soviet Union,” in Towards Mobility: Varieties of Automobilism in East and West (Wolfsburg: VolkswagenAktiengesellschaft, 2009), 34.
31. Nordica Nettleton, “Driving Towards Communist Consumerism,” Cahiers du Monde Russe 47, no. 1–2 (2006), https://journals.openedition.org/monderusse/9594.
32. Lewis Siegelbaum, “The Impact of Motorization on Soviet Society after 1945,” in Towards Mobility: Varieties of Automobilism in East and West (Wolfsburg: VolkswagenAktiengesellschaft, 2009), 22.
33. Lewis Siegelbaum, Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 22.
34. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, interestingly, we see a spate of vampiric and lycanthropic Russian oil novels, but so far as I know, no postcommunist Russian road novel. There is, however, a particularly notable post-Soviet road novel: Serhiy Zhadan’s astonishing 2010 Voroshilovgrad (Dallas: Vellum Books, 2016), which I’ll touch on later. Voroshilovgrad tracks its protagonist’s journey from Kharkhiv back to his childhood home of Luhansk to take charge of his missing brother’s gas station. What first takes up the appearance of a road novel hurtling toward progress quickly becomes a swirling nonlinear tour of the abandoned factories, parks, and airports of the oil frontier of the Donbas and the nonlinear and irreal stories of the people and often ghosts either trapped there or stubbornly holding on to an older, Soviet past. Significantly, as Amelia Glaser notes, once in the Donbas, the car is swapped for the Soviet-era Ikarus buses, which become “the golden chariots” of the past (n.p.). In its turn to the bus, Zhadan’s novel fuses the deindustrialization and de-development road novels that emerge in more utopic guises in 1970s US cities and that then in more dystopic guises in the post-2008 Latin American contexts. Amelia Glaser, “Under the Tyranny of Memory,” Los Angeles Review of Books, June 29, 2016,
35. Timothy Brennan, “Homiletic Realism,” in Negative Cosmopolitanism: Cultures and Politics of World Citizenship after Globalization, ed. Eddy Kent and Terri Tomsk (Montreal: McGill Queen’s University Press, 2017), 277.
36. In The Making of the African Road (Leiden: Brill, 2017), Kurt Beck, Gabriel Klaeger, and Michael Stasik note that, “Africa is the continent with the lowest road density worldwide, and many of the existing roads indeed require full attention when using them” (1).
37. Lindsey Green-Sims, Postcolonial Automobility: Car Culture in West Africa (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 19.
38. For more on automobility in West Africa, see Jennifer Hart, Ghana on the Go: African Mobility in the Age of Motor Transportation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016); Kenda Mutongi, Matatu: A History of Popular Transportation in Nairobi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017); and Ambe J. Njoh, “Implications of Africa’s Transportation System for Development in the Era of Colonization,” Review of Black Political Economy 35, no. 4: 147–62.
39. Neil Lazarus, “Great Expectations and After: The Politics of Postcolonialism in Africa Fiction,” Social Text 13/14 (Winter–Spring 1986): 49–63.
40. Chinua Achebe, No Longer at Ease (Oxford: Heinemann Publishers, 1987), 101.
41. Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 2009), 555.
42. Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), 20.
43. Fredric Jameson, The Modernist Papers (New York: Verso, 2007), 157.
44. Jameson, Modernist Papers, 158.
45. Jameson, Modernist, 163.
46. Jameson, Modernist, 158.
47. Jameson, Modernist, 158.
48. Jameson, Modernist, 163.
49. Jameson, Modernist, 155.
50. Quoted in Jameson, Modernist, 158.
51. Jameson, Modernist, 160; Michael Niblett, World Literature and Ecology: The Aesthetics of Commodity Frontiers, 1890–1950 (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 29.
52. Jameson, Modernist Papers, 158.
53. Jameson, Modernist, 155.
54. Patricia Yaeger, “Editor’s Column: Literature in the Ages of Wood, Tallow, Coal, Whale Oil, Gasoline, Atomic Power, and Other Energy Sources,” PMLA 126, no. 2 (2011): 306.
55. Imre Szeman and Dominic Boyer, Energy Humanities: An Anthology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017).
56. Imre Szeman, “Conjectures on World Energy Literature; or, What Is Petroculture?,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 52, no. 2 (2017): 282. See also Amitav Ghosh, “Petrofiction: The Oil Encounter and the Novel,” New Republic, March 2, 1992, 29–34; Graeme Macdonald, “Research Note: The Resources of Fiction,” Reviews in Cultural Theory 3, no. 2 (2013): 1–24.
57. Lawrence Buell, “A Short History of Oil Cultures; or, The Marriage of Catastrophe and Exuberance,” Journal of American Studies (May 2012): 273–93.
58. Scott Obernesser, “Road Trippin’: Twentieth Century American Road Narratives from On The Road to The Road,” PhD diss., University of Mississippi, 2019; and “What It Means to Be On The Road: Mobility and Petrocultures during the Mid-Twentieth Century,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 27, no. 3 (Summer 2020): 491–512.
59. Stephanie LeMenager, Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 17.
60. Stephanie LeMenager, “The Aesthetics of Petroleum after Oil!,” American Literary History 14, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 59–86.
61. Obernesser, “What It Means,” 9–10.
62. Adam Hanieh, “Petrochemical Empire: The Geo-Politics of Fossil-Fuelled Production,” New Left Review 130 (July–August 2021): 26–27.
63. See Rick Crownshaw, “Climate Change Perpetrators: Ecocriticism, Implicated Subjects, and Anthropocene Fiction,” in Routledge International Handbook of Perpetrator Studies, ed. Susanne C. Knittel and Zachary J. Goldberg (London: Routledge, 2019), 228–40; Sharae Deckard, “‘This oil thing touches everything’: World-Literary Crime Fiction and Fossil Capital,” Études anglaises 71, no. 1 (2021): 34–52; Harry Pitt Scott, “Offshore Mysteries, Narrative Infrastructure: Oil, Noir, and the World-Ocean,” Humanities 9, no. 3 (2020): 71; Jennifer Wenzel, “Petro-Magic-Realism: Toward a Political Ecology of Nigerian Literature,” Postcolonial Studies 9, no. 4 (2006): 449–64; Ilya Kalinin, “Petropoetics,” in Russian Literature since 1991, ed. Evgeny Dobrenko and Mark Lipovetsky (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 120–44; and Warwick Research Collective, “Oboroten Spectres: Lycanthropy, Neoliberalism, and New Russia in Victor Pelevin,” in Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), 96–114. Also see Treasa de Loughry’s analysis of how Rana Dasgupta’s Solo takes up an oneiric and bipartite structure to offer a “multi-scalar analysis of polymeric expression,” “Polymeric Chains and Petrolic Imaginaries: World Literature, Plastic, and Negative Value,” Green Letters 23, no. 2 (2019): 187.
64. See Johanna Isaacson, Stepford Daughters: Weapons for Feminists in Contemporary Horror (Brooklyn, NY: Common Notions, 2022); Patricia Stuelke, “Horror and the Arts of Assembly,” Post45 (April 14, 2019), https://post45.org/2019/04/horror-and-the-arts-of-feminist-assembly; and Annie McLanahan, Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and 21st Century Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017).
65. Isaacson, Stepford, n.p.