Join us this Thursday, February 6th at 2:45pm in the ICSLAC seminar room (or remotely, as it is a hybrid event) as Dr. Myka Tucker-Abramson (Associate Professor, University of Warwick, Department of English and Comparative Literature Studies) will present over Zoom. Her work has been published in PMLA, Modern Fiction Studies, and Feminist Theory. This talk is taken from her forthcoming monograph, Cartographies of Empire: the Road Novel and American Hegemony (Stanford University Press 2025).
Event Details:
- Abstract: Challenging dominant conceptions of the road novel as a distinctly American genre that reckons with domestic questions of national identity, this talk offers a new set of spatial and temporal coordinates for our understanding of the genre. I reread the road novel as a genre specific to, coterminous with, and illuminating of US hegemony’s global trajectory from its emergence to decline. More specifically, I argue that the genre takes up the tropes of automobility and travel in order to map out violent and vertiginous processes of capitalist modernization, while equally obfuscating these harsh truths through narratives of individual success and failure in achieving the so-called “American way of life.” To illustrate these claims, I turn to three road novels that emerge at different moments across US hegemony’s arc: Jack Kerouac’s paradigmatic 1956 road novel On the Road, which marks the emergence and consolidation of US hegemony; Iva Pekárková’s post-socialist transition road novel Truck Stop Rainbows (1989) which, tracking the primitive accumulation of the socialist state, presents the emergence of US unipolarity amid the Soviet Union’s collapse; and Adania Shibli’s Palestinian road novel Minor Detail (2018) that, by tethering its apartheid landscape to the US military and economic support underpinning it, refracts the terminal crisis of US hegemony. Taken together, this talk aims to reperiodise and reorganise our understanding of the genre of the road novel and its role as both key cultural product and critical lens on US hegemony.
- PDF: included “Introduction,” from Cartographies of Empire (attached), which Myka graciously provided, for those interested!
- Zoom: email makenziesalmon@cmail.carleton.ca for Zoom link.