Storied Road: Ambivalence in the Landscape of American Automobility

This introduction to the larger study of early American road narrative draws on an array of archival material to map and theorize the emergence of modern American automobility. The confluence between Henri Lefebvre’s social production of space and Tim Cresswell and John Urry’s reflections on mobility resonate in John Brinkerhoff Jackson and Anne Whiston Spirn’s theories of the language of landscape. This basis helps show that road stories propagated what Antonio Gramsci and Raymond Williams would call “manufactured consent” to a settler colonial regime of national integration that have never been stable, inevitable, nor universal. Mikhail Bakhtin and Carolyn Miller’s theories of genre provide a way of showing how road story continually renegotiates geographic thinking. In this, American road story is dominated by specific subjectivities, overwhelmingly white and predominantly male versions of five figural types—Agrarians, Progressives, Trailblazers, Vagabonds, and Tramps. At the turn of the twentieth century, these figures formulated and explored competing visions of a new mobility landscape, raising fraught questions of government structure, inclusion and access, frictions between urban and rural environments, and tensions of labor economics. Even the most aspirational examples exhibit dissonances of faith in the national automobility project. So, given the implications and consequences of American automobility in terms of social justice and ecology, scrutiny of its formative justifications becomes all the more imperative.