Review: Cartographies of Empire: The Road Novel and American Hegemony

On the other, Tucker-Abramson reveals the wish fulfillment, defensive denials, and violent processes that drive and sustain the genre, including “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.” (19) We might translate the critical move as follows: rather than a focus on the car and the mobility it seems to make possible for certain protagonists, Cartographies of Empire instead attends to how stories about cars are also, sometimes unwittingly, stories about the colonial and capitalist relations threaded into the roads beneath, what Samantha Schweblin calls the “asphalt nerves” of connection.¹ Even as the tropes of travel and the automobile simultaneously document these violent processes, they “obfuscate these harsh truths through seductive narratives of individual success and failure to achieve the so-called American way of life” (3). 

From US classics to Adania Shibli’s Palestinian road novel Minor Detail (2020[2017]), which Tucker-Abramson reads in the context of Israel’s post-October genocidal incursions into Gaza and the West Bank, the global and comparative edge of Cartographies of Empire is matched by a re-periodization of the genre. We begin with Anglo-American origins in the late 1940s and 1950s in Chapter 1: Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust (1948) and John Christopher’s The Death of Grass (1956). Chapter 2 then considers how the road novel of the 1970s maps new internal commodity frontiers of US Empire: the racialized inner city (Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren [1975]) and the reservation on the edge of an oil and uranium boom (Lelie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony [1977]). Chapter 3 moves to post-socialist Eastern Europe, where the road novel encodes the collapse of communism and the passing of what Susan Buck-Morss calls “mass dreamworlds” (91). Novels including Truck Stop Rainbows by Iva Pekárková (1992 [1989]) and Zachary Karabashliev’s 18% Gray (2011[2008]) bring to the fore the violent experience of capitalist integration in debt, dispossession, displacement, loss of community, and the eruption of ethnic rivalries. Chapter 4 explores the “countertopographic feminist road novel” in the context of the 2008 financial crisis, the erosion of US hegemony after a failed War on Terror, and the emergence of a multipolar world system (with the rise of China). Key texts here are Chris Krauss’s Summer of Hate (2012), a Western that narrates failed personal and economic developments amid the US Southwest’s speculative real estate and construction bubble; and Carol Bensimon’s We All Loved Cowboys (2018 [2013]), a “gauchesca” and cross-class lesbian romance set in the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul during the soy boom. They are deemed “countertopographic” novels insofar as the protagonists fail to grasp the contours of the rising misery and inequality surrounding them, as well as possibilities of collective political struggle embedded there. Even as the genre falters in its original offering of a “comforting narrative of white, middle-class and national redemption” (137), however, it also allows for readerly anagnorisis. The protagonist in We All Loved Cowboys may be essentially blind to her environment, but the reader is encouraged to do the work she cannot and to identify the soybean frontier shaping the events of the novel as part of a larger story of land and resource dispossession, pauperization, privatization, and the collapse of social welfare. 

In her final chapter, Tucker-Abramson returns to the United States and posits the “postapocalyptic road novel” as grappling not only with the erosion of the road novel’s material base in a regime of accelerated subsumption but also, more pointedly, with the genre itself. Ling Ma’s Severance (2019) and Emily St. John Mendel’s Station Eleven (2014) are the two main examples here. Critical to this new context is the role of logistics in extraction, a configuration of global capitalism Javier Arboleda calls the “planetary mine” that marks the end of US hegemony. Instead of a fantasy of agrarian return after the apocalypse, these novels – both satirical and redemptive – take logistical spaces (e.g., IKEA, airports) as both romantic ruins and enclave spaces of the future. Symptomatically, the protagonist’s Nissan runs out of fuel at the end of Severance and we are told that “[w]ith nowhere else for the novel to go and with no one to go with, it concludes with a kind of exhausted ambiguity, offering at best a vague hope of species propagation, but one shorn or any social or political vision of a new, collective society” (166). Particularly fascinating in Tucker-Abramson’s reading of the present is how the ship, rather than the car, returns as the privileged vehicle for mapping the spaces of logistics (consider the fascination with the container ship Ever Given stuck in the Suez Canal in 2021 or the ongoing crisis in the Strait of Hormuz). Just as the car is displaced by the ship, the genre itself makes room for other forms such as the zombie novel, the comic book, the sea narrative, utopian literature, and the postapocalyptic and such (153). 

The book’s gesture to articulate narratives around automobiles and roads from across different latitudes of capitalist development novels is urgent and necessary, and the individual close readings insightful and deeply nuanced. When approached from a cultural archive outside the imperial core, however, the book feels overly invested in the rise and fall of a well-defined genre, one perhaps too closely tied to the rise and fall of US hegemony. As the genre weakens, it is said to paradoxically proliferate, leading to the “remarkable efflorescence of exhilaratingly strange, formally diverse road novels from peripheral and semi-peripheral areas” (176). But from the perspective of the Latin American archive, for instance, road novels have long existed that were always formally diverse and likely “strange” to an Ango-American audience. Does the heterogeneity of Latin American examples today necessarily attest to a historical decline or faltering of what was otherwise a tightly plotted genre? Instead, I would locate them within a broader discourse that flared up around motorized travel and modern transportation infrastructures from the very beginning of the twentieth century, a discourse that included roads, cars, trucks, buses, and trains.

 In this context, cultural critic Jens Andermann has proposed that narratives of motorized travel in early 20^th century Latin America frequently coalesced around the trope of the “accidental journey” because cars often broke down, roads were unpassable, and supply chains for fuel and spare parts were interrupted.² This syncopated space-time pattern of acceleration and interruption does not resonate with a US frontier mentality of self-discovery. And Andermann proposes that it might have given birth to a specifically Latin American aesthetic, functioning as “something of an origin scene of Latin American abstractionism, by way of the liberation of aesthetics from the referential function of colonial landscaping achieved thanks to technology.”³ This is just one example of how the trope of the automobile outside the Anglo-American context was likely entangled in an efflorescence of alternative narratives from the beginning, telling stories that might not have quite registered from the center of US hegemony. 

The precondition for the road novel’s emergence as a hegemonic genre is what Kristin Ross in Fast Cars calls, the “metamorphosis of the car into the quotidian.”⁴Tucker-Abramson acknowledges that in many places, especially in the Global South, the car never did become quotidian and so instead became allegorical of class hierarchies (12–13). But we can go a step further to point out that what Brazilian critic Roberto Schwarz might call the “misplaced idea”⁵ of the car applies to the novel form as well, which, to become quotidian, also required widespread access to literacy and infrastructures of publication and circulation. In a more heterogeneous landscape, narratives around motorized travel in Latin America tended to be formally diverse and promiscuous from the very beginning, scattered across various modes of writing, never sealed off from stories of collective and non-motorized modes of travel, and perhaps never quite coalescing as self-sufficient fantasy.  

Perhaps inadvertently then, Cartographies of Empire may redouble the normativity of the Empire’s cartographies, overselling to some extent the hegemony of the road novel as a genre as well as its function as a carrier of US hegemony throughout the world. Still, the book’s gesture to think together novels from across different regions is both commendable and necessary. Even more important, reading road novels as entry-points into the fantasies and devastations of capitalist development reframes them under the poetics of infrastructure. I have no doubt that Cartographies of Empire will quickly prove to be a key reference point in global conversations on how roads and automobiles have been charged with meaning in literary form. 

: :

1. Samantha Schweblin, Fever Dream (Riverhead Books, 2017), 183.
2. Jens Andermann, Entranced Earth: Art, Extractivism and the End of Landscape (Northwestern University Press, 2023), 79.
3. Jens Andermann, Entranced Earth, 79.
4. Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (MIT Press, 1995), 29.
5. Roberto Schwarz, Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture (Verso, 1992).

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  Adriana Johnson

  Adriana Michele Campos Johnson is Professor of Comparative Literature and Latin American and Iberian Cultures at UC-Irvine. She is the author of Sentencing Canudos: Subalternity in the Backlands of Brazil (2010) and the forthcoming Cinema as Infrastructure: Visuality, Power and the Latin American South (University of Texas, 2027). Lately, she writes on infrastructural modes of reading, automation, piracy, different media (language, writing, visual forms) and is at the start of a project on the sense we make of water forms (drought, rivers, rain, sea).