Trains, Culture, and Mobility
Riding the Rails
Contributions by Samuel Gerald Collins, Colin Divall, Tristan R. Grunow, Araceli Masterson-Algar, Alexander Medcalf, Agata Morka, Hiraku Shimoda, Hiroki Shin, Peter Soppelsa, Rowan Wilken Edited by Benjamin Fraser, Steven D. Spalding
Publication date:
30 December 2011Length of book:
322 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksISBN-13: 9780739167496
Trains, Culture and Mobility: Riding the Rails goes beyond textual representations of rail travel to engage an impressive range of political, sociological and urban theory. Taken together, these essays highlight the complexity of the modern experience of train mobility, and its salient relation to a number of cultural discourses. Incorporating traditionally marginal areas of cultural production such as graffiti, museums, architecture or even plunging into the social experience of travel inside the traincar itself, each essay constitutes an attempt to work from the act of riding the train toward questions of much larger significance. Crisscrossing cultures from the New World and Old, from East and West, these essays share a common preoccupation with the way in which trains and railway networks have mapped and re-mapped the contours of both cities and states in the modern period. Bringing together individual and large-scale social practices, this volume traces out the cultural implications of “Riding the Rails.”
Trains, Culture and Mobility: Riding the Rails is an exemplary piece of interdisciplinary scholarship which shows the value of a cultural theory grounded in the particularities of cultural history. Incorporating the study of photography, architecture, publicity material and everyday practices and phenomena, it manages to be extremely broad-ranging in its geographical and thematic scope while retaining an unusual level of coherence for an edited collection. It is also pleasingly quirky and distinctive in its concerns, from train graffiti to cell phone etiquette.