The Rise of Uber and the [Re]construction of the North American Dream

The road – while on the surface often perceived as merely a means of allowing individuals to move from one location to another, has during recent decades become deeply intertwined with both individual and mass narratives related to the pursuit of freedom. The freedom narrative began when the United States highway system, developed during the early 1960s and thematically charged by the Beat Generation’s road-trip literature, became imbued with new meaning and new freedom-facilitating potential. The road, an architectural feat once thought of largely as a means of providing mass mobilization, came to be understood as both the road to freedom, and the road as freedom. However, today we find ourselves experiencing a new road narrative, one that still speaks to freedom but that differs vastly from the road narratives of the 1960s. Today, as individuals experience the road through sharing-economy services such as Uber, a narrative shift has occurred whereby freedom on the road is no longer experienced individualistically and/or destructively but, instead, communally and constructively.

The Rise of Uber and the [Re]construction of the North American Dream

The road – while on the surface often perceived as merely a means of allowing individuals to move from one location to another, has during recent decades become deeply intertwined with both individual and mass narratives related to the pursuit of freedom. The freedom narrative began when the United States highway system, developed during the early 1960s and thematically charged by the Beat Generation’s road-trip literature, became imbued with new meaning and new freedom-facilitating potential. The road, an architectural feat once thought of largely as a means of providing mass mobilization, came to be understood as both the road to freedom, and the road as freedom. However, today we find ourselves experiencing a new road narrative, one that still speaks to freedom but that differs vastly from the road narratives of the 1960s. Today, as individuals experience the road through sharing-economy services such as Uber, a narrative shift has occurred whereby freedom on the road is no longer experienced individualistically and/or destructively but, instead, communally and constructively.

The Belt and Road as political technology: Power and economy in Pakistan and Tajikistan

While celebrated as a new ‘win-win’ initiative, Belt and Road narratives sidestep the fact that current investment regimes originating in China must contour to existing political economies in host countries. Drawing on the examples of Pakistan and Tajikistan, both of which share land borders with China, and both of which have been eager recipients of recent Chinese investments, we forward two arguments: (1) In both countries the narrative of connectivity promoted through the Belt and Road Initiative builds on previous bilateral engagements with China. (2) Within Pakistan and Tajikistan, engagement with China has enabled the utilization of BRI as a political technology for domestic purposes, with the attempt to rule, re-define, order and exploit. Put differently, new investments from China serve to consolidate existing authority structures.

New Directions for Old Roads: Rewriting the Young Adult Road Trip Story

This chapter argues that contemporary young adult road narratives rewrite the story of the road to include more diverse representations that expose the challenges of traveling while part of a marginalized group. Road trip narratives codify privilege via class, gender, sexual orientation, and whiteness within the North American context to define a dominant road story that has commonly been represented throughout literary history. This chapter examines how the young adult road trip becomes a site of subversion for indigenous travelers, travelers of color, queer travelers, and trans travelers through the ways certain identities receive or navigate the privilege of mobility on the road within different geographical spaces.

Book Reviews

Siobhan Carroll, An Empire of Air and Water: Uncolonizable Space in the British Imagination, 1750–1850 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 290 pp., ISBN 9780812246780, $59.95 (Cloth).Ann Brigham, American Road Narratives: Reimagining Mobility in Literature and Film (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015), x + 262 pp., ISBN 978-0-8139-3750-2, US $29.50 (paperback).Sue Beeton, Film-Induced Tourism, 2nd ed. (Bristol: Channel View Publications, 2016), xxv + 311 pp., ISBN: 9781845415853, $40.00 (paperback).Michael Carroll, Greece: A Literary Guide for Travellers (London: I. B. Tauris, 2017), xiv + 290 pp. ISBN: 978-1-78453-380-9, £16.99 (hardcover).John Eade and Mario Katić (eds.), Military Pilgrimage and Battlefield Tourism: Commemorating the Dead (London: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2017), xxi + 164 pp., ISBN: 9781472483621, $140 (hardcover).