Cultural Histories of Sociabilities, Spaces and Mobilities ed. by Colin Divall

Abstract

Reviewed by: Cultural Histories of Sociabilities, Spaces and Mobilities ed. by Colin Divall Tiina Männistö-Funk (bio) Cultural Histories of Sociabilities, Spaces and Mobilities. Edited by Colin Divall. Brookfield, VT: Pickering & Chatto, 2015. Pp. 272. $99. There are characteristics common to all article collections, one of them being a certain unevenness in style, scope, and modes of analysis among the chapters. However, some subjects seem to fit this form better than others, including the topic at hand: Cultural Histories of Sociabilities, Spaces and Mobilities introduces the reader to a multiplicity of geographical locations, historical eras, and groups of actors. Although there seems to be very little in common between such subjects as New Yorkers hating their new subway map in the 1970s (analyzed by Stefan Höhne), and Englishmen engaging in pilgrimage with the aid of guidebooks in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries (studied by Emily Price), reading through the compilation of such diverse subjects proves this first impression wrong. It is exactly the wide range of topics that serves to make the point of the volume: mobility is a social and cultural phenomenon always molded in and by the specific spaces it moves through, starts, or terminates in. In the introduction, editor Colin Divall discusses mobility’s microspaces, like vehicles, and macro-spaces, like landscapes, that simultaneously are acutely material and full of cultural meaning. In line with that, interesting views are provided by the articles demonstrating mobility’s ability to rearrange and shape the sociabilities in both kinds of spaces. These include, for example, Virginia Sharff’s article on how women produced the American West over centuries by claiming home spaces through the mobility provided by horses, railroads, and automobiles; Greet de Block’s article on the urbanizing effects the railroads had in rural Belgium from the 1830s on; and Gordon Pirie’s article on the role of racialized spaces of mobility in making and breaking the South African apartheid. These views are complemented by the attention given to imagined mobility in many of the articles, as in the above-mentioned essay on pilgrimage guides; in Dhan Zunino Singh’s research on utopian and futuristic plans for possible traffic solutions in Buenos Aires around the turn of the twentieth century; and in Nobuko Toyosawa’s contribution on Japanese topography books as constructors of national places in the early eighteenth century. Even the broadest of scopes has its limitations and in this collection one of these is the concentration on motorized transport when dealing with the twentieth century and even the latter part of the nineteenth. The shift from studying transport to studying mobility and mobilities has been characterized by the wish to move from the study of certain modes of transport to a broader study of the social practices and cultural spaces in which people and things move. However, particular modes of transport, such as trains and cars, still seem to take up the center of the stage. Lesser-known vehicles are [End Page 466] analyzed in interesting ways, for example when Kevin J. James discusses the horse-drawn Irish jaunting car in the context of mid-eighteenth- to early-twentieth-century tourism. Walking and cycling, however, receive only the briefest of mentions and are not analyzed systematically. Meanwhile, the idea of motor travel as the norm of modern personal mobility goes largely unexamined, although the role of car ownership and use is discussed both in relation to gender equality in America (Margaret Walsh) and individual freedom under the communist regime in Romania (Adelina Stefan). An important combining force for the chapters is the framing of mobility as material culture. This works beautifully, even, or especially, in the chapters analyzing imagined mobility. The intertwined nature of imagined and material qualities of mobility is also demonstrated in many of the other articles, for example by Birgit Braasch, who discusses the material practices of eating on ships and airplanes as constructors of the meanings and images of Atlantic crossings from the 1940s till the 1970s. She also addresses historical change in dominant modes of mobility, another thread running through the entire collection. As Divall points out in his introduction, material change has been, and is, the ultimate...