Transnational Railway Cultures: Trains in Music, Literature, Film, and Visual Art ed. by Benjamin Fraser and Steven Spalding

Abstract

Reviewed by: Transnational Railway Cultures: Trains in Music, Literature, Film, and Visual Art ed. by Benjamin Fraser and Steven Spalding Hugo Silveira Pereira (bio) Transnational Railway Cultures: Trains in Music, Literature, Film, and Visual Art Edited by Benjamin Fraser and Steven Spalding. New York: Berghahn Books, 2022. Pp. viii + 244. Transnational Railway Cultures analyzes representations of railways and the experience of traveling by train across borders (in both the strict and broad sense of the term) in several arts (literature, cinema, music, painting), timeframes, and geographies, spanning five continents. It encompasses different topics associated with railway traveling, such as progress/backwardness, the persistence of colonial depictions, and the construction of memories, among others. Railways are one of the most debated technologies in the community of historians of technology. Therefore, it is not easy to come up with something new. Transnational Railway Cultures offers a fresh approach to the subject by exploring how railway travel is represented in different movies, books, or artistic productions from a transnational perspective. I welcomed both the return to the classics, namely Leo Marx's Machine in the Garden and Wolfgang Schivelbusch's The Railway Journey, and the engagement with more recent studies (especially those on mobility studies). Often, the use of classical works tends to be looked down upon as dated literature, but I believe that books such as those by Marx and Schivelbusch are still useful for historians today. The chapters fit well together, although there is no clear train of thought between them, which makes drawing comparisons difficult. This justifies the want of an overarching thesis that glues the chapters together. The editors clarify in the final remarks that the book was never meant to be comprehensive and that its gaps should be regarded as opportunities for further studies, but I believe that an attempt at finding common ground, even if at the cost of some speculation, would be useful for readers and for future iterations. [End Page 271] My main concern about the book is that readers may not always see the "border crossing" promised by the transnational approach. On some occasions, this is due to the texts being too hermetic (ch. 4) or too descriptive and heavily reliant on quotations from the work that was analyzed (ch. 7). In other instances, the transnationalism seems forced and supported by speculative reflections or personal opinions. For example, it is claimed that music or poetry replicate the sound of trains, thus evoking the travels of commuters to work or Jews toward concentration camps (chs. 1 and 2). In chapter 4, "gothic" is used to describe conflict between races (nationalities, at best). Other assertions are made that capitalism will violently undo itself (ch. 3) or that today's traveling is pedantic tourism (ch. 8). This becomes more visible when the authors do not engage with the theoretical framework of those fields (e.g., cartoons in chapter 5 or travel writing in chapter 8). I was left wondering how much one can draw from a movie or a poem, or if any conclusion could be considered valid. On a similar note, in some chapters I wondered whether the main conclusions would be drastically different had the authors chosen a different piece of literature, cinema, or art. Regardless, the edited volume will be of interest to historians of technology as it engages with concepts usually analyzed by the discipline. The notion of techno-scientific progress (and its persistence) is the most visible (with trains assuming the role of icon of modernity, contrasting with the backwardness embodied in characters and landscapes surrounding them). But the notion of borders (chs. 6 and 9), postcolonial policies and stereotypes (chs. 5 and 8), critical infrastructure (ch. 3), and deconstruction of geographical dimensions (ch. 5) are also addressed. Chapter 2 clearly resonates with Kranzberg's First Law, reflecting on how railways are not good nor bad nor neutral. While perusing the volume (especially chs. 2, 3, 8, and 10), I frequently thought of Matthias Middell and Katja Naumann's "portals of globalisation"—those sites that are centers of international trade and communications and promote cultural transfer and the development of global connectedness. I think that this concept may foster a productive dialogue...