Transfers

There is a humorous old anecdote, told perhaps to greatest effect by the American novelist David Foster Wallace (1962–2006) to open his speech to the graduating class of Kenyon College in 2003:

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how's the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and then goes, “What the hell is water?”

In June 2020, the Centre for Mobilities Research (CeMoRe) at the University of Lancaster (UK) and the Centre for Advanced Studies in Mobility & Humanities (MoHu) at the University of Padua (Italy) co-hosted an international conference on the theme of “Unruly Landscapes.” As a result of the pandemic, the two-day event had to be moved online, but participants nevertheless enjoyed two days of inspiring discussion as the speakers engaged with the intersection of landscape and mobility from a variety of disciplines and approaches.

This article, one element in a multifaceted art research project, explores the agency of the aircraft landing gear compartment (wheel bay) in global transfer. It takes as its beginning histories of human and other-than-human actors falling from aircraft wheel bays as aircraft descend into London Heathrow and asks what art research can bring to the problem of their political and ethical framing. Its theoretical touchstones include John Ruskin on dust and the object-oriented philosophies of new materialism. These are brought into conversation with an account of the process of modeling and exhibiting a wheel bay, as well as extracts from a microstratigraphic survey conducted on the original. The article ultimately contends that the wheel bay gives shape to otherwise intangible aeromobilities, knowledge of which is integral to a nuanced understanding of the political geography of airspace at London Heathrow.

The toponymical landscape is created by and perceived through place names. A place name arises when a society attributes values to space but, with the transformations of societies, it can evolve or simply be accompanied by new specifications. This study analyses public transport station names. It indicates how urban facilities need to be specified on the signs, and also reveals the way in which companies purchase the right to rename locations for advertising purposes. A spontaneous process of place name attribution is designated “unruly,” while the word “ruly” signals a sponsored event, with evident privatization of the public space.

Engaging with the US author Paul Auster's fiction, the article explores how the stories his characters tell, in order to survive traumatic experiences, move them across their urban landscapes. Focusing on Auster's Moon Palace (1989) and In the Country of Last Things (1987), the article shows how the mobility of the main characters’ stories opens a parallax view, which reveals the past as an integral part of the experience of the present moment and the negotiation of trauma.

This article works at the intersection of mobilities and landscape studies. It shows absence-presence as a principal means by which mobilities are related to landscape, thus enabling the concept of landscape to be elaborated with regard to the politics of community, the ways in which embodied practices manifest themselves and create place, and the intertwinement of the cultural and the natural. To elaborate the conceptual argument, the article presents the case study of a planned but never fully realized high-speed tramline running through a residential area of Tallinn, Estonia. To explore the multiple absences of what was planned and the presence of imagined and a few realized landscape elements, the article makes use of artistic works, such as a skiing performance of infrastructure re-creation (Invisible Tramline).

Hark—the Tiddy Mun, lurching from the murk. Beware Will-o’-the-Wisp, seducing benighted travelers into the swamp. Hear the padding of the Black Shuck. The incumbents of moors, marshes, fens, and levels mobilized their extra-territorium poaching, smuggling, distilling, arms caching, and rough justice activities unimpeded through perpetuating imaginaries of fear and anxiety. Disorientating wetland mythologies and folklore still resonate today within our contemporary cultural and literary narratives of these paludal spaces. This article explores how these uncanny representations compromise wetlands’ future protection. Wetlands’ carbon sequestration, floodwater storage, and biodiversity properties contribute significantly to climate change adaptation strategies. Yet delinquency, vandalism, fly-tipping, and arson in these waterscapes evidence continued contemporary human disregard. Empirical findings from the WetlandLIFE project show the diverse ways in which these narratives are being shifted toward a “nowtopian” framing, to encourage people to use and value wetlands differently, to prevent further degradation of these complex, vital, and unruly landscapes.

There is a myriad of ideas, often from companies and governments, on what sustainable mobilities should look like and how people should be engaging them. Yet top-down narratives do not always adequately reflect laypeople's mobilities on the ground, and so this article explores the idea of dreams as a way of subverting pre-existing imaginations and redistributing freedoms to move sustainably on one's own terms. Dreams as imaginative forms of inquiry could also expand epistemic frontiers to include voices that have hitherto been under-represented. Where personal dreams contest the status quo, the aim is not about dismissing the productive possibilities from experimental dreams of the technological elite. Instead, this discussion uses the rhetoric of parables as a way to caution against enterprises that expand too quickly without means of care to sustain operations. Thus, this article suggests the labors of repair and maintenance as future avenues of research for sustainable mobility.

Silvia Vignato and Matteo Carlo Alcano, eds, Searching for Work: Small-scale Mobility and Unskilled Labor in Southeast Asia (Thailand: Silkworm Books, 2018), 312 pp., 16 illustrations, $40.00

John Wei, Queer Chinese Cultures and Mobilities: Kinship, Migration and Middle Classes (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2020), 216 pp., 9 illustrations. HK$495

Ben Nobbs-Thiessen, Landscapes of Migration: Mobility and Environmental Change on Bolivia's Tropical Frontier, 1952 to the Present (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020), 342 pp., 12 halftones, 4 maps, 2 graphs, $35.50

Gretchen Sorin, Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2020), xviii +332 pp. $28.95

Candacy Taylor, Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America (New York: Abrams Press, 2020), 360 pp. $35.00