Transfers

How do you represent a moment when crossing a bridge became a major historical fl ash point? Th e twenty-fi fth of March of this year marked the fiftieth anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s fifty-four-mile march from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital of Montgomery, a march to protest the lack of voting rights for African Americans in the southern United States. Th e major point of contention, where infrastructure and politics met, was the Edmund Pettus Bridge leading out of Selma. Th e first attempt to march occurred on what was later known as Bloody Sunday. Black protestors attempted to cross the bridge, against the instruction of local and state troopers. Th ey were beaten mercilessly and the footage was broadcast on national television. Th e second attempt took place after Dr. King put out a call to all Americans who identify with the civil rights movement. Th ey gathered on the bridge and knelt to pray. King sensed trouble and called off the march. After a court decision in favor of the protestors, the march took place.

Mixing transportation studies, film analysis, and urban geography, this article looks at El tren blanco (The white train), a documentary film from 2003 by directors Nahuel García, Sheila Pérez Giménez, and Ramiro García. In light of work by train theorist Wolfgang Schivelbusch and urban geographer Henri Lefebvre, the documentary's interviews with cartoneros—cardboard workers who ride daily into central Buenos Aires to pick up recyclable goods—speak to the alienation and spatialization of class that characterize the contemporary urban experience. Following an urban cultural studies approach, attention is balanced between the social context of Buenos Aires itself and the film as an item of aesthetic value. In the end, it is important to pay attention both to the train car as a space in itself and to the historical and contemporary positioning of the train in larger-scale urban shifts.

When, in the early twentieth century, British middle-class writers went on a tour in search of their country, travel writing not only saw the re-emergence of the home tour, but also the increasing appearance of the motorcar on British roads. With the travelogue playing the role of a discursive arena in which debates about automobility were visualized, the article argues that, as they went “in search of England,” writers like Henry Vollam Morton and J. B. Priestley not only took part in the ideological framing of motoring as a social practice, but also contributed to a change in the perception of accessing a seemingly remote English countryside. By looking at a number of contemporary British travelogues, the analysis traces the strategies of how the driving subjects staged their surroundings, and follows the authors' changing attitudes toward the cultural habit of traveling: instead of highlighting the seemingly static nature of the meaning of space, the travelogues render motoring a dynamic and procedural spatial practice, thus influencing notions of nature, progress, and tradition.

This article considers the impact of cross-country air and interstate highway travel on changing conceptions of the land and regions of the United States. Focusing on air passenger and highway maps, promotional materials, and passenger and driver accounts from between the 1920s and the 1970s, it explores how airline and highway-based portraits transformed from highly detailed, if at times comical, representations of the nation's land and people to increasingly simplified and schematized visions of mere lines across space. These changes encouraged a steady erasure of formerly conceived regions and a growing imagining of the great center of the United States as “flyover country,” a place that needed to be quickly traversed to get to somewhere that actually matters.

This article is about the use of trained Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) for transportation, in particular across muddy or flooded terrain, clandestine off-road transportation, and during guerrilla operations or political revolts. In a sense, these are all in fact the same transport task: the terrestrial conveyance of people and supplies when, due to weather or politics or both, roads cannot be used. While much recent work from fields such as anthropology, geography, history, and conservation biology discusses the unique relationship between humans and trained elephants, the unique human mobilities opened up by elephant-based transportation has been for the most part overlooked as a research topic. Looking at both historical and recent (post–World War II) examples of elephant-based transportation throughout South and Southeast Asia, I suggest here that this mode of transportation has been especially associated with epistemologically less visible processes occurring outside of state-recognized, formal institutions.

Conceptual work on the history of mobilities has been devoid of animation other than humans and their machines. The deafening automobility of the present has drowned out memories of an “animal past” teleologically, and the raucous rapidity of the mobile machine drives over the “animal present.” This article is an attempt to explore what a history of mobility that takes animals seriously might look like. It is based on the argument that living nonhuman creatures have their own mobilities and that these animobilities have shaped and been shaped by human societies. It is intended to open up historical narratives of a complex, shifting, nonlinear relationship between animals and changing human technologies of transport—as part of this journal's mission to rethink mobility and include more subaltern approaches. A key finding is that mobility's negative sociopolitical and environmental effects on different groups, in fact species, are inversely correlated to their proximity to power. This article touches on several research trajectories, but the focus is on control of mobility by the state, with case studies drawn from southern Africa's history.

This article describes the little-known history of military labor and transport during the East African campaign of World War I. Based on sources from German, Belgian, and British archives and publications, it considers the issue of military transport and supply in the thick of war. Traditional histories of World War I tend to be those of battles, but what follows is a history of roads and footpaths. More than a million Africans served as porters for the troops. Many paid with their lives. The organization of military labor was a huge task for the colonial and military bureaucracies for which they were hardly prepared. However, the need to organize military transport eventually initiated a process of modernization of the colonial state in the Belgian Congo and British East Africa. This process was not without backlash or failure. The Germans lost their well-developed military transport infrastructure during the Allied offensive of 1916. The British and Belgians went to war with the question of transport unresolved. They were unable to recruit enough Africans for military labor, a situation made worse by failures in the supplies by porters of food and medical care. One of the main factors that contributed to the success of German forces was the Allies' failure in the “war of legs.”

Architectural pilgrimage is implicitly appreciated in architecture and design circles, especially by students who are encouraged to “travel to architecture,” with the focus on the Grand Tour as a means of architectural exploration. However, the expression has not been made explicit in the fields of architectural history, pilgrimage studies, tourism research, and mobility studies. I explore how pilgrimage to locations of modern architectural interest affects and informs pilgrims' and architects' conceptions of buildings and the pilgrimage journey itself. Drawing initially on a European architectural pilgrimage, the personal narrative highlights the importance of self-reflection and introspection when observing the built environment and the role of language in mediating processes of movement through and creation of architectural place-space.

A última aventura reveals the approximately one-month journey that I undertook on the Transamazonic Road on October 2011. Traveling by car along sections of the almost four thousand kilometers of this highway that runs east-west across the northern part of Brazil, I searched for material and symbolic evidence remaining from a pharaonic, utopic, boastful project that had quickly faded into oblivion and abandonment. The outcomes of my travels are static images of empty, unpopulated scenes, where absent dwellers keep the vestiges of grand fantasies.

South Australian Maritime Museum 126 Lipson Street, Port Adelaide, SA 5015, Australia http://samaritimemuseum.com.au/ Admission: AUD 10/8/5 The South Australian Maritime Museum cares for one of South Australia’s oldest cultural heritage collections.2 The core collection, inherited from the Port Adelaide Institute (one of the legion of nineteenth-century mechanics’ institutes providing learning resources to working men), began in 1872. Visiting seafarers spent time in the ins titute’s library, leaving behind crafts or souvenirs picked up in exotic ports of call as a token of thanks. In the 1930s, honorary curator Vernon Smith refi ned the collection to focus solely on nautical material and searched for artifacts to enhance it. Th e collection now comprises over twenty thousand objects.

Main Reef Road, South Africa, 1999; Nicolaas Hofmeyr (director and writer); 88 minutes; Free Filmmakers Production

Bronwen Douglas, Science, Voyages, and Encounters in Oceania, 1511–1850 Nicole Starbuck

David Lipset and Richard Handler, eds., Vehicles: Cars, Canoes, and Other Metaphors of Moral Imagination Rudi Volti

Kathryn A. Morrison and John Minnis, Carscapes: The Motor Car, Architecture and Landscape in England John Mohr

Sumanth Gopinath and Jason Stanyek, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies, 2 vols. Michael D'Errico

Anna Morcom, Illicit Worlds of Indian Dance: Cultures of Exclusion Kabita Chakraborty

Maarten Van Acker, From Flux to Frame: Designing Infrastructure and Shaping Urbanization in Belgium Nathalie Roseau

Garth Lean, Russell Staiff, and Emma Waterton, eds., Travel and Imagination and Travel and Transformation Christopher Keirstead

Iain Borden, Drive: Journeys through Film, Cities and Landscapes Fabian Kröger

Jonathan R. Wynn, The Tour Guide: Walking and Talking New York Matilde Cordoba Azcarate

NOVEL REVIEW Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North Paul Sharrad