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Isabel Dorothea Kalous

Navigating Hostile Terrain with the Green Book: Race, Im/Mobility and a Travel Guide for African Americans during Segregation

Drawing on a combination of literary, cultural and mobility studies, this article analyzes the narrative and rhetorical strategies of the Green Book travel guides (1936-1966) to illuminate the ways the guide encouraged black mobility and challenged the existing conditions that curtailed such travel. Examining different dimensions of mobility allows for a better understanding of the significance of the Green Book as not just a response to its time and a guide to keep African American traveler safe but also an understanding of its role in (re)shaping landscapes, representations and practices of black travel. The article argues that the Green Book mobilized African Americans, both in a physical way but also in the sense that it textually and visually created representations and narratives of black mobility that had the potential to change individual as well as societal perceptions of African American travelers. It deconstructs white conceptions of travel and integrates black travelers into tourist discourses that were dominated by images of white travelers. As such then, the Green Book rendered quotidian acts such as travel and vacation into political acts and forms of resistance.

Alexandra Ganser, Leopold Lippert, Eva Maria Schörgenhuber, Helena Oberzaucher

American Studies as Im/Mobility Studies: Introduction

The introduction to the JAAAS special issue American Studies as Im/Mobility Studies maps the field of mobility studies in the context of American studies, framing the various contributions to the issue. By summarizing dominant mobility narratives in US culture (e.g. in the mythology of the Western frontier), Ganser, Lippert, Oberzaucher, and Schörgenhuber demonstrate how deeply ingrained the idea of freedom of mobility is in the American cultural imaginary. In the vein of critical mobility research across the humanities, the introduction critiques these dominant scripts of American mobility in light of recent movements like MeToo or Black Lives Matter, which implicitly highlight that the mythology of the “freedom of mobility” has been deeply gendered and racialized. Along with former President Trump’s securitization attempts at the US-Mexican border, these developments demonstrate, so the authors, how the immobilization of various groups of people runs equally deep US history but also complicates the equation of mobility with progress. In the second part, the article introduces the individual contributions to the special issue and demonstrates how they add to ongoing discussions around US im/mobilities.