The beginning of the 21st century has seen important shifts in mobility cultures around the world, as the West’s media-driven car culture has contrasted with existing local mobilities, from rickshaws in India and minibuses in Africa to cycling in China. In this expansive volume, historian Gijs Mom explores how contemporary mobility has been impacted by social, political, and economic forces on a global scale, as in light of local mobility cultures, the car as an ‘adventure machine’ seems to lose cultural influence in favor of the car’s status character.
Table of Content
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Introduction: ‘Pacific Mobility’: Irony, Class and the Car as Medium
Part I: Doom, for Some? Questioning the Car
Chapter 1. The Shock of the Oil: Energy and the Carnival of Mass-Produced Car Adventure (1970s–1990)
Introduction: A Postmodern Automotive Adventure?
Western Mobilities: Energy, Environment and the Middle Classes
Banalizing the Automotive Adventure: Highbrow Automotive Culture
The Revival of Automotive Adventure: The Car in Western Popular Culture
The Limits of Mobility Growth: The Urban Crisis
Globalizing Environmental Consciousness: Towards a “Pacific Century”
Conclusions: Beyond a Nihilistic Automotive Adventure?
Part II: Confusion: Where Is the Adventure?
Chapter 2. The Motorization Miracle: The Quest of the Rest (1990–2015)
Neoliberalizing Mobility: Introduction
Opening up: Motorizing the Chinese Middle Class
On the Road to Hyperautomobility? Turn of the Millennium ‘Development’ through Motorization in the Rest of the World
Neoliberal Mobility: Automotive Adventure, Ecological Concerns and ‘the War on the Car’
Conclusions
Chapter 3. The Adventure Machine Redux? Searching for the Motives of the Neoliberal Motorist
From the ‘West’ to the ‘Rest’: Introduction
Parallel Worlds: Post-Postmodern Reflections on a New Multi-Modal Mobility Culture
Emancipatory Mobilities: Adventures Produced by Women, Ethnic Minorities and Working-Class Youth
Carnivalizing Adventure: Popular Culture and the Shifting Class Base of the Adventure Machine
Bipolar Dichotomies: Diasporic Mobilities between South and North
Provincializing Adventure: The Commodity Character of the Car in Heavily Layered Mobility
Billionaires, Brothers and Other Incarnations: Car Adventure and Family in China
The Loss of Automotive Irony: Conclusions
Conclusion. ‘Deplorable’ Mobilities and the Future of the Car Adventure
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Gijs Mom is Associate Professor emeritus at Eindhoven University of Technology. He is the author of Atlantic Automobilism (Berghahn Books, 2015) and Globalizing Automobilism (Berghahn Books, 2020). He is a co-editor, with Georgine Clarsen and Mimi Sheller, of the Berghahn Books series “Explorations in Mobility.”
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