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cover of episode Myka Tucker-Abramson, "Cartographies of Empire: The Road Novel and American Hegemony" (Stanford UP, 2025)

Myka Tucker-Abramson, "Cartographies of Empire: The Road Novel and American Hegemony" (Stanford UP, 2025)

2025/5/15
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Miranda Melcher
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Myka Tucker-Abramson
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Miranda Melcher: 过去我对公路小说不感兴趣，认为它们只是关于人们试图重拾青春。但这本书让我意识到，这种小说在许多国家都有，而且提出了重要的问题。我很高兴Myka能来解释这个现象。 Myka Tucker-Abramson: 我开始关注公路小说，是因为我发现自己被那些不太像传统公路小说的作品所吸引。我认为这些小说以富有成效的方式描绘了资本主义转型时期的关键时刻。这本书旨在追踪公路小说出现的任何地方，并分析它如何反映和批判美国霸权。我发现公路小说不是一种民族类型，而是一种帝国主义类型，它采用美国生活方式的幻想，但这样做是为了描绘资本主义现代化的暴力和令人眩晕的过程，同时也以美国意识形态来掩盖它们。

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This chapter introduces Dr. Myka Tucker-Abramson's book, "Cartographies of Empire," which challenges the conventional view of the road novel. It explores the genre's global presence and its connection to US hegemony.
  • The road novel genre is often dismissed as mundane.
  • Tucker-Abramson's book examines over 140 global road novels.
  • The book challenges the idea that road novels are primarily about American experiences.

Shownotes Transcript

The road novel is often dismissed as a mundane, nostalgic genre: Jack, Sal, and other tedious white men on the road trying to recapture an authentic youth and American past that never existed. Yet, new road novels appear every year, tackling unexpected questions and spanning new geographies, from Mexico, Brazil, Bulgaria, Palestine, Ukraine, and former-Yugoslavia. Why did the road novel emerge and why does it persist? What does it do and why has it traveled so widely?

In Cartographies of Empire: The Road Novel and American Hegemony) (Stanford University Press, 2025) Dr. Myka Tucker-Abramson draws from an archive of more than 140 global road novels from over twenty countries, challenging dominant conceptions of the road novel as primarily concerned with American experiences and subjectivities. Grounding her analysis in materialist theories of genre, world-ecology and commodity frontier frameworks, and post-45 American literary studies, Dr. Tucker-Abramson persuasively argues that the road novel is a genre specific to, coterminous with, and revealing of US hegemony's global trajectory. Shifting our focus from Americanness to the fraught geopolitics of US Empire, from the car to the built environment through which it moves, and from passengers to those left behind, Dr. Tucker-Abramson remaps the road novel, elucidating the genre's unique ability both to reveal the violent and vertiginous processes of capitalist modernization and to obfuscate these harsh truths through seductive narratives of individual success and failure.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose* book*)* focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher), wherever you get your podcasts.*

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