Myka Tucker-Abramson, "Cartographies of Empire: The Road Novel and American Hegemony" (Stanford UP, 2025)
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Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Micah Tucker-Abramson about her book titled Cartographies of Empire, the Road Novel in American Hegemony, published by Stanford University Press in 2025. This book is really interesting, I found, because it takes something that...

To be honest, I did kind of dismiss the road novel, the idea of characters off in a car trying to recapture something, whether they're actually youthful and they're going off on an adventure, or they're older and they're trying to pretend that they're youthful. I admit, this is maybe not a genre that I've been necessarily that interested as a historian. I'm like, okay, fine, they exist. But as this book points out, there's a lot of them. There's a lot of them from many, many, many different countries, right?

why? And in fact, as soon as I read that blurb, and as soon as I realized that this was definitely the case, I had lots of questions about what was going on. So Micah, thank you so much for coming onto the podcast to help us make sense and take seriously the road novel. Thanks, Miranda. It's great to be here. Thanks so much for having me. Well, I'm very pleased that you're joining us. Would you mind starting us off, please, by introducing yourself and tell us why you decided to write this book?

Yeah, of course. So I'm an associate professor of American literature at the University of Warwick.

And I guess this book emerged kind of against my will in the sense that without meaning to, I realized that I kept being drawn to and writing about novels that were road novels, but that didn't quite look like them as they're often described. And so I'm thinking here of novels like Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood or Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers.

And while I was reading them and writing about them, I felt that these were offering these really kind of productive mappings of key moments of capitalist transition. And I started to realize that there was something in the genre that allowed them to do so.

But that something wasn't being reflected in the dominant literature about road novels, in part because I think a lot of the critical literature tended to focus overwhelmingly on the novels of distinctly national questions. So particularly this idea of the road novel as an American genre, about the search for American identity or the true source of American freedom, like these kinds of things.

Or they focused a lot on the experience of driving and what that told us about petromodernity or automobility. And my...

my sense was that this was a key part of the story. It was a kind of central part of the story, but that something else was happening. And so to make sense of the genre, I felt that I needed to go back to the genre myself and try to figure out the kind of theory of the road novel that would make, that would allow me to make sense of the novels I was reading. And so that

meant defining what the road novel is, thinking about where it emerges and why, and also trying to think seriously about what it does. That is to kind of draw on the work of Marxist genre critics, people like Michael McKeon or Franco Moretti, right, what its problem solving technique was. And so that's what I set out to do.

Thank you for that introduction. That's very helpful to give us a whole bunch of threads for us to pull as our conversation progresses. But I do want to start with, and maybe this is just me as a historian always being curious about scope and sources and case selection.

As you point out in the blurb of the book, there are a lot of these road novels, as you've just described there. They were popping up even when you weren't necessarily looking for them. There's a lot to choose from here. So how did you decide which text to focus on? Were you thinking of it in terms of a geographic range or a time range? How did you make sense of the wealth of material?

Yeah, so maybe I'll start with what the book does and then walk back a bit to how I got there. So the book fundamentally aims to basically track the road novel wherever it appears and

And it takes as its starting point the kind of post-45 period and then covers basically as many road novels as I could find from that 1945 period till now. And so I guess there's kind of two questions in your question, right? So first is why the post-45 period, right? Because it's true that road novels do exist before then. But my sense was that before the post-war period, they don't really exist as a coherent genre, right?

So you have, for instance, kind of proletarian novels of migration, like The Grapes of Wrath. You have these kind of earlier, like anarchist hitchhiking or train hopping narratives. You have all of these kind of modernist narratives of car trips across Europe or the US. You have these incredibly kind of creative, almost biographies of automobiles. But none of this kind of cohered into a clearly knowable genre.

And my research revealed that really that doesn't happen until the post-45 period. And I assume that's because of a kind of mix of the development of the Cold War, the emergence and consolidation of a kind of petro-saturated notion of the so-called American way of life, right? The kind of suburbs and the automobile and travel, right?

And it's these various factors, as well as the emergence of an iconic road novel, right, namely Carol Acts on the Road, that really allowed the genre to cohere into something that's kind of knowable, familiar, citable and so forth. And so I guess then the second question is about scope.

And initially, when I set out to write the book, my focus was actually quite narrowly construed as I was thinking about it as an American literary project, even if I want to fight back against the nationalist framing. But two things kind of happened that that challenged this. The first is that friends and colleagues, particularly, in fact, historians, as it were,

started really challenging me to think about my archive, right? So one friend in particular said, if the genre is your archive, how can you really write about it without knowing the whole archive or knowing as much as possible? And at the time, I found that really compelling, but also felt that that was impossible or really daunting, right? Like who has time to kind of read that much?

But at the same time as these conversations were happening, I was lucky enough to get a fellowship in Berlin, which also happened to be in the middle of COVID and at the start of another lockdown period. And so I found myself with a lot of time on my hands and decided to kind of give it a go. And so I basically just started trying to gather and collect and read as many road novels as I could find. And

And I kept track of them using a kind of very badly put together Excel spreadsheet that laid out a number of kind of categories for some kind of informal coding. So stuff around identity categories of the protagonist, stuff around the different kinds of genres that were being used, the different regions that the road novels belong to or the different

countries, the different kinds of processes of modernization that were happening, right? All of these kinds of things that I could start to look for.

And in the end, I think I assembled an archive of around 140 road novels that, much to my surprise, had come from all around the world. So the U.S., of course, but also the U.K., Germany, Iraq, Palestine, former Yugoslavia, Brazil, Argentina, China and so forth.

And this process was really revelatory because, as my historian friend said it would be, the archive itself really revealed the trajectory and shape of the road novel as it changed over time and space.

And so when I was selecting which novels to use, I really just kind of followed the archive and followed the kinds of clusters that started to emerge and then tried to explore and make sense of why those different clusters emerged when and where they did.

Amazing. I love the interdisciplinary connections. And, you know, we've all been there with the badly organized but very helpful Excel spreadsheets. So thank you for telling us about that part of your process. And it allows us, therefore, to ask some of these kind of big questions, given that you did do all this reading and put all this together. So the first one that kind of comes to my mind is given what you've mentioned so far,

about ideas of the road novel being inherently about the United States or inherently about capitalism. Does that sort of stand up to the investigation you've done? Is the road novel inherently about the US? Is it inherently about capitalism? Is it inherently about both?

Yeah, that's a great question. And it's something I found myself really kind of struggling to articulate because the answer, it turned out, was both, but that the two terms kind of mediate each other in important kind of ways. Right. So I think, as I already mentioned, one of the key interventions that the book aims to make is that the road novel isn't primarily a national genre, but an imperialist one. Right. One of a kind of American empire, not the U.S. as a nation state.

But because it is a kind of genre that emerges around in and around the US, right, it takes up American images as its kind of basis. Right. So it is a genre that very much expresses American ideas, American reality, American realities.

to some extent, American ideologies, right? So it's shaped around the kind of geographies of the American way of life, around this idea of long distance drives, around specific notions of individual freedom, mass consumption, right, a rising middle class. All of these become the kind of vernacular, the language that the road novel speaks, right? And this is why I think it takes the appearance of a national genre.

And so the way the book kind of tries to articulate this is by saying that the rogue novel is a genre that takes up the kind of fantasies of the American way of life and automobility, but it does so in order to kind of map out violent and vertiginous processes of capitalist modernization, while also then kind of obfuscating them in these American kinds of ideologies.

So in this sense, right, it's a genre that appears everywhere, but it takes up a lot of kind of dominant American kind of conceptions in order to map out these local geographies.

And one of the things I became particularly interested in the book as I started reading more widely was the kind of explosion of these road novels where we really see the kind of notions behind the road novel, automobility, freedom, autonomy.

entrepreneurial self-making clashing against the geographies and the lived realities on the ground. So this occurred, for instance, in places like the U.S. South in the 1950s, but we also would see it in places like Bosnia after the catastrophic disillusion of Yugoslavia.

And here the ideas of the Brazilian literary critic, Roberto Schwartz, who talks about misplaced ideas is really quite useful to me, where there's something about how

When ideas from one dominant context are then transposed onto another context where they don't make sense of things, in fact, that disjuncture produces these incredibly compelling articulations, not just of one country or the other, but kind of both and the system that links them together.

The idea of the novels being sort of one and the other and the connection, I think it's this connection that I find so fascinating here, especially because in many ways, when you're talking about the post-45 moment, we're thinking about the end of World War II when so much is connected and not necessarily by choice, you know, people moving things.

things moving. And there's a lot going on in this sort of emerging moment of the road novel as a genre. What did you identify as sort of the necessary preconditions for all this to happen in this context?

Yeah, so this was one of the kind of main questions I really was wrestling with throughout the process of writing, right? I was really trying to figure out why does the road novel emerge when and where it does and why and how do we understand the places where it expands to and becomes prominent in places where it doesn't kind of quite land.

And I think there's really kind of clear answers around why it's able to kind of cohere in the U.S., which I touched upon briefly, right? The kind of explosion of kind of cheap automobiles, the explosion of road infrastructure, money for road trips, etc.

the kind of advertisement industry around it, right? This kind of sense of a rising tide, I guess, like lifting all boats and the explosion of a kind of middle class, right? These are all of the forces, I think, that really allowed it to kind of emerge in the U.S. Alongside, we can also say the emergence of the Cold War, which created this kind of narrative of freedom versus totalitarianism, right? And the road novel became a kind of key figure of capitalist U.S. freedom.

But the question of why the road novel spread to some places and not others or spread to some places at certain moments and not others was one that I really had a hard time kind of figuring out.

And I experimented with many different explanations, right? So was it about geography? Did you need something like the kind of expansive West? Was it about that that helped link them? Was it about kind of location in the world system so that core countries would definitely have the road novel but not peripheries?

But but none of these really worked. And so what I what I finally kind of came to realize is that this difficulty was the result of the fact that the road novel spreads differently at different moments of history in this post 45 period.

And so I think in in the period kind of immediately following World War Two, when U.S. hegemony is is quite durable for a significant kind of proportion of the world, the road novel does tend, I think, to emerge and develop in regions that are undergoing war.

capitalist development under the sphere of U.S. economic, cultural and military influence, and also where that kind of promise of achieving U.S. style capitalist development really feels in reach. And so we start to see it, for instance, in places like Mexico, parts of Latin America, parts of Europe, particularly, I guess, Marshall Plan, the Marshall Plan country of West Germany, and

And then after the fall of communism, we start to see it in parts of Eastern Europe. But we don't, for instance, see it in the Soviet Union or in newly post-colonial West Africa. Right. So places where either that kind of notion of capitalist development is not desired or in places where it feels somehow inaccessible at that moment. Right.

But as the project of U.S. hegemony enters into crisis, as the kind of mask of the promise of development is torn off and some of the more naked realities of capital accumulation, so debt, dispossession, displacement, eruption of ethnic rivalries, right, all of these kinds of factors, right,

the road novel changes. And I really date this process with the beginning of the second and third world debt crisis and then the rollout of neoliberalism. And one of my arguments is that once this happens, the road novel ceases to become a kind of genre that is used to kind of express the desire for this kind of process of modernization, but rather it becomes more

much more of a genre of critique, right? So one that really starts to kind of forefront and highlight de-developmentalism crisis and decline. And it's as U.S. hegemony, I think, continues to weaken and decline that the road novel actually globalizes. Put us in a box.

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If we think then about how we can see this kind of not just in one novel, but really, as you said, across the genre, obviously, you're not going to talk about 140 novels in one chapter. That's not super plausible. But you do help us show some of the ways that these novels begin to be used frequently.

for more of these critiquing purposes that you just mentioned through some groupings. So I wonder if you can help us understand kind of the way you've been able to see this change and how the road novels are being used, perhaps through some of these ways you've put them together?

Yeah, absolutely. So maybe just first, I guess, to kind of situate the book. My first chapter tries to do something like create a kind of baseline of the road novel and the kind of different kind of genres that it kind of coheres around.

And so it does so by turning to kind of three road novels that emerge early on. So Kerouac's Canonical on the Road, of course, right, has to be kind of at the center of the book. But I read that alongside of two less well-known, but to my mind, actually equally paradigmatic road novels. So John Christopher's totally kind of bananas British post-apocalypse eco-horror road novel, The Death of Grass, and then Faulkner's Southern road novel, Intruders in the Dust.

And my argument is that actually all of these books deal with kind of similar questions, like questions around petrification, modernization, collapse of British hegemony and rise of U.S. hegemony. But they do so using a whole range of different genres. Right. So On the Road really relies on the Western. And we think about the road novel generally as a Western. But these novels from more kind of Western.

Peripheralized in the sense of the South and in the UK, maybe just kind of historical losers. They take up really different kinds of genres. So they take up the Gothic in the case of Faulkner and more of the kind of horror in the case of the Christopher series.

And so having these kinds of generic baselines of a kind of Western impulse towards victory versus a kind of more crisis-ridden take up of the Gothic and horror, the following chapters really kind of circle around those different kind of clusters. And so my second chapter is kind of the, is the moment where I really start to think about the potential of the road novel as a kind of genre of crisis and of critique, right?

And this is a genre, this rather, sorry, this is a chapter that turns to the 1970s, which is a really kind of tumultuous period in which anti-colonial revolutions abroad and working class Black, Indigenous and queer uprisings at home really threatened U.S. hegemony and the U.S. way of life.

And I see in this kind of moment of eruption, the emergence of a kind of more crisis-driven road novel.

And so in that second chapter, I look at two revolutionary road novels and a road short story, if we can use that term, that are generally not actually read as road novels. And so those are Samuel Delaney's Dahlgren and Leslie Marmon Silco's Ceremony. And I read those alongside Simon Ortiz's short story, The Panther Waits.

And this chapter is really interested in the question of how these authors push the kind of genre to the limit. And I read it as really becoming a kind of test case about whether the road novel can be taken for a revolutionary collective project. Right.

Right. That is adequate to these 1970s moments that these writers were not necessarily in. But I guess we can say we're in the orbit of. Right. And so this is a kind of moment where I'm really interested in whether or how the road novel could be a kind of revolutionary genre of eruption or just one that's kind of mapping out these different kind of landscapes of empire. Right.

No, I mean, that's exactly where I'd like you to take us to. Like, is it possible for them to do that? Or are there like built in problems with the trope of the road novel that means it can't have that revolutionary potential? So the answer is yes and no. And my interest is.

was really this question of perhaps what a revolutionary road novel would mean. And initially, I think it appears that both Delaney and Silco do this work of kind of revolutionizing or transforming the road novel such that it is possible to be a kind of collective form, one that is equal to the

the revolutionary moments of the revolutionary movements rather of their time. And so I describe the process through which they do that in Delaney's case as creating what I described a kind of general strike road novel that kind of reimagines the urban riots of the 1970s, right, as this general strike, as this kind of a really, really important kind of counter systemic moment.

And in Silco's case, I refer to what she creates as a kind of pan-Indigenous or counter-dispossession road novel.

And what I'm interested in there is the way in which she both absorbs the individualist, right, kind of settler colonial form of the road novel into the narrative web of kind of collective Indigenous storytelling that frames the novel. And with Delaney, I was interested in the way in which she kind of explodes the narrative itself into this kind of creative, free, kind of wild, right, kind of science fiction epic.

And what I found, though, as I started to kind of think more about those novels, is that in fact, by the end, both novels turn away from a kind of redemptive road novel ending and end up really probing the limits of the road novels operation more broadly. Right.

And what they kind of show is that the road novels impulses towards capitalist expansion or individualist development will always reassert themselves, threatening the very radical energies that were propelling the road novels in the first place.

And so the argument that I ultimately made is that these are, in fact, quite revolutionary road novels. But what makes them revolutionary or kind of radical road novels was the way that they ultimately refused the idea of the road novel and the kind of notions of privatized automobility baked in as capable of imagining collective emancipation.

And so I guess then the question that I was asking myself is, why is this, right? Why is it that the road novel and its kind of modes of resolution, why can't they be kind of revolutionized?

And I think there's a couple of reasons. The first goes back to my argument that it's an imperialist and not a national genre, right? And I found that in my research, many books and articles are really attached to this idea that the genre is a kind of litmus test of national citizenship, that the presence of Black, Latinx, or female road novels or road novel protagonists

really does index an increasingly integrated or kind of progressive nation state. I'm really sympathetic to this desire to celebrate the kind of creative take-ups and refigurations of the road novel for emancipatory purposes. And I was also sympathetic to the ways that given these kinds of longer histories of slavery, dispossession, or foreclosed freedom, that seizing control of the car can feel like liberation.

But I guess I was kind of struck by the sense that actually, I'm not sure it does. And this is, I guess, the second reason, which is that the car and the system of automobility are not neutral systems, right?

All of the kind of colonial regimes of extraction, right? We can think about rubber for trees or the kind of metal that's the skin of the car, the oil that fuels the car, the kinds of segregated spatial arrangements it creates, right? So we can think about the divide between the kind of suburb and the city in the US, right? All of these are underpinning the car, right?

And so here I became really, really taken by or really convinced by arguments like critic arguments like critic, like Paul Gilroy, who made a quite similar argument about the danger of the automobile becoming a symbol for black empowerment in his essay, Driving While Black.

And in this essay, he argues that while the kind of pleasurable techno aesthetics of the car can appeal to many, especially those who have faced these kinds of histories of confinement or enslavement,

And while it can appear as a kind of form of resistance, right, these aesthetics often obfuscate its own racialized production. And here he argues that it's, I'm quoting, its particular features of racially divided factory production have to be placed in relation to the history of slavery.

And the article ends by warning that the forms of resistance that an automobile offers mark a kind of sharp break from earlier socialist and Black power urban struggles that were really kind of based on kind of collective politics. And so what I kind of came to through these novels and also through engaging in kind of radical Black and Indigenous thinkers was,

was this idea that the road novel as a form with automobility and Americanist baked in really can never produce a narrative of collective empowerment, or at least it can't do so right through the kind of redemptive happy ending, but can only do so rather through its distancing or its kind of critique of those desires and modes of power and freedom itself. And that's kind of where I landed in this second chapter.

That's very interesting to think through what the possibilities are and, of course, what the limits are as well. What about if we think about it in terms of a somewhat different kind of political question, I suppose? You mentioned earlier road novels in the context of the collapse of the Soviet Union from perspectives from Eastern Europe. How was the road novel used to make sense of that transition?

Yeah, so I think this touches quite nicely on the last question. And this is part of the book that surprised me most or part of the book that I wasn't expecting to find and did find and kind of became perhaps the part that I became most interested in. Yeah.

And one of the things I kind of found here was just how many road novels there were that are about the collapse of the socialist world and the vertiginous experience of being integrated into the modern capitalist system, right? So there were road novels here from East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, a huge number from Yugoslavia, and one from Ukraine. Interestingly, there are really...

so far as I could find none from Russia. I'm curious why that is, but we can leave that to the side. When I started looking at these novels, a lot of them were marketed as being these counter-cultural novels that took up the American trope of the road novel to chart the kind of drive, to use a

pun from the kind of repressive, totalitarian, backwards, failed socialist republic, right? All that kind of post-socialist idiom kind of baked in to the final destination of this kind of shiny society organized around the free market, capitalism, democracy, right? The creative class, yada, yada, yada.

And so when I started reading these novels, I was expecting to some degree to find that kind of a narration, but it wasn't what I found at all. And what I found is that instead of kind of copying these kind of U.S. novels or just offering a kind of reverie of U.S. style development or capitalization or kind of capital modernization,

they did something much more interesting, or they did a few much more interesting things. So first I found that they offered these kind of really astute narrative accounts of the interlocking series of crises that led to the collapse of socialism, right? That is, they actually offered in many cases quite materialist accounts of why socialism ended, as well as narrating the experience of capitalist transition, right?

The second thing that I found is that in narrating that experience of transition, they actually ended up kind of flipping the script on the road novel, right? So previously, and I mentioned this earlier...

Right. The road novels power kind of the road novels power really lies in the kind of two step that it does. Right. This is this kind of problem solving function. So it both reveals and obfuscates the processes of capitalist modernization. And it does so by really focusing on individual narratives of success and development. Right. That's the kind of game it plays there.

And this obfuscation is really important because it means that to some degree, the kind of individual success or failure narrative has to make it so that we can't really see the critical mapping that is happening. And I think this is really the case in a novel like

On the road where when you look at the kind of places on the road is going right, it offers these incredible narrative accounts of the petroification of California agriculture. It takes us to the Texas oil fields that are the kind of beginning of the oil boom in the U.S.,

It takes us to Mexico at the moment when the kind of the Pan-American Highway is being built. It starts thinking about the kind of opening up of North Africa to U.S. hegemony. But we never really see any of that because it seems so much about Sal, right, and his kind of journey.

And one of the things that I thought was so interesting about the post-socialist road novel was that that operation starts to falter. And then, in fact, the kind of more material histories of failed development, the kind of violent landscapes in which they move, come to kind of overpower the individualist narratives, right? The individualist narratives can't actually obfuscate those kinds of larger processes, right?

And then third and finally, and this is perhaps the bit that most surprised and excited me, was that these novels ultimately challenged these kind of ideological accounts of transition themselves. And oftentimes these narratives in different ways reasserted a kind of attachment to the desires or promises of socialism, even if and as they were critical of specific socialist states. And it was that kind of...

That kind of, yeah, collective impulse or that kind of, I guess, productive nostalgia to kind of recuperate the last lost dreams of socialism that I came to find the most exciting and interesting about those books.

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Yeah, it's a really good question. And one of the questions I'd be so curious if I could kind of ask all of these authors is whether they deliberately meant to turn to the road novel or if the road novel kind of called them, right? This question of authorial intention is interesting to me, even though I know we killed the author in the 1970s with Foucault.

But I think the reason that the genre is so powerful and so kind of useful in these contexts is

is precisely because it kind of captures the ideology of post-socialism themselves, right? In narrative form, it takes all of the kind of fantasies that people were told to expect as they transitioned out of socialism into capitalism, right? That they would become these creative class subjects, that they would be able to achieve

mass consumption, that they would be free of authoritarianism to this kind of shiny new world of kind of capitalist democracy.

And when you hold up these novels that kind of have baked within them those kinds of ideologies and you overlay them in these contexts that are where people's quality of life is often way poor in contexts like Yugoslavia, where the kind of brutal wars of succession have led to quite extreme privatization, violence and de-development. I think that disjuncture becomes hugely powerful. Right. And

And that kind of, again, to go back to Schwartz's idea of misplaced ideas, I think there's something about how the road novel allows these authors to really stage the kind of contradictions between dominant ideology and lived reality in these really, really profound ways.

So one of the examples that I think is kind of useful to think about this, and this is one of my favorite road novels, it's Lana Bastichich's Catch the Rabbit, which is a kind of post Yugoslavia road novel. She actually confronts the road novel head on.

And so she has this kind of incredible passage where she says, you know, us driving in the car on this road trip, we really should be in the US. In the US, I'd be able to name the trees, I'd be able to name the roads, but in Bosnia, it doesn't make any sense, right?

And there's this kind of incredible moment where she just really confronts that kind of disjuncture between this kind of cultural form that feels so familiar and the lived reality in which it's being made to make sense of. That is a very good example for illustrating that. And also for, as you said, the kind of disconnect between the lived reality and sort of what the imaginary is. And of course,

the collapse of the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe is not the only time that we can think about where that sort of disconnect might be apparent. I wonder if we can now move to discussing the war on terror and the 2008 financial crisis, that period of years where there was a lot of disconnect going on. To what extent was this a turning point for the road novel? Yeah. So here I think we're getting, I think it's chapter four of the road novel, which

And one of the kind of arguments I want to make is that some of this kind of work in flipping the genre of the road novel that happens in places like the former socialist world, but also I think in places like Mexico that also kind of suffered from the Second World Debt Crisis, that they in some ways are

short of being their own examples that only relate to their experience, they in some ways actually reconfigure the road novel for what will happen as the kind of period of neoliberalism unfolds and as the kind of crisis of U.S. hegemony reaches a kind of louder pitch, as it were.

And so I think once we get into the kind of moment of the war on terror in the 2008 financial crisis, the road novel as a form basically becomes what it was in that kind of post-socialist and also in the Mexican context.

And, and, and this is, I guess, for a couple of reasons, right? I think the war on terror is such an important marker because of the ways in which it kind of tore up any fantasy of a rules based order, or of the US as a purveyor of global peace and stability, right? So some people refer to this moment as kind of domination without hegemony.

On the other side is the kind of 2008 financial crisis, right? And this, to me, I think really marks the end of any kind of belief that the middle class way of life was available to everyone domestically, right? As we start to see just these kind of the hauling out of the middle class and these huge disparities between a growing group of precarious or precarious under unemployed people, and then an increase

increasingly small proportion of insanely rich people. And so I think this is a kind of moment where, as I said, the road novel really transforms and is no longer able to kind of propel its own fantasy that it had before.

And a useful example here, I think, is Chris Krause's Summer of Hate, particularly in relation to her kind of trilogy of road novels. And Chris Krause is kind of a kind of recurring kind of figure in my book because I think she is the kind of she's, I think, the kind of greatest narrator of books.

of American empire in the post, in the post Vietnam era through road novels, right? So she writes these kind of three road novels. The first one, I Love Dick, which again, it's not really often read. It's more read as auto fiction, not as, you know, auto driving fiction. Haha.

But that one is really about the kind of gentrification of New York and also about the U.S.'s war in Guatemala. And that's in 1999, I believe. And then in 2004, she writes...

she writes another road novel that's set a little bit earlier, which is about the collapse of the socialist world. And that one is kind of set in Romania, but it is also about de-industrialization in the U S and then finally in 2020,

12 or 2013, I think she writes Summer of Hate, which this time takes up the war on terror and the kind of build up to the subprime mortgage crisis, as well as the kind of rise of Joe Arpaio and an increasingly violent and kind of militarized border regime.

And one of the things that I really love about Chris Krause is the way in which she's always thinking about the relationship between these kind of domestic processes and questions of empire in relation to each other.

And one of the things that kind of happens throughout is that the road novel becomes a way of trying to, uh, make these connections. So most, I guess, clearly in, in Torpor, which is the one about Romania, uh, the main character who's involved in all kinds of, uh, real estate work in upstate New York ends up driving to Romania to try to adopt a child. And so the road novel kind of works to kind of bridge classes and it works to kind of bridge core and periphery and all of these, uh,

kind of troubling ways. And one of the things that happens in Summer of Hate is the novel tries to do the same kind of process. So you have a protagonist who's a real estate speculator and an art critic who

This is set in like I think 2006 or 7 who goes out to Phoenix to develop some real estate. She falls in love with someone who's a veteran of the war on terror who then kind of gets caught up in Arpaio's regime. So that's the kind of setup. But the thing that I think is really important about Summer of Hate is the way in which this process starts or stops rather working.

One thing that happens in her previous two novels is that through these road trips and through these various forms of real estate speculation, she is always able to kind of find some kind of redemption and to kind of link with these kind of different classes. And in Summer of Hate, it just completely fails and it completely fails for a couple of reasons.

Summer of Hate as a novel ends up splitting in two. So she actually needs this guy she gets involved with, Paul, to reach the actual kind of working classes or underclasses. So we get the sense that you can't even bridge the classes anymore due to this divide of 2008. But

But the other reason that it doesn't work is the whole novel is really about her trying to dodge taxes through real estate development. And the trick of the novel is that this investment in Phoenix is happening right before the subprime mortgage crisis. And so the whole thing is kind of going to fall apart.

And so I think that Krauss here and her kind of trilogy of road novels really does like a nice job tracing its arc, as well as the kind of failure of its of its kind of operation of redemption.

And obviously, since then, this theme you've mentioned there of the U.S. no longer being so hegemonic, of it being sort of powerful, but there's a lot of other countries going on as well. That's only continued, right? There's a much more contested landscape more recently for these U.S.-backed structures in the post-45 moment were much stronger countries.

Do we see this impacting the road novel more generally as we move sort of onwards from the immediate financial crisis period? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. As you point out, in some ways, this is a kind of continuation and expansion as opposed to kind of a break from 2000 and from the kind of war on terror and then the 2008 crisis.

And it seems to me that since 2016 and maybe the first Trump presidency is a useful kind of marking point here, the road novel does seem to kind of blow open both geographically and as a genre, right? It gets much weirder, much more interesting. The kinds of endings become much darker, right? And again, it really kind of further globalizes. And so, yeah,

This, in some ways, was the hardest part of the book to write because there was just so many different ways you could cluster or kind of talk about the kinds of road novels that emerged in the 2016 period.

But I ended up, I think, focusing on two in particular. And so first was the explosion of Latin American feminist neo-extractivist road novels. And so here I'm thinking about novels like Carol Ben Simmons' We All Love Cowboys, Marianne Enriquez's Our Share of the Night, and Salva Almada's The Wind That Lays Waste.

All of which I think take up the genre of the road novel to map out the soy and cotton frontiers fueled by China's, the kind of China driven commodity boom.

And I guess one example is maybe useful here is Samantha Schweblin's Fever Dreams, which also belongs to that grouping. And this, like a lot of the novels I mentioned above, is generally read in terms of a kind of feminist boom in horror, which it absolutely is. Right. But I was so interested in how all of these novels that were kind of filled with horror also were road novels. Right.

And Schwablin's fever dreams is at every stage mediated by driving or at least by the car. Oftentimes they're actually sat in a park car. Right. And so just to mention a few for those for those of you who have read it, right, the characters drive to the countryside where the novel is set. Right.

And the entire story of this kind of of this kind of transmigration that happens is told while two characters are sitting in a parked car. Right. It's a car that takes them to the site where the protagonist gets poisoned by glyphosate, which is the kind of main which is the main crisis driving the novel. And it concludes with the husband driving to the town in his car to find out what happened.

And what I found so interesting about this novel is that in every single image, the car is associated not with freedom, but rather with stuckness, with danger, with failure. Right. And instead, it ends up turning to a kind of much more mythical movement right from the road as a kind of solution to this kind of much vaguer transmigration movement.

And one of the other things that I thought was so interesting about these kinds of novels was the kind of disjuncture that was registered in the form, right? So as I mentioned, the, the, the,

the kind of soya and cotton frontiers that all these novels are really interested in were driven by a kind of China-centric commodity boom. And I thought it was super interesting that you had all of these novels turning to an American form and drawing on a kind of dominant American idiom, but to describe processes where actually the economic power was not the U.S. in the same way, but rather China. And there was something about this disjuncture that I thought was super interesting. Yeah.

And this the second kind of cluster that I ended up writing about and that really, I guess, kind of caught my interest was what I was called the kind of post-apocalyptic logistics road novels. I spent a lot of time naming kinds of kinds of road novels, I guess, in this book.

And here I'm thinking about authors like Emily St. John Mandel and her novel that then became, I think it was a Netflix series, Station Eleven, Ling Ma's Severance, those are probably the most well-known ones, but there's also things like Robert Penner's Strange Labor or Lauren Boyce's Afterland.

And where those kind of Latin American ones were really touring kind of like basic commodity foodstuffs, right? Soya and then kind of cotton. And these novels instead were kind of mapping contemporary logistical built environment. So these novels really circle around Ikeas, around airports, around Walmarts, around malls, right? And they kind of offer this kind of almost...

this kind of fantasy of being able to start back again and kind of settlements around these kinds of logistical spaces. Right. And so, again, these novels were trying to use the road novel to kind of have some kind of recuperative sort of fantasy and

But again, what I started to find really interesting in these novels is that neither the automobile nor the genre of the road novel could really kind of work. Right. So in many cases, you know, people ran out of gas, which is kind of quite literal sort of metaphor. But that one thing I found so interesting is that they all start to turn from the car to the ship.

And there's this real sense that it's actually the ship that kind of holds the secret to some kind of future or that the ship has this kind of libidinal kind of spark of interest and energy. At the same time, as they turn from the card of the ship, they also started turning from the road novel genre to all of these other kinds of genres. So the zombie novel, the comic book, the sea narrative, utopia, post-apocalypse and so forth.

I think Lauren Berlant has called this a kind of generic flail. Right. And so I was really interested in how all of these novels that initially kind of set things up as a kind of road novel. Right. The whole process, again, totally dissolves.

And so my sense is basically that the road novel becomes this really useful genre to take up and destroy as a way of kind of wrestling with the really violent and brutal and quite catastrophic currently disillusioned American hegemony.

It's really interesting to see how different the novel looks over like not actually that much time, right? And yet you've mapped out for us the many different ways that this is being played with and used as critique. And as you said, you know, dissolved and taken apart as well. So you've already mentioned kind of a number of things that you found interesting and surprising as you figured all this out. Is there anything else we want to discuss that you came across in the research or writing that surprised you that we haven't mentioned yet?

No, I think I've mentioned a lot of it. I think it was just the scope and scale of it. But I think particularly the thing that surprised me the most, or maybe that captured my imagination the most, was the kind of post-socialist road novel. And it really led to me kind of re-evaluating and re-valuing the kind of legacies and trajectories of second worldism.

Yeah, no, that's definitely a very interesting aspect of the book. However, of course, there is no more further I suppose to analyse on this point. The book is out in the world. It's off your desk. You finished figuring all this out. Or have you? Is there a sequel project? I don't know. What are you working on now that this is done?

Yeah, so there's one last bit of the book that I'm working on now, which is actually on the kind of the post Yugoslav road novel in particular, right? The kinds of histories and trajectories of Yugoslavia are quite distinct from a lot of those that emerge in Eastern Europe and kind of Comic-Con countries, particularly, right, the fact that it emerges out of the kind of partisan movement, the way in which it kind of kicked off

It develops the kind of non-aligned movement, the kind of catastrophic wars of succession that wrenched it apart.

And I wasn't able to fit any of that into the book. And so I'm working on a kind of standalone piece on the post Yugoslav road novel and, and some of the kind of attempts again to kind of re reconfigure recharge and, and, and re valorize the kinds of socialist values and promises of Yugoslavia. So that's the kind of small last bit of the road novel. And I never want to read another road novel again, as long as I live.

And then the second project continues on my, I guess, habit of picking topics that nobody is that keen to think about. So again, as I think is in the write-up for the book, the road novel is just considered the most kind of boring genre imaginable. I was always embarrassed to say that's what I was working on at dinner parties.

And true to form, this next project is probably even more kind of like funny to tell people you're working on at dinner parties, but it's basically a critical reevaluation of US proletarian literature in the 1930s.

And it's kind of reevaluating in two ways versus trying to do a kind of more crisis driven world ecology approach, thinking about the kinds of commodity frontiers and spatial processes that led to its emergence, but also trying to

reintegrate it into what is often being called Red World or the communist literary system. So now it's kind of distance from the Cold War where there's less anxiety about talking about the ways in which Soviet and communist culture influenced American literature. It's thinking about how we can re-evaluate or kind of see interesting and new things with it when we do read it in relation to what's happening in the Soviet Union and the literary and cultural sphere circling it.

Hmm. All right. Well, that sounds, I mean, I wouldn't have a problem explaining that at a dinner party. So, you know, we'll see how that one develops. But of course, as you continue working on that new project, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Cartographies of Empire, the Road Novel and American Hegemony, published by Stanford University Press in 2025. Micah, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. Thanks so much for having me, Miranda.