Mobility and American Cultures
June 20-22, 2002

The corsortium’s first conference was held at the University of Bologna in June 2002. It explored mobility as a quintessential American ideology. Participants considered sociological, cultural (both popular and high), economic, technological, literary, historical and political approaches to the topic. They discussed how Americans received and resisted the ideology of mobility. They considered mobility in art and film, mobility in racial, ethnic, gender and class formations, and mobility in the 21st century’s context of globalization.

1ST PANEL
Chair: Susan Smulyan
Brown University

TRANS PACIFIC CIRCUITS: THE MOBILITY OF CHINESE/AMERICAN IDEAS OF CITIZENSHIP
by Robert Lee
Brown University

Between 1870 and 1952 Chinese in the United States were excluded from immigration and naturalized citizenship. Nevertheless they enacted US citizenship in ways other than through voting or sitting on juries: they created political organizations, sued the government, organized boycotts and resisted discriminatory laws. They also articulated and debated the meaning of citizenship in both their Chinese and American homelands. This paper wm look at one such transnational debate among Chinese intellectuals and activists in the late 19th century and thus illustrate the movements of people and ideas between Asia and the United States. Wang Chin Foo, who first came to the United States in 1868 to study at a Pennsylvania college, was an activist in the service of the Chinese· communities in New York and Chicago. Popular on the Chautauqua lecture circuit, Wang published an essay summarizing his views in 1887 entitled 'Why I am a Heathen," a satirical critique of Christianity and its accommodation of racism. The next month, another American Chinese, Van Phou lee, then an undergraduate at Yale, published a rejoinder to Wong entitled 'Why I Am Not a Heathen" arguing that those who persecuted Chinese were not true Christians. Taken together, the debate on Christianity reveals not only American Chinese views of American society, culture, and government, but also an important range of views of Chinese society, culture, and government at a critical moment in China's political development. Wong's rejection of Christianity, for example, is based not only on his observation of its social practice in America but also shaped by China's long and troubled relationship with Christianity, including the massive mid-19th century Taiping Rebellion. Lee’s defense of Christianity as a liberal social ideology also draws not only on his more positive experiences with New England Protestant congregations which welcomed Chinese, but also on a critical understanding of the limitations of Confucian social ideology. An exploration of this exchange and its social origins reveals a lively transnational circuit of experience and ideas among mid-19th century Chinese in North America.

“A DEPRAVED, CONSUMING PUBLIC”: AMERICAN MOBILITY AND THE OPEC OIL EMBARGO OF 1973
by Natasha Zaretsky
Brown University

This paper argues that the OPEC oil embargo initiated a widespread cultural debate about the enervating effects of middle class consumption on national strength, a debate-which focused largely on the “American love of the automobile and the value Americans place on mobility. Because post-war economic growth had been predicated on acc8S$ to cheap and plentiful auto petroleum, ·and the mobility and freedom it brought, the American automobile functioned as one· of the most powerful symbols of prosperity throughout the postwar years. But during the embargo of 1973, this symbolic role was disrupted as commentators condemned the American car as a “gas gulper, pandering to the gross tastes of a depraved, consuming public.” The paper traces this temporary symbolic shift, while-also looking at the ways in which gas and advertising companies had to quickly hone a conservation message, one that went against some of the most basic rules of advertising. Finally, the paper argues that, although this indictment of the American automobile did not have any long-term impact on car design, fuel consumption, or the American love of the open road, it must be seen as part of a broader ideological attack on the postwar, consuming, middle class family, an attack that did have profound long-term implications.

A RACE SO DIFFERENT FROM OUR OWN
by Sandra Lwin
Yale University

This paper looks at issues of mobility through the lens of racial and spatial segregation at the turn of the last century. It examines the Plessey Case and Justice Harlan's invocation of Chinese laborers on the transcontinental railroad in his famous dissent against segregation, and focuses on the intersections between black-white segregation and Chinese exclusion.

THE ELISE SIGEL MURDER AND THE POLICING OF MOBILITY IN TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY NEW YORK CITY
by Mary Lui
Yale University

On June 16, 1909, New York City police discovered the body of nineteen-year-old Elsie Sigel inside a trunk in a room in mid-town Manhattan. The police quickly suspected the room's missing occupant, a Chinese man named Leon Ling, of committing the murder. Overnight, the murder of Elsie Sigel., who was rumored to be a missionary to the city's Chinese workers, made the front pages of newspapers throughout the country. For several months, the city's newspapers and magazines published numerous articles, letters, and cartoons portraying the murder case as a modem urban tragedy played out against the seemingly foreign backdrop of New York City’s Chinatown and its inscrutable Chinese residents. As police and journalists worked to make sense of Elsie Sigel's murder and her relationship with Leon Ling, New Yorkers confronted the disturbing reality of interracial sexual and social relations between Chinese men and white women and the· place of Chinese immigrants in turn-of-the-century New York City. The general public responded to Elsie Sigel's murder and the rumors of her affair with a mixture of disbelief, horror, and outrage. Her murder forced the public to acknowledge the extent to which formal and informal attempts at separating the city's Chinese and non-Chinese populations through the regulation of racialized, gendered, and sexualized sociospatial borders was failing and the consequences were devastating. By revisiting this 1909 murder, we gain a better understanding of how mobility, both physical and socioeconomic, was also a gendered and racialized privilege. By examining the popular depictions of the Elsie Sigel murder, we see how these images and stories by imparting moral and social lessons for readers worked to restrain the physical and social mobility of Chinese men and white women of all socioeconomic classes, while reaffirming mobility as a white male privilege. These racialized narratives of urban sexu~1 danger emerging out of official reports and rumors worked to reassert breached sociospatial boundaries. Yet, as this paper will discuss, reinscribing these borders and keeping watch over the movements of the city's inhabitants proved difficult as the facts of the murder and the actions of those being policed showed the extent to which these borders remained permeable and easily transgressed.

2ND PANEL
Chair: Richard Hutson
University of California at Berkeley

MOBILITY OF IMMOBILITY? LAS VEGAS AND THE VIRTUAL GRAND TOUR
by Giovanna Franci
University of Bologna

Mobility is a constitutive element of the American nation, a way to look for its own identity through a continuous progress and change. It is not by chance that cinema, the first example of art in movement, is typically American. In the past, the Grand Tour adventure was part of the collective imaginary of travel to exotic foreign lands, which lead the traveler to seek out new, extreme sensations in unknown places, if not even 'other' worlds, out of a profound desire to escape. This experience of the “stupendous spectacle,” of the full vision is lost forever to the modern traveler. What remains is just a repetition, a second-rate journey. There can be travel within one's own room, in the style of Pascal; or virtual travel, a vicarious journey in place, like that which America has created with its theme parks since the times of Walt Disney. This sort of journey now finds its apotheosis in Las Vegas, where you can visit Egypt and Rome, Paris or the Italian fakes, New York or the Malaysian jungle without ever moving away from the desert of Nevada. The first part of the paper will deal with the imagination of Italy and Europe as a kind of renewed picturesque 'Grand Tour' to mass tourism (actual movement). The second part will examine the phenomenon of Las Vegas, with its Italian inspired art and architecture -from Caesar's Palace to The Bellagio, and The Venetian -with a comparison between the re-invention of the buildings in Las Vegas and the original ones (virtual movement). An analysis of the new phase of post-postmodern architecture will conclude the paper with many question marks.

Walled In: Spatial Immobility in American Culture
by Geoffrey Green
San Francisco State University

Spatial mobility has long been recognized as a significant theme in American culture: from Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, The Grapes of Wrath, Kerouac’s On the Road, Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 to Chuck Berry's "Promised land," Robert Johnson's "Hellhound on My Trail," Ricky Nelsen's "Travelin' Man," and the noir-ish TV series, The Fugitive, relentless motion has epitomized the American quest for life, liberty, and personal individuality. But there has also been a clearly-established counter-tradition in American culture, one that renders mobility as pointless and futile and instead focuses on immobility in relation to the anxiety concerning fulfillment of identity, Jove, and personal integrity. An examination of such varied literary, cinematic, and musical texts as Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener," Edgar Poe's "The Man of the Crowd," John Barth's The End of the Road, Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy, Billy Wilder's film noir, The Big Carnival, as well as Johnny Cash's "Folsom Prison Blues" and Bob Dylan's ''Time Passes Slowly" and “Watchin' the River Flow” establishes a clear counter-tradition of immobility as an ironic foil; an antithesis to the dominant mythic theme of mobility in American culture.

SOCIAL MOBILITY VS. COMMUNITY: THE POETRY READING AND THE BEAT GENERATION
by Ron Loewinsohn
University of California at Berkeley

The Beats seem like an apt choice to exemplify mobility in American culture. The book that’s most often taken as their Bible and route map is Jack Kerouac's On the Road. The other core Beats (Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Gary Snyder) likewise are all concerned with motion, whether ifs physical movement across a landscape or cityscape, or mobility among forms. Like Ovid, many of the Beat writers are concerned with transformations, asking, 'What persists? What’s stable in all this mobility?"  Acknowledging this, this paper focused instead on how the Beats' practice (as well as their content) dramatized their rejection of the 50s model of upward social mobility, replacing it with what they hailed as a classless community that was democratic and anarchic, yet unified by its own rituals. One of the major rituals that creates and sustains that community is the poetry reading, which the Beats redefined and reshaped. Prior to the Beats, the poetry reading had been defined and conceived as a recital, a performance that insisted on separating and differentiating between performers and audience. In the hands of the Beats the poetry reading was transformed into a ritual – complete with audience participation – that affirms and unifies the community's members while validating the poet as their spokesman. Within this (highly self-conscious) sub-culture, which is defined by its conflict with the larger mainstream middle-class culture that surrounds it, a different sort of mobility characterizes the Beats' crossing of boundary lines and categories, as they act out their rejection of the values and models of middle-class success, often in painful dramas.

“BLACK LIKE THE DEPTHS OF MY AFRICA”: LANGSTON HUGHES IN AFRICA, 1923
by James T. Campbell
Brown University

Since the late eighteenth century, when the first shiploads of African Americans landed in Sierra Leone, thousands of African Americans have journeyed "back to Africa." The diversity of African American life is registered in the variety of those who have made the passage: sailors, missionaries, teachers, fortune hunters, artists, poets and, more recently, journalists, professors, Peace Corps volunteers, foreign service officers, and representatives of a veritable alphabet soup of NGOs. Hundreds of these travelers recorded their observations and reflections, producing a virtual sub-genre of that most self-reflective of literary forms, the African travelers' account. Included in the roster are many of black America's most distinguished intellectual and political leaders: Paul Cuffe, Martin Delany, Alexander Crummell, W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Ralph Bunche, Richard Wright, Maya Angelou, and Alice Walker, to name only a few. In a book project entitled "Middle Passages," I argue that one of the most influential bodies of sources in shaping African American ideas about Africa – is the collection of travel writings left by black Americans who themselves ventured to the continent. This paper is drawn from a chapter on the era of the Harlem Renaissance, an era of intense fascination with Africa among black American writers and intellectuals. The paper focuses in particular on poet Langston Hughes, whose tragicomic 1923 voyage to West Africa was recounted in his 1940 autobiography, "The Big Sea." By reading Hughes' retrospective account of the trip alongside both contemporary commentary about Africa and the poems and letters that Hughes himself wrote at the time, I hope not only to cast fresh light on one of American literature's most enigmatic figures, but to illuminate a fundamental change in the meaning of Africa in African American intellectual and imaginative life as African Americans moved back and forth, physically, imaginatively and discursively, between Africa and the United States.

3RD PANEL
Chair: Laura Wexler
Yale University

MOBILIZING HOLLYWOOD FILMS TO “TEACH DEMOCRACY” DURING THE ALLIED OCCUPATION OF JAPAN
by Susan Smulyan
Brown University

When and how did American popular culture begin to move around the world? The circulation of commodified mass media remains one of the most contested issues in globalization. American ideas and culture "move" across national borders, but that movement is embraced, resisted, and profited from in unequal measures. This paper looks at an important moment in the exportation of American film and in the evolving idea that American popular culture carries American ideals around the world. During the American Occupation of Japan attar World War H, the American military government used Hollywood movies to "teach democracy" and in the process illustrated the complexity of cultural exchange as well as the difficulty in ascribing simple ideologies to popular culture forms. Because the U.S. Government had direct control over the American films admitted to Japan, issues of national and ideological expression should be clearer than when private companies control such cultural interactions. Yet Japanese reactions to the films, a changing American political climate, and the relationship between the government and the already internationalized Hollywood film industry complicated the picture and the flow of American movies.

A FRONTIER BEFORE THE LAST: SPACE IN AMERICAN SCI-FI FILM
by Franco La Polla
University of Bologna

The notion of space in the American sci-fi film has undergone a few changes through the decades since the 50’s. In those years space was presented as a hazardous territory and not as a goal enthusiastically to be faced. The cold war was certainty behind this reading, but also the colonization pattern, which follows that of the western, a genre largely comparable with the former. Sci-fi, thus, has to be seen as a genre strictly connected with the historical roots of the nation. By the time space turned into the site of superior intelligence and peaceful approach, which appears as a step toward its shrinking into virtual reality. Outer space became, in the general imagination and quite erroneously, something already well known by everybody thanks to the mass-media apparatus, which projected a false and eventually reassuring· image of it country-and worldwide. After the green sensibi1ity of the 60's, the mid-70's launched with Lucas and Spielberg a new version of space as a place where one could go around like a drunk driver (which means a place quite comfortable and pretty familiar). A new space had to take over, virtual space, whose structure is that of the labyrinth, with all its death symbolism. Virtuality, the highest technology of this day, works following the same pattern of ancient magic, like in Star Trek's holodeck, where one can create things, environments, people and interact with them. And once again the old, traditional equivalence of huge and small, of macrocosm and microcosm, that has marked the American culture through the centuries from the first Puritan experiment to the Transcendentalist experience has found in a microchip the place where to concentrate the entire universe.

THE Road as Allegory OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION: John Ford’s "Stagecoach"
by Richard Hutson
University of California at Berkeley

John Ford's Stagecoach (1939) has overt references to the Great Depression: the criminal banker, for instance, is a giveaway. But more deeply, the crisis of conf1dence in a system seems to force the imagination back to the most primitive form of story organization and of social relationships-the purest seriality. The reduction of various American popular genres to road movies is a phenomenon characteristic of the U.S. in the 193Os. As is the case with a number of these films, Ford's vision is one of redemption for his characters (except for the banker, Gatewood) even as Gatewood seems to become integrated into a developing social grouping of the characters that overcomes the seriality of their relationship. As it turns out, they all have an important feature in common – their lives may be seen as various forms of ruin. And, in the end, they are figures as survivors who overcome, to a modest extent, the ruination of their former lives. After all, even Gatewood had a dream of redemption for himself. The seriality of the road signifies this ruin, but it is also the road of their redemption.

SOME VERSIONS OF HOMECOMING IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN FILM
by Michelle Fadda
University of Bologna

The fictions of “homecoming” have always played an important role not only in the symbolic construction of America, but also in the ritual of consensus which has permitted American cinema to establish a “world” and an ideology, and the moviegoers to accept that special reality in which “the made up” becomes a “made real.”  However, after the crisis of Hollywood in the Fifties, and above all after the loss of identity and the downfall of the American dream provoked by the Vietnam war, a sense of being a "stranger at home" pervaded American cinema for many years. The feeling of the Vietnam veteran who came home without recognizing the face of America -without being recognized by America -was in a certain sense analogous to the mood of many American films which, in the 70's and 80's,seemed no longer capable of establishing a "natural" connection with that consensual myth, and of creating a believable narrative that was able to habit America, intended both as a geographic place and a place of the mind, the locus of a transparent interpolation – both formal and thematic – between culture, history, society and individual. Is it still possible in the cinema of the 90's to "come back home" again, to elaborate a fiction of belonging, after the disenchantment towards America described by the so called New Hollywood, in an age of displacement and polisemy or, more to the point, in a society which has lifted out material and local experience into cyberspace? Some recent American films seem to reply in the affirmative to this question, trying to deal in some way with an idea of America and to reconcile themselves to a "lived modernity" -or post-modernity. By focusing on the ambiguities and contradictions of these new journeys through America, the paper will try to describe some versions of these homecomings. Examples range from films like Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan and Artificial Intelligence to Zemeckis' Forrest Gump and Cast Away, to Lynch's Straight Story and Joel Coen's O’ Brother, Where art Thou.

CALIFORNIA AND OTHER ADVENTURES: MOVING THROUGH SPACE AND TIME WITH DISNEY
by Margaretta Lovell and Kathleen Moran
University of California at Berkeley

Disneyland Park in Anaheim California is, among other things, a fantasy about urban mobility. Both the past (trains, trolleys, stagecoaches, pirate ships, riverboats) and the future (space ships, monorails, people movers) have been domesticated and present day vehicles look exotic or cute (Dumbo planes, miniature submarines.) The only “cars” one encounters are the kind that move on tracks through fantasy spaces or up and down roller coasters. Until last year, the admission gates into Disneyland definitively separated visitors from the "reality" of Los Angeles life, most clearly represented by the vast parking lot, which spread like a barren concrete desert outside the entrance. Disney's original "lands" mayor my not have been consciously envisioned as an alternative to Los Angeles, but in any case they were most emphatically NOT versions of real places or even real times. Adventureland, Frontierland, Tomrrowland, Fantasyland and Main Street were self-consciously designed to edit out messy historical references, and to move visitors away from reminders of reality into a place of synthetic geographies and "once upon a time." They were spaces, often reduced in scale, which cited childhood images and stories, through which one traveled as if by magical impulsion on one of the carefully programmed and orchestrated rides. In the spring of last year, Disney's California Adventures opened. Built on the 55-acre plot that had been the old parking lot, DCA announces rather than shuts out its California context. Though Disney public relations staff insists that DCA does not attempt to "replicate" California, journalists and visitors have frequently described the park as a "virtual" California. Its themed areas evoke and reproduce actual places, actual historical events and actual buildings, and its historical references are not self-contained Disney productions. The Grand Californian, the resort hotel that is the centerpiece of DCA, is the most spectacular departure from Disney's previous orientation. A vast seven-story building designed by Peter Dominick of Urban
Design, the hotel is a quite remarkable interpretation of a c.1910 Arts and Crafts style structure. While rides through simulated pediatric-scale adventures are still the main attraction of this Disney experience, the real novelty is found in the time-travel feature of this quite serious and very adult reproduction of high art architectural design.

In this paper, we discuss Disney's California Adventure and, in particular, the Grand Californian as variants on the American dream of a coherent wholesome pedestrian-based society which through spatial cues and temporal displacement invite visitors to participate in a masquerade of upward mobility. Just as Main Street and Tommorrowland were the symptomatic evocations of mid-twentieth century American hopes and anxieties, so the Grand Californian tells us something about America's current postures and evasions.

4TH PANEL
Chair: Franco La Polla
University of Bologna

AMERICAN MUSIC ON THE TRAILS
by Franco Minganti
University of Bologna

The wilderness has always played an important role in the imagination of American mobility. Its landscapes have inspired all kinds of artists (writers, painters and photographers), while its soundscapes have stimulated the genius of American composers dedicated to capturing the essence of the American spirit while trying to reframe it in music. "American Music on the Trails" reflects on some aspects of a musical ''westward expansion", which include the influences of European Romantic music, the (musical) imagination of moving, and the (musical) stereotypes of wonder and exoticism, particularly when related to the quintessential American 1I0ther", the Native American. Examples range from American classics like Ferde Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite to Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring and Billy the Kid, to popular music and the scores to films and TV westerns.

"Andante Sostenuto": Chromatic Mobility in Kurt Weill's and Bertolt Brecht's "The Seven Deadly Sins"
by Marcia Green
San Francisco State University

In The Seven Deadly Sins, Weill and Brecht present, in musical form, a cultural critique of American culture and the American Dream. An analysis of the musical and geographical mobility through movement of the two doppelganger sister protagonists [one with voice; one with movement] as they work to achieve "success" reveals a fundamental irony: despite extensive geographical mobility across the United States, stability is attained by the smallest possible musical mobilization. Although the sisters achieve the American Dream, they lose their integrity, one sin at a time. In a sense, spatial mobility is both represented and negated--emphasizing the ironic underplayings of the text.

FROM DAGUERROTYPES TO NICKELODEONS: SETTING AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHY IN MOTION
by Didier Aubert
Université Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle

The paper will try to give a survey of different American attitudes toward the temporary technological limitations photography encounters when dealing with motion, and the aesthetic and social consequences of these obstacles. What was the status of this "frozen" image? To a considerable extent, it was paradoxically linked to the incredible "mobility" of its practitioners and of the images themselves, which Holmes famously compared to a kind of “universal currency.”  The essay will then try to explore the specific issues raised by the development of “hand-held cameras,” “snapshots,” and finally “motion-pictures.”

THE LOOK, THE GAZE, AND THE RELAY RACE: A PHOTOGRAPHIC INQUIRY
by Laura Wexler
Yale University

This paper considers not the movement of persons, but of images of persons, by means of photography, as a relay race through time as well as space. What happens, when a photographer acts to relay “proleptic memory,” that is, memory-in-advance? To make palpable the extermination of a people even before they have begun to disappear? In the 1930s, Roman Vishniac had a sense that the Jews of Eastern Europe were going to be exterminated; he could do nothing except to create a memory, for the future, of what would once have been. He spent many years with his camera in and out of countries and jails in Eastern Europe, trying to get photographs that no one wanted him to take. Not the authorities, not the Americans and not, surely, the Jews who didn’t consider themselves endangered. But Vishniac understood his role as a photographer to be to relay their gaze to the future. This paper inquires into the politics and ethics of this kind of endeavor. What original and continuing forms of spectatorship do such images invite? Can a monument that is built when the need for a marker has not yet even arisen disrupt the momentum of genocide? Or might “proleptic memory” reveal instead the paralysis and resignation that make the need of the future's recollection inevitable? It is hoped that general as well as particular considerations will emerge from this example.