So That We as a Race Might Have Something Authentic to Travel By

African American Automobility and Cold-War Liberalism

Bibliographic Data

ID3013063
AuthorsCotten Seiler (corresponding author)
Year2006
Volume58
Issue4
Pages1091-1117
Publication date2006-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0003-0678 • E-ISSN: 1080-6490
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/aq.2007.0015
OpenAlexW2048588680
LanguageEN
Citations received15
References cited24

This essay examines the perils, pleasures, opportunities, and political significance of African-American automobility as documented in Travelguide (Vacation and Recreation Without Humiliation) and The Negro Motorist Green Book, midcentury guidebooks which directed black drivers to hospitable roadside lodging, restaurants, and mechanical assistance. These texts offer a multifaceted, often contradictory rhetoric of communal racial uplift and liberal individualism figured around the practice of driving. The years of their publication, 1936-1957, saw tremendous volatility in American race relations, as World War II and the Cold war made the national doctrine of white supremacy a global political liability. It was in this historical context that African Americans' desire and fitness for citizenship were tethered to and divined in their participation in automobility-a practice that fused self-determination and self-representation, mobility, consumption, and social encounter. The rhetorical strategies of these guidebooks complemented a particular strain of liberal antiracism necessitated and lubricated by the cold war, facilitated by the "nationalization" of postwar politics and economics, and performed in increasingly standardized public spaces. One of these spaces was the Interstate highway, which, set apart from and above the landscape and local culture through which it cut, provided an opportunity for the obscuring of one's identity from the scrutiny of others. The new interstate highway, I argue, enabled the African-American driver to pass as the blank liberal subject, and to effect, under certain circumstances, the privatist withdrawal that has been such an extravagant and problematic characteristic of American citizenship

Cold war · Liberalism · Political science · Politics · Race (biology · Sociology · American Environmental and Regional History · American History and Culture · European history and politics · Gender Studies · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies

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