This issue of Transfers follows on the heels of special issues dedicated to landscapes, pedagogy, and the legacies of the pathbreaking mobility studies scholar John Urry, and cleaves to the journal's original mission of presenting eclectic and challenging scholarly work that derives from, and speaks to, a number of disciplinary fields and actors. The texts that follow this editorial come from scholars working in sociology, anthropology, media studies, cultural geography, literary studies, and development studies, and housed in academic institutions in Europe, Asia, and South America.
Gathering and preparing for publication this selection of seemingly unrelated work, I couldn't help but find points of association creeping in, with one in particular emerging as a sort of convening theme. Reader, you are entitled to explore the stimulating and generative contributions of this issue's authors without the framing I'm about to offer. So, as always, feel free to skip this editorial.
The frame I have in mind is violence. How much of our mobility is compelled by it? How many souls, historically, has violence propelled to places near and far from their origins? And how much mobility is undertaken to enact violence? Violence or the escape from it underpins individual and collective mobilities: the migratory journeys of refugees, expeditionary wars, flights from abusive homes and relationships, the crossings to freedom of the fugitive enslaved, the incursions of settler-colonials into the lands of Indigenous peoples around the world. Violence is also salted into many of our quotidian mobilities, not least the assertive automobility that shapes everyday life in the United States and other car-dependent societies.
A bit of context: I write this editorial as I come to the shattering conclusion of William Vollman's The Dying Grass: A Novel of the Nez Perce War (2015). This 1,376-page doorstop of a book treats in granular and harrowing detail the US Army's 1877 campaign against bands of Nimiipuu (known to the colonial powers as “Nez Perce”) under Heinmot Tooyalakekt (“Chief Joseph”) and other chiefs. The conflict stemmed, of course, from the US government's desire to facilitate the mobility of some—westering white settlers, especially after the discovery of gold in the region—and curtail the mobility of others—the nonwhite Indigenous groups who had long inhabited the Columbia Plateau in the present-day states of Washington, Idaho, and Oregon. Specifically, the US government, in violation of an 1855 treaty, had reduced the Nez Perce reservation lands by some 90 percent, denying them access to resources and circumscribing their capacity to roam and sustain themselves as they had done for centuries.
The war that ensued amounted to a meandering and dismal trek punctuated by skirmishes and pitched battles across the region's mountainous terrain. Between June and September of 1877, the Nez Perce were pursued some thirteen hundred miles from their homelands in the Wallowa Valley to within striking distance of the Canadian border, where, diminished in number, starving, and freezing, they surrendered. Although some escaped across the border, over four hundred of the remaining men, women, and children were deported through the rapidly colonizing Midwest to Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma), where they languished until many returned to a reservation in Idaho in the late 1880s.The story of the Nez Perce and the violence of the war is, like so many other narratives of conquest, dispossession, and diaspora, a story of mobility. It is suffused, that is, with the ways people move themselves and the things they carry: horses, mules, feet, wagons, wheeled artillery, trains.
So, too, do the articles gathered here, each in their way and to a greater or lesser degree, touch on violence, in addition to exploring other themes. Marian Aguiar's contribution shows how literary artists have refigured the iconic diasporic collective subject of the Vietnam War's aftermath, the so-called “boat people,” into something empowering, rich, and strange. Bianca Freire-Madeiros and Nathalia Silva lead us through the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God's Solomon's Temple in São Paulo, Brazil, where the story of the Exodus of the Hebrews and other biblical takes are marshaled by right-wing forces to recruit believers for combat against adversaries on the left. Patrick Laviolette's theoretically rich essay reminds us that death subtends the narratives and images of hitchhiking, a practice the significance of which might be pursued as a metaphor for the larger structures of contemporary life. Florian Sprenger reveals the violence to matter, including human bodies, beneath the algorithmic and engineering transition to autonomous mobilities—that our mobility is always predicated on some degree of “infrastructural violence.”
This issue's “Trajectories,” by Erica Smith, constellates a number of works that consider global heating through the lens of mobility justice. As Smith and the authors she surveys adumbrate, struggles over resources and habitable land will drive violence, and that violence will drive the climate migration that has already begun. Our “Ideas in Motion” contribution, by Dylan Brady, challenges us to reconsider rail as a mobility apparatus and the nation-state as the crucial source of infrastructure, both of which have been marginalized over the past decades.
There's something in this issue for everyone thinking theoretically, historically, culturally, and gravely about mobility. We hope that you find yours.