Globalizing Automobilism

Gijs Mom is Associate Professor emeritus at Eindhoven University of Technology. His monograph Atlantic Automobilism: Emergence and Persistence of the Car, 1895–1940, was published by Berghahn Books in 2015. He is a co-editor, with Georgine Clarsen and Mimi Sheller, of the Berghahn Books series “Explorations in Mobility.”

• List of IllustrationsPrefaceIntroduction: Questioning the Car: Prolegomena for a Historical Analysis of Global MobilityNew Perspectives, New QuestionsLooking Back: Emergence and Persistence of the Adventure MachineExtending Adventure: The Car as Possession and Status SymbolProducing Commodification: Status, Narcissism, and Self-DevelopmentDiversifying Automotive Identities: The Non-Hegemonic SelfNew Mobility Studies: Bodily Senses, The Car as Medium, and the Challenge of RepresentationThe Trouble with Travel Writing: Meandering between Fictionality and RepresentationThis Study: Sources and TerminologyPart I. Emergence and Persistence (Again): The Shaping of Mobility Layerdness beyond the WestChapter 1. Modernizing without Automobilization: Subverting and Subalternizing Mobility History (1890–1945/1950)Imperialist Mobilities: Japan and the Modernization of ManchuriaUrban Mobilities: The Rickshaw and the Motorization of Asian CitiesBetween Long March and Long-Haul: Rail and Road Network Building in ChinaDual Networks of Rails and Roads: The Modal Configuration in Other Asian CountriesMigration, Colonialism and the Struggle between Rail and Road: The Case of AfricaMore than Modern: Constructing a Latin American Adventure MachineThe Rest and the West: Subversive and Subaltern Mobilities?Part II: Exuberance, with a Twist: Spreading the Gospel of AutomobilismChapter 2. Fragmenting Automotive Adventure: Western Exuberant Automobilism and Middle-Class Guilt (1945–1973)“Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan”A Multimedia Feast: Folk, Beat, Rock and Other MobilitiesMotorizing the Worker: Fragmentation and Convergence of Western Car CulturesThe Attack on Public Transport: Hegemonic Car Cultures in a Cold War SettingExperiencing the Car in a Fragmented Culture: Shifts in Autopoetic AdventuresSongs and Movies: Rejuvenating the Adventure Machine in Popular CultureFlow Interrupted: Crash and the Systemic Aspects of AutomobilismChapter 3. Layered Development: The Transnational Construction of a World Mobility System (1940s–1970s)What is ‘Layered Development’?Alternative Developments: Soviet Mobility and the Modernization of China and IndiaConceiving ‘Development’: Mobilizing the ‘Rest’Mediating Modernization: Japan and Asian ‘Development’Constructing ‘Circulation’: The IRF and the "Development" of AfricaDevelopmentalism vs. Dependentismo: Latin American Mobilities and the Frustrations of Middle-Class ModernityConclusions: Road, Rail, and DevelopmentLayered, Fragmented, Subversive, Subaltern: ConclusionsBibliographyIndex

“[Mom presents two] distinct yet well-integrated perspectives, that of the historical and the methodological craftsman. The effective nexus of those perspectives allows Mom to tell a story too often overlooked and even blatantly ignored by Western-centric texts on the same subject. Despite its considerable length, this text is a dense work of research best suited for academics who are serious about mobility studies and/or non-Western 20th-century (or postcolonial) history.” • Choice“… a nuanced and complex account of the histories of mobility… [Some chapters] are real gems for the outline of a diverse world often invisible in mobility literature, as well as for a detailed anatomy of motorization and development practices.” • TSEG- The Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History“Mom has access to an extraordinarily broad palette of source materials and methods. There is no other monograph in the field of such vast comparative scope.” • Peter Norton, University of Virginia