Lynne Pearce

Automobility in Manchester Fiction

Abstract This article contributes to recent debates concerning automobility and ‘mobile, embodied practices’ (Cresswell & Merriman, 2011) by considering how various ‘driving events’ entail modes of perception that are of interest from an ontological perspective; that is, how drivers and passengers see the world through the windows of a moving car and how the driving ‘sensorium’ (Gilroy, 2001; Sheller, 2004) may be associated with emotional states (such as ‘escape’, ‘frustration’, ‘nostalgia’) that arguably characterize the everyday life of late modernity. In addition, the discussion speculates on what this altered perception means for how we see and conceptualize the contemporary urban landscape, concurring with Doel (1996) that such space has effectively become a ‘scrumpled geography’ that can no longer be accounted for in traditional cartographical terms. These reflections are explored through close readings of a selection of literary texts (principally, crime fiction novels) emanating from Greater Manchester (England) and thus the article also contributes to recent work (both cultural and sociological) on the re-imagining of this particular urban landscape in recent times (Haslam, 2000; Pearce et al., forthcoming).

The Urban Imaginary: Writing, Migration, Place

‘Writing, Migration, Place’, the subtitle of this editorial, was also the subtitle of the international conference, ‘Glocal Imaginaries’, from which the present special issue derives. Extending across four days and two sites (Lancaster University and the Whitworth Gallery, Manchester) this conference, attracting delegates from 35 countries around the globe, was the culmination of the Arts and Humanities Research Council [AHRC]-funded research project, ‘Moving Manchester’ (2006–2010), which investigated the ways in which migration has informed writing in Greater Manchester from the 1960s to the present. Although manifestly crossand inter-disciplinary in nature (with participants representing the social sciences, history, geography and linguistics, as well as literary and cultural studies), the conference’s thematic focus on writing practice and textual production distinguished ‘Glocal Imaginaries’ from a good many other conferences that have addressed issues of migration, post-colonialism and/or ‘the g/ local’ in recent times. In other words, this was a conference that attended to the agency of creative writers, journalists, webmasters, film-makers and artists in creating and shaping, as well as responding to, the discourse(s) of globalization, migration, and mobility and showed how the ‘representational’ (Lefebvre, 1991) realm is arguably more instrumental in (re)imagining the material world than has sometimes been allowed. One striking thematic focus to emerge from the call for papers was ‘The G/local City’ which we subsequently took as one of our cross-disciplinary conference streams and which is revisited here under the aegis of ‘The Urban Imaginary’. Therefore, while the city, and urban space more generally, has already been the focus of many excellent Mobilities’ articles and special issues, we trust that our specific attention to the discursive and creative production of contemporary urban

Re)constructing the region in the 21st century

This special issue has its origins in a colloquium on the theme of ‘The Construction and Legitimation of Regional Identities in Europe and Beyond’, which was hosted by Lancaster University in November 2006 as part of the Institute of Advanced Studies’ Annual Research Programme. This research programme culminated in an international conference on ‘Regions and Regionalism’ (September 2007), which we have also drawn upon in our selection of articles. In putting together this special issue we have sought to include not only ‘the best’ of these articles in terms of their scholarly depth and originality, but also those that capture the international flavour of current debates (and artistic practices) concerning the construction of regions and regionalism in various public spheres and social domains. As will be seen from the list of contents, the regions under discussion are located in Europe, North America and the UK, while our contributors are spread equally widely across the globe. Moreover, the contributions embrace a wide range of disciplines and practices: the analysis of TV documentaries and series, contemporary literature, digital storytelling and focus group discussions. They comprise debates about minority languages, everyday politics, and the revival of old–new territorial regions as well as issues of regional or national identity and identification. We trust that it is precisely this globalization of the regional that will render this a thought-provoking collection of articles at a time when the social, economic and ideological struggles between the ‘local’ and ‘global’ are more disputed than ever before. Indeed, what the wide-ranging interdisciplinary discussions at the colloquium made abundantly clear is that as an administrative category, ‘the region’ is at the frontline of most nations’ (and indeed the European Union’s (EU)) attempts to control or manage their populations’ sense of ‘home and belonging’ in both local and global contexts. This ideological battle for the region is especially evident with respect to the role of regional TV and media broadcasting. Whatever we may feel about the agenda of

'Writing' and 'region' in the 21st century: Epistemological reflections on regionally-located art and literature in the wake of the digital revolution

This article, which draws upon the work of the AHRC-funded research project Moving Manchester (2006—9), looks at the ways in which Manchester’s vibrantly multicultural writing community positions itself in relation to issues of region and regional identity. In particular, it investigates how contemporary writers have both reproduced and challenged the stereotypes associated with the city, issues of filiation/affiliation and the way in which many local writers’ groups may be said to have produced literature which is of the region without necessarily being about it. The innovative ‘grassroots’ nature of much Manchester writing (notably its ‘live literature’ scene) is also considered. The final section of the article compares this community-based experience of ‘writing’ and ‘region’ with that found on digital storytelling websites and posits that the digital form would seem to encourage transnational rather than regional identifications in the texts produced.

A Motor-Flight Through Early Twentieth-Century Consciousness: Capturing the Driving-Event 1905–1935

It is thought-provoking to observe the extent to which motoring has long been, and still is, associated with madness. Whilst, today, the psychopathology of car culture may turn upon its environmental insanity and the widely reported tabloid phenomenon, ‘road rage’,1 a century ago, when motoring was still in its infancy, there was wide concern for how the altered states of consciousness brought about by travelling at speed might constitute, or at least lead to, a kind of madness.2 Sometimes this was indexed as a benign ‘motor mania’ (as in Mrs. Kennard’s ‘witty and amusing’ middle-brow novel, The Motor Maniac (1902)); in other texts (fictional and otherwise), however, the ‘mania’ takes a rather more disturbing turn.

‘Driving-as-Event’: re-thinking the car journey

Abstract This article explores the possibility of ‘measuring’ the individual car journey in terms of the quality of the cognitive distance travelled by the car’s occupants. Literary texts constitute an invaluable resource in this regard since their focus on the interiority of the driving experience is of great help in the theorisation of what I refer to here as ‘automotive consciousness’. In the discussion that follows, I propose that each and every car journey may be thought of as a unique and non-reproducible event in the lives of the drivers and passengers concerned on account of the variable psychological and situational factors involved.

The Literary Response to Moss Side, Manchester: Fact or (Genre) Fiction?

Today, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, Greater Manchester is home to approximately two and a half million people. But in what sense ‘home’? Despite the postmodern discourses, both academic and popular, which have imbued the concept with provisionality, ‘home’ still bears powerful connotations of roots, rootedness and heritage (Marangoly George 1996). Home, in this archaic sense, is not where ‘you’ come from, or even where you were born, but where previous generations of your family come from: your parents, your grandparents and, quite possibly, your great-grandparents. Yet this is manifestly not the case for anyone whose home is Manchester. As Dave Haslam, author of Manchester, England (2000) sums up: Unlike London, which was a thriving metropolis three hundred years ago, Manchester is a hybrid town, born all in a rush one hundred and fifty years ago, when those arriving for work in the fast-growing factories, workshops, warehouses and foundries included large numbers of Catholic Irish, as well as Scots, and Germans and East European Jews. These migrations have been replicated since, with incomers from the Caribbean in the 1950s and from the Asian sub-continent in the 1970s. (Haslam 2000: xi)

Trackless mourning: the mobilities of love and loss

In response to recent work in cultural geography on the spatial practices of mourning and remembrance, I draw upon my own research on the discourse of romantic love (in the field of literary and cultural theory) in order to theorise a connection between the memorial practices associated with the ‘life’ of a relationship and those pursued in retrospect. Through a focus on embodied mobility, I propose that there are implicit links between the way in which we create and store memories (à propos Bergson), the way we protect and project them (the processes commonly associated with nostalgia) and the way we activate them in later years (memorialisation). A secondary – but related – line of argument concerns the distinction between public (and ‘spectacular’) and private (and ‘invisible’) memorial practices and the function of mobilities of various kinds within each. With reference to a small selection of autobiographical and literary texts, I reflect upon the way in which burials (in the Christian tradition) have, for centuries, been inscribed by spectacular hypermobility (for the deceased as well as the bereaved) and how, by contrast, our more private memorial practices are often invisible precisely because they exist only as micro-mobilities of some kind. For while mourning may involve visits to memorials in the landscape (as explored in the work of Avril Maddrell and others), it may equally take the form of walks (or drives) devoid of both destination and visible trace (what I refer to here as a ‘trackless mourning’) or express itself in the smallest of gestures that, unbeknown to the world, unite the deceased and the bereaved.

‘Walking out’: the mobilities of love

ABSTRACT In this article, I propose that mobility performs a crucial role in the production and sustenance of intimate relationships and focus, in particular, on courtship practices and their modern-day equivalents. I pursue this discussion through close readings of literary and autobiographical texts from the nineteenth century through to the millennium, and by means of a framework that triangulates the work of Tim Ingold, David Seamon and Henri Bergson. My focus here is on how the mobilities we practice during the everyday routines of courtship – i.e. the paths we make, the routes we take, the roads we travel, the journeys we repeat, the transport we use – come to characterise the relationship concerned and impact upon its progress. Both Ingold’s work on ‘lines’ and Seamon’s on ‘place-ballet’ are conceptually suggestive in this regard and speak to recent work in mobilities/cultural geography on the significance of patterns of movement in the praxis of relationships.

Mobility and the humanities

Abstract This special issue showcases new and emerging work on mobilities by scholars working in arts and humanities disciplines. In this introductory article we counter the conventional genealogy of mobility studies and the new mobilities paradigm as having emerged from the social sciences, tracing the long entanglement of mobility thinking with debates in the arts and humanities, from writings rooted in process philosophy and post-colonial thinking, to engagements with transport history and artistic representations of movement. We argue that arts and humanities approaches to movement and mobility can usefully be guided by a broadened understanding of ‘kin-aesthetics’, through which scholars can examine how movement is enacted, felt, perceived, expressed, metered, choreographed, appreciated and desired. In the final section we introduce the articles in the special issue, examining some of the different texts, methods and theoretical frames through which the authors approach movement and mobility in its different forms.