Transfers

The curse “may you live in interesting times” (erroneously attributed to China, probably dating to nineteenth-century Britain) is scourging a great many of us these days, as a wave of authoritarianism batters the political systems and civil societies of nations once committed to democratic values and norms. The authoritarianism currently gripping portions of Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas may well vary in its intensity and practices when compared to the mid-twentieth-century totalitarianism of, say, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, but it shares with those regimes a fear of people's mobility and a desire to control it.

Bruno Latour's Aramis, or the Love of Technology is a highly intertextual, narrative account of the failed vision of a “personal rapid transport” system in the Paris of the 1980s. This article demonstrates that the main reason for the failure was not so much the lack of communication among the involved parties, as stated by Latour in his “scientifiction”. Rather, it was a computer technology which, then as now, is unable to process the inevitable amount of “big data” and depends on a highly efficient artificial intelligence. The current political and social narratives about smart transport lead back to the archaic question of free will and determination, informed by the representation of this automatic hyper-network at the interface of public and individual traffic.

The multi-fold developments in science and technology have led to enhanced mobility among people in the present times. The desire to have a better life impels migration to far off lands even when it involves facing alien, different cultures, and unknown people. The struggle to adjust and adapt to the new surroundings takes them along various paths filled with numerous challenges. This leads to the creation of a space for them that is transcultural, imbibing the characteristics of more than one culture and often perceived as embodying the promise of an escape from the existing complexities, constraints, and norms governing national and communal identities. However, cross-cultural conflicts as well as those due to the implications of gender have to be negotiated before one can hope to achieve a coveted kind of existence. Additionally, the caste factor is a major construct in the formation of identity particularly in the Indian cultural context where it is deeply embedded in the social set-up and determines the social norms. Its implications are vast and it continues to impact identity even as people migrate to the new land. Sunjeev Sahota in The Year of the Runaways (2015) provides a realistic peep into the struggles identity undergoes on venturing into the transcultural spaces. The article explores Sahota's portrayal of issues such as factors impacting migration, negotiations of identity, caste, and gender conflicts in the transcultural space even as one strives to make a home of the outside world.

In recent debates around the concept of technocracy, the issues of “technology” and “skill” (tekhne) and “power” (kratos) have been absent, even though the combination of these words defines the term. To address the issue of tekhne, I draw on Thorsten Veblen's theoretical justification of the epistemic differences between engineers and financiers. For kratos, I invoke the anarchist critique of authority. The theoretical argument presented in this article claims that epistemic superiority lies in the procedures of knowledge production. Epistemological issues taken as algorithms in the nexus with bureaucratic mechanisms of execution demand a specific type of knowledge. Empirical observations from the reopening of a trolleybus system in Prague, capital of the Czech Republic, show that local engineers have formulated this agenda and that the Czech tradition of electrical engineering in the transport sector plays a crucial role. In turn, the existing procedures for the execution of transportation-related agendas allow engineers to realize their vision for decarbonizing a diesel bus fleet.

Diao, Ying. Faith by Aurality in China's Ethnic Borderland: Media, Mobility, and Christianity at the Margins. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2023.

Kielman, Adam. Sonic Mobilities: Producing Worlds in Southern China. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022.

Sara Baume, A Line Made by Walking (London: Windmill Books, 2017), 308 pp., €13 (paperback).

Chris Abani, GraceLand (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), 321 pp., $18.08 (hardcover).

Civility and etiquette underpin how we are expected to move, where the mobile subject—particularly in transit mobilities—is conditioned and expected to perform in certain manners. In this article, I consider civility and etiquette as more than fixed codes of conduct but a contested and situated process that is both infrastructurally mediated and affectively charged. In the context of transit mobilities, etiquette is closely entangled with not only the ways mobile subject interacts with the infrastructures of mobilities but also the bodily and affective experiences of mobilities. Drawing on the intersecting conceptual lenses of affect and infrastructure, I seek to rethink civility and etiquette in relation to the politics of the body, investigating how socio-cultural norms of mobility are materialized or transgressed at the level of the body. Moreover, I argue that attention to transgression is crucial to uncovering the power dynamics that underlie and construct the norms of civility in transit, revealing an uneven geography of bodily comportment as well as a politics of mobility across intersecting social differences.