American Mobilities

Julia Leyda American Mobilities American Culture Studies | Volume 14 In memory of my grandmother, Hazel (Azzia) Richard De Ville (1906-1992), and my mother, Seraphia De Ville Leyda (1936-1989). Julia Leyda is Visiting Professor in the Graduate School for North American Stu- dies and a Fellow in the DFG Research Unit “Popular Seriality: Aesthetics and Practice” at the John F. Kennedy Institute, Freie Universität Berlin. Her research interests include cuteness, the financialization of domestic space, and contem- porary cli-fi. Julia Leyda American Mobilities Geographies of Class, Race, and Gender in US Culture An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high quality books Open Access for the public good. The Open Access ISBN for this book is 978-3-8394-3455-0. More information about the initiative and links to the Open Access version can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommer- cial-NoDerivs 4.0 (BY-NC-ND) which means that the text may be used for non- commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. To create an adaptation, translation, or derivative of the original work and for commercial use, further permission is required and can be obtained by contac- ting [email protected] © 2016 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Na- tionalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de Cover layout: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Cover illustration: Photo collage by C.E. Shore: »Horse-Drawn Wagon Loaded with Sacks of Potatoes« (circa 1940). US Natio- nal Archives and Records Administration. »Dust Bowl, Dallas, South Dakota« (1936). US Department of Agriculture. »Visitors Leave their Cars Parked along a Road to Photograph Buffalo in the Field« (1938). US National Archives and Records Administration »B&O Passenger Train, Chicago« (1943). Jack Delano, US Library of Congress. »Chrysler Building, Midtown Manhattan, New York City« (1932). Samuel Gott- scho, Gottscho-Schleisner Collection, US Library of Congress. Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-3455-6 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-3455-0 Contents Acknowledgments | 7 Foreword | 9 Introduction: American Mobilities | 11 1 Reading White Trash Class, Race, and Mobility in Faulkner and Le Sueur | 33 2 Incorporation and Embodiment Gender, Race, and Space in Hurst and Himes | 61 3 Who’s Got the Car Keys? Geographic, Economic, and Social Mobility in the Magic Kingdom of Los Angeles | 107 4 Black-Audience Westerns Race, Nation, and Mobility in the 1930s | 141 5 Space, Class, City Imagined Geographies of Maud Martha | 173 6 Home on the Range Space, Nation, and Mobility in The Searchers | 191 Acknowledgments The author wishes to thank Christopher Shore for, simply, everything. Warmest gratitude also goes to those colleagues, friends, and family whose support made this project possible: Jayme Burke, Roger and Shelley Cav- aness, John Eckman, Le’a Kent, Merrill Marchal, Jolie Préau, Julie Prebel, John Sheehan, Wendy Somerson, and Anneliese Truame. Certainly having the best dissertation committee in the universe helped mightily—all my thanks to Susan Jeffords, Steven Shaviro, Matthew Sparke, and Priscilla Wald for their consistent encouragement and enthusiasm. Permissions Chapter 1 first appeared in Arizona Quarterly 56.2 (2000); revised version printed by permission of the Regents of the University of Arizona. Chapter 4 is reprinted with permission from Cinema Journal. Chapters 5 and 6 are reprinted with permission from the Japanese Journal of American Studies, where they were published as articles in 2008 and 2002, respectively. Foreword This book is the product of a very personal experience of American mobility: a transnational academic career that has traversed three continents over the course of the past twenty years. Embarking on my doctoral study in 1995, I could hardly have imagined the trajectory that would carry me from Seattle to Germany to Japan and then, in 2015, back to Germany again. The timeliness of the “transnational turn” in American Studies also strikes me as exceedingly well-timed for my own career, coming as it did just as I was beginning to make my place within the transnational networks of Ameri- canists in Europe and Asia while maintaining ties to the United States. Had I remained in the U.S., it is entirely likely that I never would have published my dissertation in book form, but rather moved on to another research project in order to acquire tenure in the U.S. academic system. In- deed, in the national academic context where I found myself—Japan—the publication of a monograph was not in fact even a requirement for tenure; peer-reviewed journal articles and international conference presentations were esteemed more highly than a (frequently self-published) monograph and thus I adapted to my situation and built my CV accordingly. However, upon relocating to Germany, I discovered that the conventions dictate that, for a professorship, an academic must have her dissertation between two book covers sanctioned by a publishing house. This requirement at first caused me some small degree of chagrin, given the intervening years since my doctoral defense, in which I had ranged far and wide into some new ter- ritory both literally—in my countries of residence—and metaphorically, in my research and teaching. It felt, somehow, dishonest to publish in 2015 a dissertation that had been written in the previous century (!). But then I hit upon the notion of 10 | AMERICAN MOBILITIES publishing, in place of four of the original dissertation chapters, the four peer-reviewed journal articles that grew up out of them, along with the re- maining two unpublished chapters, constituting a kind of greatest hits of my early career that ranges from text written as a doctoral student to the re- worked and often hardly recognizable revisions produced under the rigors of an early career academic, and under the guidance of anonymous review- ers and generous colleagues. What follows here is then a published record of my doctoral research, completed at the University of Washington between 1995 and 1998, and then substantially revised over the subsequent years. I have retained the original Dedication, Acknowledgments, and In- troduction, only amending when necessary to clarify the provenance of par- ticular chapters. The full text of the original dissertation is available online in the usual repositories for the unnaturally curious, but this more conven- ient and (I hope) more compelling version will be the final text of a (for me) fascinating first book-length undertaking. Introduction: American Mobilities Is it conceivable that the exercise of he- gemony might leave space untouched? Could space be nothing more than the pas- sive locus of social relations, the milieu in which their combination takes on body, or the aggregate of the procedures employed in their removal? The answer must be no. HENRI LEFEBVRE/THE PRODUCTION OF SPACE According to the ideology of separate spheres, domesticity can be viewed as an anchor, a feminine counterforce to the male activity of territorial conquest. I ar- gue, to the contrary, that domesticity is more mobile and less stabilizing; it travels in contradictory circuits both to expand and contract the boundaries of home and nation and to produce shifting conceptions of the foreign. AMY KAPLAN/“MANIFEST DOMESTICITY” Mobility has been a key feature in American culture from the settlement of the original colonies to the nation’s expansion toward new territories. Even after the closing of the frontier in 1890, Eastern populations continued to spread westward in search of property and prosperity. The allure of available land and natural resources drew Americans to all corners of the country 12 | AMERICAN MOBILITIES hoping to establish a better life for themselves and their families. Through the turn of the century, the urbanization that accompanied industrialization continued to draw rural populations until, by the prosperous 1920s, more Americans lived in the city than in the country. During the 1920s, cities in the western states swelled, particularly in California, as middle-class white Americans scrambled to escape what had become known as the (racialized) nightmares of urban life: immigration, overcrowding, pollution, disease, and crime. But the 1920s were also a time of economic warning signals: ag- ricultural industries were already depressed and while stock prices were in- flated, real wages were stagnant. The progress of America was slowing down. After the crash of 1929, the Depression forced a phenomenon I call “negative mobility” into the national imagination. In the 1930s, geographic mobility could no longer be equated with nation-building progress; rather, the migration, displacement, and homelessness of millions of unemployed Americans during the Depression constituted a real threat to the nation it- self. Instead of signifying upward social mobility, geographic movements during the Depression resulted from involuntary relocation in search of work, food, and shelter.1 Up to this point in American history, westward movement had always implied progress, development, and opportunity, and thus been linked ideologically with upward class mobility. However, during the 1930s and in the two subsequent decades, the United States underwent a reconfiguration of space that touched every facet of daily life and cultural production. The Great Depression was the first time in American history when massive migrations resulted not from the push of expansion, urbanization, or immigration, but out of economic crisis—negative mobility pre- occupied the nation. The Depression forced thousands of Americans to leave their homes because of downward class mobility, not in search of land ownership but because they could no longer afford rent or mortgage payments.

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