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[9] rüdiger kunow american studies as mobility studies: some terms and constellations mobility is perhaps the prototypical experience of our time. In the current “post-national constellation” characterized by an accelerating “‘disenclavement ’ of society, culture, and the economy” (Habermas, 47, 48), mobility has become an aggregate of complex individual and collective, real and imagined processes. Such processes involve the deregulated mobility of goods and capital (mobility “from above”) and the regulated mobility of people (mobility “from below”), as well as the simultaneously regulated and anarchic mobility of ideas, images, and information. These various mobilities impinge on the lives people live, the ways they conduct business, the information they use, and the cultural practices in which they are involved. If we accept the proposition that mobilities constitute cultural relations in our time, then mobility must in a systematic fashion become part also of our critical lexicon, especially so in an American studies that defines itself as cross-cultural, comparatist, and transnational. My paper is a small and incomplete attempt to provide such a lexicon. It takes some inspiration from Stephen Greenblatt’s essay “A Mobility Studies Manifesto.” Greenblatt insists on understanding mobility “in a highly literal sense.” This means he is interested in micro-processes such as “[b]oarding a plane, venturing on a ship, climbing onto the back of a wagon, crowding into a coach, mounting on horseback, or simply setting one foot in front of the other and walking: these are [he says] indispensable keys to understanding the fate of cultures” (250). Mobility studies is intended to take us to “the ‘contact zones’ where cultural goods are exchanged” (251). “[M]obility studies should account in new ways the tension between individual agency and structural constraint” (251), such as “the way in which seemingly fixed migration paths are disrupted by the strategic acts of individual agents and by unexpected, unplanned, entirely contingent encounters between different cultures” (252). Mobility studies should not be about movement alone but should pay attention also to “the allure (and, on occasion, the entrapment) of the firmly rooted” (252–53). More recently, John Urry has presented a similar blueprint for a system- [246] rüdiger kunow atic study of mobility processes, this time from the viewpoint of the social sciences. Urry insists on the degree to which our current social arrangements— I would include our cultural arrangements as well—are in fact based on and presuppose actual and potential forms of movement (6). Mobility helps constitute many of these arrangements today, and it did so in previous moments of history. Hence, Urry proposes a “mobility turn,” a different way of thinking through the character of economic , social and political relationships. . . . [E]specially invigorating [are, from the point of view of the social sciences,] the connections, overlaps and borrowings with both physical science and with literary and historical studies. The mobility turn is post-disciplinary [and it] emphasizes how all social entities , from a single household to large scale corporations, presuppose many different forms of actual and potential movement. The mobility turn connects the analyses of different forms of travel, transport and communications with the multiple ways in which economic and social life is performed and organized through time and various spaces. (6) Taking both Greenblatt’s and Urry’s suggestions as starting points, I will in the following pages present an argument based on the assumption that cultural artifacts and cultural practices can only be satisfactorily analyzed, if they are seen as “mobilized” (Urry, 7), as moving across a variety of different social and semantic spaces. Now, what exactly are we talking about when we talk about mobility? Mobility is often regarded as a quality or property pertaining to people or objects. It is immediately plausible that these can and have been “disenclaved ” (Habermas) from their former locations and attachments by processes of dislocation/relocation, exile, or migrancy and then have become involved in transversal relations across and beyond a wide variety of domains . It is also plausible to assume that some people or objects are more easily mobilized than others, and the object A of our discipline, “America,” can be said to possess the attribute to an unusual degree. There is even an elective affinity between mobility and that object A. From the earliest moments of European intervention in the “New World,” “America,”—however that term might be specifically defined—was a dense and suggestive signifier that produced mobile subjects. Domestically, on the North American continent and later inside...

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