“You Don’t Have to Ride Jim Crow”: the Freedom Riders of 1961 and the Dilemma of Mobility
详细信息 查看全文
- 作者：Barbara Lüthi
- 关键词：Freedom Rides ; Transport segregation ; Race ; Regulatory power and technologies ; Politics ; Representations and practices of mobility
- 刊名：International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society
- 出版年：2016
- 出版时间：December 2016
- 年：2016
- 卷：29
- 期：4
- 页码：383-401
- 全文大小：631 KB
- 刊物主题：Sociology, general; Clinical Psychology; Personality and Social Psychology;
- 出版者：Springer US
- ISSN：1573-3416
- 卷排序：29
文摘
This article offers an exploration of what it meant to move under “cramped conditions” for African Americans and their compatriots during an era of often violent racial discrimination and segregation in the 1950s and 1960s in the USA. As the example of the Freedom Rides shows, these conditions included both moments of closure and entrapment determined by the rule of law as well as acts of resistance resulting from a century-long legacy of resistances. Particularly, I try to understand the complex “constellations of mobility” as a fragile entanglement of the politics of movement, representations of movement, and the embodied practices of movement. This paper proposes an approach to mobility that takes both historical forms of mobilities and immobilities seriously. On the one hand, my analysis relates to regulatory power and technologies used by state and non-state actors in order to retain white privilege over issues of mobility during the period preceding and accompanying the Freedom Rides. On the other hand, I argue along the lines of “mobility as resistance” by showing the strategies used to transgress written and unwritten laws and normative standards of the Jim Crow era.