This book explores the formative role of mobilities in the production of our close relationships, proposing that the tracks—both literal and figurative— we lay down in the process play a crucial role in generating and sustaining intimacy. Working with diaries, journals and literary texts from the mid- to late-twentieth century, the book pursues this thesis through three phases of the lifecourse: courtship (broadly defined), the middle years of long-term relationships and bereavement. Building upon the author’s recent research on automobility, the text’s case studies reveal the crucial role played by many different types of transport—including walking—in defining our most enduring relationships. Conceptually, the book draws upon the writings of the philosopher, Henri Bergson, the anthropologist, Tim Ingold and the geographer, David Seamon, engaging with topical debates in cultural and emotional geography (especially work on landscape, memory and mourning), mobilities studies and critical love studies.

This book uses diaries written by ordinary British people over the past two centuries to examine and explain the nature and extent of everyday mobilities, such as travel to school, to work, to shop or to visit friends, and to explore the meanings attached to these mobilities. After a critical evaluation of diary writing, the ways in which mobility changed over time, interacted with new forms of transport technology, and varied from place to place are examined. Further chapters focus on the roles of family and life course, gender, income and class, and journey purpose in shaping mobilities, including immobility. It is argued that easy and frequent everyday mobilities were experienced by most of the diarists studied, that travellers could exercise their own agency to adapt easily to new forms of transport technology, but that factors such as gender, class, and location also created significant mobility inequalities.

This is the first book dedicated to literary and cultural scholars’ engagement with mobilities scholarship. As such, the volume both advances new theoretical approaches to the study of culture and furthers the recent “humanities turn” in mobilities studies. The book’s scholarship is deeply informed by cultural geography’s vision of a mobilised reconceptualisation of space and place, but also by the contribution of literary scholars in articulating questions of travel, technologies of transport, (post)colonialism and migration through a close engagement with textual materials. A comprehensive introduction maps pre-histories and emerging directions of this exciting interdisciplinary endeavor while taking up the theoretical and methodological challenges of the burgeoning subfield. Contributions range across geographical and disciplinary boundaries to address questions of embodied subjectivities, mobility and the nation, geopolitics of migration, and mobilities futures.

This book offers a critical analysis of global mobilities across China and Italy in history. In three periods in the twentieth century, new patterns of physical mobilities and cultural contact were established between the two countries which were either novel at the time of their emergence or impactful on subsequent periods. The first two chapters provide overviews of writings by Italians in China and by Chinese in Italy in the twentieth century. The remaining chapters cover: Republican China’s relationships with Italy and Italian Fascist colonialism in China during the 1920s–1930s; Italian travelers to China during the Cold War from the 1950s to the 1970s; migrations between China and Italy during the 2000s–2010s. In analyzing these cultural mobilities, this book opens a new line of inquiry in Chinese-Italian Cultural Studies, which has been dominated by historical study, and contributes a significant case study to the scholarship on global cultural mobilities.

This volume aims to address kinship in the context of global mobility, while studying the effects of technological developments throughout the 20th century on how individuals and communities engage in real or imagined relationships. Using literary representations as a spectrum to examine kinship practices, Lamia Tayeb explores how transnational mobility, bi-culturalism and cosmopolitanism honed, to some extent, the relevant authors’ concerns with the family and wider kinship relations: in these literatures, kinship and the family lose their familiar, taken-for-granted aspect, and yet are still conceived as ‘essential’ spheres of relatedness for uprooted individuals and communities. Tayeb here studies writings by Hanif Kureishi, Zadie Smith, Monica Ali, Jhumpa Lahiri, Khaled Housseini and Nadia Hashimi, working to understand how transnational kinship dynamics operate when moved beyond the traditional notions of the blood relationship, relationship to place and identification with community.

Border Crossings and Mobilities on Screen explores the movement, fluidity and change characterizing contemporary life, as represented on screen media, from mobile devices, to television, film, computers, video art and advertising displays. People have never moved around more, and increasingly migration and mobility has come to shape both our understandings of ourselves, and the ways in which we interpret and mediate the world we live in. As people move, media plays a key role in shaping and reshaping identity and belonging, opening the doors to transnational and transcultural participation. Drawing on screen media case studies from around the world, this book demonstrates how screen mobilities reconfigure notions of space, place, network and border regimes. The increasing ease of consumption and production of media has allowed for an unprecedented fluidity and mobility of class, gender, sexuality, nation and transnation, individual freedoms and aspirations. Putting people at the core of the book, this book shows the many ways in which people are using screen media to create identity, participation and meaning. The rich picture built up over the many chapters of this interdisciplinary volume raise important questions about the nature of contemporary media experiences. At a time of great change in the ways in which people move and connect with each other, this book provides an important global snapshot for researchers across the fields of media, communication and screen studies; sociology of communication; global studies and transnationalism; cultural studies; culture and identity; digital cultures; travel, tourism and place.