The road novel is often dismissed as a mundane, nostalgic genre: Jack, Sal, and other tedious white men on the road trying to recapture an authentic youth and American past that never existed. Yet, new road novels appear every year, tackling unexpected questions and spanning new geographies, from Mexico, Brazil, Bulgaria, Palestine, Ukraine, and former-Yugoslavia. Why did the road novel emerge and why does it persist? What does it do and why has it traveled so widely?

In Cartographies of Empire: The Road Novel and American Hegemony (Stanford University Press, 2025) Dr. Myka Tucker-Abramson draws from an archive of more than 140 global road novels from over twenty countries, challenging dominant conceptions of the road novel as primarily concerned with American experiences and subjectivities. Grounding her analysis in materialist theories of genre, world-ecology and commodity frontier frameworks, and post-45 American literary studies, Dr. Tucker-Abramson persuasively argues that the road novel is a genre specific to, coterminous with, and revealing of US hegemony's global trajectory. Shifting our focus from Americanness to the fraught geopolitics of US Empire, from the car to the built environment through which it moves, and from passengers to those left behind, Dr. Tucker-Abramson remaps the road novel, elucidating the genre's unique ability both to reveal the violent and vertiginous processes of capitalist modernization and to obfuscate these harsh truths through seductive narratives of individual success and failure.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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SERMON: Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, "Seeing the World Through Multiple Lenses" - March 22, 2024