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Mobility Humanities

VOL.5, NO.1, January 2026

Special Issue

Special Issue: Aspirations of Flight

Aspirations of Flight

Weiqiang Lin and Benjamin Linder

Breathing towards Aeromobility: Aspiration, Flying and Elsewhere(s)

Bradley Rink

Aspirations of Spaceflight and Trials of Infrastructural Capital

Katarina Damjanov

Terminal Politics: Small-state Agency and the Geopolitics of Aviation Infrastructure in Nepal

Krittika Uniyal

Aspiration and the Aerotropolis: Airports, Infrastructural Speculation and Geoeconomic Form

Angela Smith, Peter Adey, Weiqiang Lin, Regina Jefferies, and Tay Koo

From Frictionless Futures to Tedious Tasks: Datafication Discourses of the Smart Airport

Naomi Irene Veenhoven

The Yogyakarta International Airport Aerotropolis as a Political Project

Khidir Marsanto Prawirosusanto

Space of Farewells: Imaginaries, Uneven Mobilities and the Making of an Airport in the Global South

Alejandra Espinosa Andrade

The Air We Fly: Dwelling in Aeromobile Atmospheres

René Catalán Hidalgo

 

 

 

Interview

Infrastructuring Migration Studies in the Asian Context

Jinhyoung Lee

An Interview with Brenda S.A. Yeoh

Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Jinhyoung Lee and Weiqiang Lin

Book Review

A Review of Urban Mobilities in Literature and Art Activism

Eduardo Nunes

M for Mobilities, M for Memory: The Métro, Motorsports, Mass Market and Media, and Migrant Workers in Paris in Horie Toshiyuki’s “M”

DOI.
Special Issue
By.
Atsuko Sakaki
Pages.
76-94
Date.
31. Jul. 2022

Abstract

The decorated Japanese author Horie Toshiyuki’s omnibus, Oparaban, collects first-person narratives of a Japanese temporary resident of late 1990s Paris for whom the city is but a lived space (Lefebvre) of everyday life practices (Certeau), filled with multisensorial effects that the subject (the narrator) is immersed in, absorbs, and feels susceptible to. The urban space of Paris is also heterogeneous and volatile, as sensed in Roland Barthes’s Incidents. My paper discusses the story “M” in this volume, which revolves around body memories (Casey) of an incidental friendship between the Japanese narrator and Moroccan men living in Paris that develops at a subway station, through watching Formula 1 races on TV, and over ethnic food made from supermarket ingredients. These circumstances complicate the binaries of mobility and immobility, immediacy and distance, authenticity and alterity, and memory and representation. The story reveals the ambiguity of Parisian urban space with its multiethnic commodities and racialised bodies that are both fluid and frozen. The intradiegetic narrator, in his attempt at making sense of memories still palpable in immanent time (Husserl), associates them with literary, photographic, and cinematic memories in topographical and topological terms, including Fritz Lang’s 1931 film M.
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