Mobility Humanities

In this article, I argue for an approach to counter-road narratives informed by mobility studies. Many works on road narratives (in literature and film) have benefitted from theoretical inputs from mobility studies and have, in turn, provided insightful accounts of mobility as an object of artistic representation. However, counter-road narratives—a term and concept that owe much to Nadia Lie’s definition of “counter-road movie”—are still unfamiliar with this kind of critical attention (or with nearly any attention at all). Predominantly representing immobility while maintaining a thematic interest on mobility, counter-road narratives are thus aligned with the growing idea within mobility studies that mobility and immobility are related and codependent states, activities, and notions. Through an analysis and critical reading of two Portuguese women’s counter-road novels, guided by the key concept of relative immobility, I discuss the politics of mobility involved in the narrative depiction of the female protagonists’ stillness and demonstrate how these characters still find imaginative and mostly aesthetic ways of moving. Finally, I ask (with only a hope of beginning to find an answer) what the implications of this kind of aesthetic mobility are for the question of embodiment, which is fundamental to mobility studies.