Description
Book SynopsisDespite the ubiquity of automobility, the reality of automotive death is hidden from everyday view. There are accident blackspots all over the roads that we use and go past every day but the people that have died there or been injured are not marked, unless by homemade shrines and personal memorialization. Nowhere on the planet is this practice as densely actioned as in the United States.
Road Scars is a highly visual scholarly monograph about how roadside car crash shrines place the collective trauma of living in a car culture in the everyday landscapes of automobility. Roadside shrines—or road trauma shrines—are vernacular memorial assemblages built by private individuals at sites where family and friends have died in automobile accidents, either while driving cars or motorcycles or being hit by cars as pedestrians, bicyclists, or motorcyclists. Prevalent for decades in Latin America and in the American Southwest, roadside car crash shrines are now present throughout the U.S. and around the world. Some are simply small white crosses, almost silent markers of places of traumatic death. Others are elaborate collections of objects, texts, and materials from all over the map culturally and physically, all significantly brought together not in the home or in a cemetery but on the roadside, in drivable public space—a space where private individuals perform private identities alongside each other in public, and where these private mobilities sometimes collide with one another in traumatic ways that are negotiated in roadside shrines. This book touches on something many of us have seen, but few have explored intellectually.
Trade ReviewHere, beautifully presented like gifts to the reader, roadside shrines mourn lives lost on the spot with stuffed animals, dolls, and footballs that mold and crumble, and are replaced and updated with “big girl” dolls as if the materials of mourning were leading their own lives forward. Scars of trauma perform for a public of strangers the melancholia of being in something unknown but pressing with others. -- Kathleen Stewart, Professor of Anthropology, University of Texas
Robert Bednar has spent almost two decades mapping and photographing thousands of roadside car crash shrines, especially in the American Southwest. This cogent, well theorized, and heartfelt account focuses on their traumatic affect, making a strong case for their disturbing significance as signs, and scars, of the nation’s troubling, and enduring, dependence on automobility.
-- Erika Doss, Professor of American Studies, University of Notre Dame
Table of ContentsPreface: Guide to the Book
Part I: Introduction
1. Witnessing Road Scars
Part II: Field Guide to Road Trauma Shrines
2. Welcome to the Drive-Through Museum of Accidents
3. Making Places for Feeling Road Trauma
4. Materializing Road Trauma
5. Performing Road Trauma
6. Interpellating the Motoring Public
7. Displacing Road Trauma
Part III: Conclusion
8. Melancholy Remains: Remembering Strangers While Driving into the Future
