Car Culture and Its Trialectics

Abstract

here are few symbols more weighted in the colonialist imaginary than the railway. Invoked with predictable regularity as both an alibi for and indicator of British colonialism in particular, the image of the train has become a ubiquitous metonym for imperialism that simultaneously attempts to efface its foundational and structural violence. Yet the constant recourse to the train as a signifier of colonial modernity has rendered its image overdetermined, verging on cliché. By contrast, Lindsey B. Green-Simms’s Postcolonial Automobility: Car Cul­ ture in West Africa offers a fresh perspective on the interconnections across infrastructure, modernity, development, and (post)coloniality through its focus on the automobile. As Green-Simms’s study makes plain, the car, while less frequently invoked, is no less central than the train in its importance as a symbol and signifier of the paradoxes and tensions of coloniality and its legacies. The automobile, as Green-Simms notes, serves as “the commodity par excellence of postwar modernity” (3), whose own valuations register specific articulations in the West African context. Centered on the concept of “automobility,” a term intended to evoke both autonomy and mobility (concepts which, as Green-Simms observes, are inherently paradoxical in nature and central to post-Enlightenment notions of the M A D H U K R I S H N A N