Urban Mobilities in Literature and Art Activism

Urban Mobilities in Literature and Art Activism explores the entwinement of mobility and immobility in urban spaces by focusing on their representation in literary narratives but also in visual and performing arts. Across a range of geographical contexts, this volume builds on the new mobilities paradigm developed by literary scholars, sociologists and human geographers. The different chapters employ a cohesive framework that is sensitive to the intersecting dimensions of power and discrimination that shape urban kinetic features. The contributions are divided into three sections, each of which places the focus on a different aspect of urban mobility: Itinerant Subjects, Modes of Transport and Places of Transit, and Urban Liminalities.

Patricia García is a senior researcher in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at the Universidad de Alcalá (Spain), where she currently leads a Ramón y Cajal project on urban peripheries in contemporary literature (2020-2025, Ministerio de Universidades, ES and European Social Fund) . Her research focuses on literary urban spaces, which she analyzes at their intersections with peripherality, gender and with representations of the supernatural. She is the author of The Urban Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century European Literature (Palgrave, 2021) and Space and the Postmodern Fantastic in Contemporary Literature (Routledge, 2015). She has held fellowships and research grants from the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies and the British Academy. She directs the network Fringe Urban Narratives (urbanfringes.com). She is the Vice-President of ALUS: Association for Literary Urban Studies, a member of the Executive Committees of the European Society of Comparative Literature and part of the editorial board of BRUMAL: Research Journal on the Fantastic. She is co-editor of the Palgrave series Literary Urban Studies.


Anna-Leena Toivanen is Academy Research Fellow at the School of Humanities at the University of Eastern Finland. Her current research project, funded by the Academy of Finland (2021-2025), focuses on the poetics of mobility in Francophone African literatures. She has held a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship at the University of Liège (2017-2019). Her monograph Mobilities and Cosmopolitanisms in African and Afrodiasporic Literatures was published by Brill in 2021, and she is currently working on her second book entitled Afroeuropean Mobilities in Francophone African Literatures (Palgrave Macmillan) She acts as the literary studies subject editor of the Nordic Journal of African Studies and has previously acted as the editor-in-chief of the Finnish literary studies journal Avain (2018-2019). She is in the editorial board of Mobility Humanities. She has co-edited a special issue entitled “European Peripheries” for the Journal of Postcolonial Writing (2021) and is currently guest-editing a special issue on public transport in African literatures for English Studies in Africa (forthcoming in 2024).

Chapter 7, "Alienation, Abjection and the Mobile Postcolonial City: Public Transport in Ousmane Sembène’s “Niiwam” and Yvonne Vera’s Without a Name" is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.