Conditions of knowledge production in the academy are increasingly disrupted as universities adopt neoliberal economic priorities, and as a result, studies of mobility take place in circumstances that are themselves highly mobilized and precaritized. This state of disruption reflects historical and material conditions that echo earlier crises of acceleration, notably during the period of aesthetic modernism. To examine links between the modernist era and our own, this essay turns to the novels and travelogues of Edith Wharton, arguing that scenes of frustrated mobility are symptoms of the author’s failed reckoning with issues of race, nativism, and class affiliation. These predicaments of mobility in crisis, or paralyses, defy conventional figurations of movement and provide the means to reframe debates on mobility and the politics of travel not only in the modernist context, but under contemporary globalization. © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

precarity cosmopolitanism mobility paralyses nativism Edith Wharton geographical materialism

ideology mobility race class neoliberalism knowledge university sector