INTRODUCTION

Prior to 1975, local government in Scotland represented a distinctly Scottish set of institutions. The roots of Scottish local government can be traced back to the royal burghs of the Middle Ages and was one of the items guaranteed in the Treaty of Union in 1707. Prior to 1929, Scottish local government consisted primarily of royal burghs, which were typically small towns or villages that organised trade and basic services within communities, and county councils established in 1889. As the functions of local government expanded, notably during the nineteenth century, the demand for a more systematic structure of local government developed. This resulted in the complex structure of 430 local authorities established in 1929, which consisted of thirty-three county councils and four counties of cities (Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee and Aberdeen), twenty-one large burghs, generally those with a population of 20,000 people or more, 176 small burghs and 196 landward district councils. In 1975, there were fifty-seven Scottish local planning authorities, comprising thirty-one counties (two of them joint), twenty-four large burghs and two small burghs, with planning powers under the 1947 Act, ranging in size and character from the City of Glasgow, with over one million people, to the County of Sutherland, with 13,500 people scattered over 2,000 square miles. In the four Border counties of Berwickshire, Peeblesshire, Roxburghshire and Selkirkshire, there were twelve small burghs: Coldstream, Duns, Eyemouth and Lauder in Berwickshire; Innerleithen and Peebles in Peeblesshire, Hawick, Jedburgh, Kelso and Melrose in Roxburghshire; and Galashiels and Selkirk in Selkirkshire. Planning powers were held solely by the four county councils.

By the mid-1960s, the generally held view was that there was a need to reform local government in Scotland. The multiplicity of local authorities, many of them serving small areas and small populations were inefficient. As population had migrated to the towns and cities as a result of the Industrial Revolution and these towns and cities had expanded into the surrounding countryside, boundary anomalies caused friction between neighbouring authorities. Also, given the emerging culture of regional, economic and strategic planning in the 1960s, pressure developed behind the concept of larger, regional local authorities that could improve service provision.

Shakespeare's allegories testify to his – and his culture's – infinite curiosity about the human mind: what it is made of, how it works, what controls it, where it resides, how it changes over time. Staging the mind through allegory does not provide definitive answers to these questions, but it does offer a flexible, experimental model, while adding depth or emblematic value to the staged character.

Shakespeare's use of ‘grounded’ allegory as a tool for characterisation brings with it some of the inherent ambiguities that I discussed in the Introduction. In particular, the issue of whether allegory deals in particulars or universals is brought to the fore. In the first pages of this book, I argued for ‘grounded’ allegory as being rooted in the material conditions of theatrical performance. To some extent, this implies that Shakespeare's images of the mind will vary along with venue, cast, historical context and other contingencies. For example, the allegorising effects I discussed in the Macbeth and Coriolanus chapters are venue specific. In other cases, such as the gesture-based allegories of Cymbeline, the effect will carry over to different venues. Concerning Troilus and Cressida, the choice of textile used for Cressida's veil or mask will affect the degree of deliberateness associated with her blush. Recent productions have displayed great creativity in the use of blush-signifying props, as with Trevor Nunn's use of a red ribbon worn as a choker in his millennial production at the National Theatre. Bridget Escolme notes that in Nunn's production, ‘Cressida has various degrees of ownership of the ribbon’ implying ‘varying degrees of agency’.

In other ways, however, the grounded nature of Shakespeare's staged allegories has a generalising effect. This is especially the case when allegories tap into the audience's collective experience. I made this point explicitly for Coriolanus and The Merchant of Venice, but it is to some degree valid for all the plays. In contrast to prosopopoeia, or explicit personification, staged allegories are not self-evident. Instead, they work by triggering recognition in the audience, based on personal and cultural memory and on an integration of the play's own structuring patterns.

Modernism and Close Reading

Tom McCarthy's fiction is a gift to academic critics. His five novels, Men in Space, Remainder, C, Satin Island, and The Making of Incarnation, abound in allusions, more or less overt, to other works of literature, to the visual arts and music, and to the theories of Continental – mostly French – philosophers. They engage with a number of the issues that we literary critics and theorists like to talk about, such as the impossibility of authenticity, the aftermath of trauma, the omnipresence of signification, the ubiquity of communication networks, and the corporate capture of progressive thought. They are structured by means of complex relays of repetition and cross-reference. And they further challenge the norms of the conventional novel by presenting characters lacking depth and plots in which narrative tension and personal development are not paramount. In all these ways, they provide a seductive invitation to today's professional critics to deploy the latest instruments of academic interpretation, including allusion tracking, influence detection, theoretical extrapolation, cultural analysis, and cryptographic decoding, and they allow us to enlist McCarthy as a heroic partisan under the flag of fiction that, keeping alive the radicalism of the modernists of the early twentieth century, resists the mainstream of ‘humanist’ or ‘lyrical’ or ‘liberal’ realism.

McCarthy, moreover, unlike those writers who shy away from commenting on their own work, has no hesitation in talking about his novels, and has given numerous interviews in which he suggests interpretations, identifies allusions, adduces influences, and explains his assault on the ubiquitous ‘middlebrow’ novel and the publishers who solicit and promote it. His collection of essays, Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish, entertainingly sets out some of the founding principles of his fiction: the first essay, for instance, titled ‘Get Real’, skewers unexamined views of ‘realism’ and the ‘real’. McCarthy has also written an e-book in which he expounds his view of the writer as a transmitter rather than an originator of verbal material, a study of Herge's Tintin that uncovers many of his favourite thematic webs in the amazing adventures of that young hero, and a piece on anthropology and writing in The Guardian that sets out some of the underpinning of Satin Island.

Pararealism

I can still recall the frisson with which I first read the opening stage direction of ‘Circe’ around half a century ago. This moment was stranger than all the strange moments I’d encountered so far in the book, and had a peculiar intensity and vividness that I couldn't explain but that gripped me immediately. Thinking about it now, I can identify several sources for its peculiar power. There were the completely unexpected, verbless stage directions announcing the scene (‘The Mabbot street entrance of nighttown … Rows of grimy houses … Rare lamps with rainbow fans …). There was the enticing notion of nighttown itself, a whole town dedicated to the night and its secret doings, made even stranger by Joyce's hyphenless spelling. There was the odd sense that this was and wasn't a theatre – as if a whole street had become a stage on which mysterious actions would be played out. And there was the garish hyperreality of the descriptive method, as though a perfectly normal scene – an evening street with children buying ice creams near tram-tracks – was being relayed through an alien, and distinctly sinister, consciousness that perceived the tram-tracks as skeletons, signals as red and green will-o’-the-wisps, and ice cream as lumps of coal and copper snow. (This was in the days before Hans Walter Gabler, in his 1982 edition, corrected ‘coal’ to ‘coral’.) Although the chapter has lost some of the sheer bewildering potency it had for me then, I still find the intensity of its descriptions – often in contrast to the comic and even banal speech of the episode – unlike anything I’ve come across elsewhere in literature. This quality has something to do with the chapter's peculiar relation to realism, immediately evident in the opening sentence. I propose to call this mode pararealism, taking advantage of all the adverbial senses of the prefix para-listed by the OED, ‘to one side, aside, amiss, faulty, irregular, disordered, improper, wrong’, as well as the notions, also mentioned in the definition, of perversion and simulation.

This chapter analyses Gilbert Simondon's theory of ontogenesis, which describes the processes of the individuation of living and non-living beings. Simondon argues that philosophy should be concerned not with substantial, defined and bounded individuals but with the processes of individuation that create these individuals. Thus, Simondon creates a universal theory of individuation, which is understood as a process initiated by the pre-individual state that contains a potential or a charge, and is then accomplished in a series of differentiations that result in creating an individual. In this sense, Simondon argues that ontology is based not on identity but on difference that forces individuals to move from one phase to another and undergo a qualitative change. What is relevant for this book is that Simondon creates a method of analogical paradigmatism that allows one to compare different – physical, biological, psychosocial and technical – systems. Simondon not only defines the unique nature of biological individuation but also reveals that psychical and social individuation, as well as technical invention, are deeply rooted in the biological. The comparison between different kinds of individuations helps Simondon to develop a universal theory of ontogenesis which can explain the continuity between living and non-living, organic and inorganic systems.

Simondon's works are not very numerous: his main ideas are formulated in the doctoral thesis Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information and the complementary thesis On the Existence of Technical Objects, both defended in 1958. The complementary thesis was published immediately after the defence in 1958, whereas his major work on individuation had to wait to become accessible to a wider audience. Nevertheless, Simondon's works were known to his contemporaries, and his works deeply influenced Gilles Deleuze, who not only wrote a review of Simondon's book, but also incorporated Simondon's ideas into his own work. Simondon's notion of individuation is discussed in Deleuze's Difference and Repetition, and his theory of material becoming can be traced throughout Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus. Recently Simondon's works have been widely discussed and reconsidered by Bernard Stiegler, Yuk Hui, Elizabeth Grosz, Anne Sauvagnargues, Brian Massumi and others.

This volume identifies many dilemmas in applying democratic politics to the European Union. But, maybe, there is a meta-dilemma: an overarching dilemma of which all other dilemmas are instances. If so, that dilemma would probably be as follows. The European Union (EU) cannot do without some kind of democratic politics. No body that is a source of shared law-making can do that if individuals are to be free and equal in the control of all their own laws. Yet, the Union does not satisfy conditions for democratic politics very well. That, in turn, suggests sub-dilemmas and intersecting dilemmas. Sub-dilemmas, since each dimension of democratic politics is difficult to reproduce at the Union level in its own way. Intersecting dilemmas where difficulties in making the Union democratic are not ‘free-standing’. Rather, they interact with dilemmas in combining the interconnectedness of member state democracies with the internal autonomy of each of those democracies. Still, dilemmas are hardly uncommon to democratic politics. The institutional design of many democratic systems owes as much to democratic dilemmas as to democratic ideals. But more or less cunning institutional designs obviously require understanding of the dilemmas to which they are supposed to respond. This chapter argues that one dimension of European Union politics along which democratic dilemmas have not been very well understood is that of representation itself.

Much of the democratic deficit debate is really about representation. For those who coined the term, the democratic deficit consisted of taking powers away from national systems of representation without developing corresponding systems of representation at the Union level (Marquand 1979: 64). For some of those who doubt the Union is in democratic deficit or even that it makes much sense to suppose it might be, the problem is also one of democratic representation (Majone 2005), albeit, in their view, it has been one huge mistake of institutional design even to have attempted a form of European Union with representative institutions and politics of its own. According to that argument, the EU lacks conditions for democracy. It especially lacks a demos; or, in other words, a public that sees itself as a democratic people. Hence, majorities of voters or representatives at the Union level are understood as having limited authority to decide or bind without the agreement of all member state democracies, which are the real democratic political communities in Europe.

Where the Line Bleeds recognises the wounded and their attempts to address their scars, often casting these scars and the path to healing in physical and spatial terms of the landscape. In her work, Ward redresses the notion of the Black community, and more specifically, the Black family as pathological and broken in the wake of slavery, by pointing to alternative configurations of familial relations. In a 2021 interview with Kiese Laymon, in which the authors discuss their connection to the Dirty South and its place in their work, Ward shared her motivation: ‘I want to tell stories that transport people … It may not always feel comfortable … I think there's worth in that’ (Layman and Ward, 2021). The inward gaze and the sharing of memory are crucial elements in uncovering and addressing the ‘dirtiness’ of hidden and untold stories. This chapter investigates how Ward juxtaposes elements of the old South with a newer South, one that seeks to address oppression and inequality, and suggests methods of survival and healing from poverty, trauma, familial stresses and lack of opportunities for her protagonists. Ward's respatialisation of Bois Sauvage shares the texture of the unfolding chronology of Christina Sharpe's ‘wake work’ (Sharpe 2016, 13) undertaking the ‘unfinished project of emancipation’ (5).

Ward introduces her reader to the ‘ungeographic’, spaces where the social lives of Black subjects have been displaced, bringing them into focus through her use of the interior or psychic worlds of her characters, as these geographical spaces are the places where her characters are most comfortable. These are the spaces where they feel safe as they work through their emotions, communicate in a language and style of their own, develop and grow. The reader witnesses the slow awakening of the characters’ unfolding in carefully crafted interior monologues which introduce the reader to interior worlds as rich as the physical landscape. By reframing the landscape of the South, just as Kathryn Yusoff (2018) reframes the impact of conquest and extraction during the Anthropocene, Ward brings untold stories to the surface. Laying unknown stories alongside familiar ones opens the landscape and allows for a new freedom for Black bodies. I argue that, using the interior geography of her characters, Ward respatialises the old South and creates a place where the old and the new collide; by mapping the richness of the ‘ungeographic’, Ward reveals redrawn territories where her characters thrive.

We started off this volume by highlighting the European political order's ambivalent relationship with democracy. This ambivalence is also mirrored in the scholarly debates that study democratic challenges, shortcomings and possible solutions. Questions arise at every turn about how best to transpose democratic principles beyond the nation-state. The book's contributions have shed light on the previously less explored trade-offs we face when contemplating democracy in the European political order, characterised by advanced economic and legal integration with the European Union (EU) at its core. We have taken an open-ended approach to these discussions, asking the contributors to engage with different aspects of European democracy, current and past, using the exploration of particular dilemmas related to these aspects as the common thread for discussions.

The volume's focus on democratic dilemmas veers away from the grand theories of democracy and European integration as exemplified by the supranational versus intergovernmental perspectives that informed debates on the EU's democratic deficit in the 1990s and early 2000s. Several of the book's contributions venture beyond these debates to highlight other salient tensions in the emergent political order in Europe. The grand theory debates were in some sense necessary to identify the key dividing lines in early discussions on European democracy. However, they ultimately drew these lines between fundamentally different conceptions of what characterised the European political order, conceptions which then came with implications for how they understood the conditions for democracy in Europe – within as well as beyond states. The intergovernmental perspective focused on European states and the ways in which they coordinated themselves within the framework of international cooperative arrangements. Democratic representation and accountability were consequently seen as exclusively tied to the level of EU member states and focused on the representatives who negotiated the shape and form of cooperative arrangements in the EU. Thinking about European democracy beyond the state was deemed superfluous. The supranational perspective, in contrast, conceived of an emerging legal and political order centred on the EU that fundamentally challenged the system of sovereign states.

Molly Bloom in Bed

Molly Bloom is lying restlessly in bed, her head next to her husband's feet, counting the days until she will next be with her lover, Blazes Boylan: ‘Thursday Friday one Saturday two Sunday three O Lord I cant wait till Monday’ (Ulysses 18.594–5). The next item we see on the page – one can hardly call it a word – is a bizarre string of letters: ‘frseeeeeeeefronnnng’ (18.596). All in lower case, it begins the fourth of the so-called ‘sentences’ of the final episode of Ulysses. Its challenge to our reading of the episode is multiple: it is unpronounceable, at least according to the norms of the English language; it is meaningless; and it is hardly conceivable as part of Molly's thought processes in the way that everything in the chapter up to this point has been. Joyce does not leave us mystified for long, however: the verbalised thoughts that follow this strange irruption explain what it is doing here: ‘… train somewhere whistling the strength those engines have in them like big giants …’ (18.596–7). Distant train whistles may more usually evoke associations of travel, separation, nostalgia, or longing, but Molly's response is clearly coloured by her active desire for the man she has just called, with obvious relish, a ‘savage brute’ (18.594). This supposition is strengthened by the sudden change of tack in Molly's ruminations as her thought continues: ‘… like big giants and the water rolling all over and out of them all sides like the end of Loves old sweeeetsonnnng …’ (18.596–8).

What kind of experience does a moment like this offer to the reader? Are we to take this series of letters as representing the actual sound of a train whistle – perhaps on two notes, higher then lower – as it penetrates the bedroom of 7 Eccles Street? (The train is too distant, I think, for the double tone to be a product of the Doppler effect.) Would it be legitimate for an audio version of the book to substitute for the reader's voice at this point a recording of the real sound?

In this chapter I will discuss Haraway's notion of sympoiesis and will examine different modes of cohabitation or hybridisation with non-human others. Such concepts as sympoiesis, or the holobiont, question the notion of the biological individual and also change our understanding of what it means to be human. As Richard Grusin pointed out, ‘we have never been human’, for the reason that ‘the human has always coevolved, coexisted, or collaborated with the nonhuman – and that the human is characterized precisely by this indistinction from the nonhuman’ (Grusin 2015: ix–x). We have never been human, because we have always been dependent on other species living within or beyond our bodies. However, the question that still needs to be answered is whether all forms of coexistence are profitable and welcomed. How does one define the limit at which this coexistence is collaborative and productive (‘posthuman’), and beyond which it becomes damaging and lethal, in other words, ‘posthumous’, e.g. coming after life? (Weinstein and Colebrook 2017). For this reason, the interrelations between different life forms should be discussed together with the concepts of immunity and contagion. The notion of immunity expresses an ambivalent character of life: on the one hand, it protects an organism against everything that is beyond its boundary; on the other hand, it helps to collaborate with other organisms and to create a new community, or an ecosystem. In this sense, immunity can be thought as a possibility for a new community connecting human and non-human beings. At the end of this chapter, I will examine different modes of interspecies communication in contemporary art practices.

Sympoiesis as ‘Making-With’

Haraway's discursive interventions, from cyborgs to symbiotic creatures, deconstruct the myth of the organism as a natural wholeness. Instead, she persuasively demonstrates that every living being is a multiplicity, an assemblage, which might be arranged and rearranged in many different ways. In this respect, Haraway, without acknowledging it, elaborates further Deleuze and Guattari's attempts to disarticulate the idea of an organism and open it to becoming and ‘unnatural participations’, which was discussed in Chapter 3. For Deleuze and Guattari, an organism is an assemblage-like construction, the body without organs, which demonstrates the disorganisation of the organism and the denaturalisation of nature.

Simondon's and Ruyer's philosophy influenced Gilles Deleuze and helped him to formulate his original theory of life. The traces of Simondon's philosophy can be felt in Deleuze's Difference and Repetition, where the interaction between the pre-individual state and individuation is transformed into the interplay between the virtual and the actual. Simondon's ideas are also present in Deleuze and Guattari's book A Thousand Plateaus, where they directly refer to Simondon while discussing the machinic phylum, an energetic power of materiality. Ruyer's works also appear in the footnotes of A Thousand Plateaus and have a more visible presence in Deleuze's book The Fold. Ruyer's concept of self-survey becomes an important theme in Deleuze and Guattari's What Is Philosophy?, where it is applied to describe the functioning of the brain. Thus, Simondon's and Ruyer's ideas are creatively employed in Deleuze's (and Guattari’s) philosophical project where they develop, evolve and create something new. In this chapter I will discuss those aspects of Deleuze's (and Guattari’s) philosophy that are related to the notion of an organism as follows: individuation as differentiation in Deleuze's Difference and Repetition, the reconceptualisation of the notion of an organism in A Thousand Plateaus, and the notion of the brain in What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari take into account different theories of development, such as individuation and morphogenesis, to create a processual philosophy of life, where all living beings share the same formative materiality.

Individuation as Differentiation

Simondon's theory of individuation had a significant influence on Deleuze, who wrote a review of Simondon's book L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique in 1966. As Deleuze points out, Simondon creates a profoundly original theory of individuation that presumes the existence of a metastable system. This metastable system, named as the pre-individual state, contains the disparation of at least two orders of magnitude, two disparate scales of reality. This disparation, or difference, exists as potential energy, a potentiality that structures and individuates reality. In this sense, Deleuze reads Simondon's theory of individuation as being methodologically close to his own philosophical project: ‘It seems to us that Simondon's perspective can be reconciled with a theory of intensive quantities, since each intensive quantity is a difference in itself […] Like any metastable system, it is a structure (not yet a synthesis) of the heterogeneous’ (Deleuze 2001: 44).

Jesmyn Ward's (1977–) second novel, Salvage the Bones (2011), recipient of the 2011 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2012 Alex Award, has been hailed as an exceptional fictional account of the 2005 Hurricane Katrina (Hartnell 2016, 206) and has helped solidify Ward's position as an eminent author of the American South. The reason the novel has sparked diverse responses is a testament to the potency of its subject matter: depictions of a Black family living in deep poverty during a national tragedy has captured the interest of the general readership and academia alike. Salvage the Bones traces the Batiste family's experiences with Hurricane Katrina in the fictional coastal town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi. Four children – Esch and her brothers, Junior, Skeetah and Randall – live with their alcoholic father on an isolated plot of land called the Pit. As they anticipate Katrina, Esch realises she is pregnant by Manny, a local boy who only shows sexual interest in her; after the hurricane makes landfall and the family survives, Esch affirms her pregnancy. Since the Batistes already live in poverty and isolation, the novel allows for the potent illustration of how Katrina exposed racism, but the focus is not on the oft-criticised state and federal response to the natural disaster and its aftermath; rather, Salvage zooms in on the newly pregnant narrator. Following Katrina, the literal meaning of the wake (of the hurricane) intersects with its metaphorical meaning as understood by Afropessimist and Black feminist theoretician Christina Sharpe. The wake, as understood by Sharpe, is a multifaceted post-traumatic state in which the Black individual cannot be free of slavery's afterlife (Sharpe 2016, 8), that is, in Salvage, the acute, tangible danger of the hurricane is imposed on the chronic, quotidian state of being a Black (pregnant) girl in an already poverty-stricken region.

Looking back at the three or four years it took to write and revise this book, I can say that it has become something different from what I had originally envisioned. This project started as a relatively narrow intervention into how a line of Latin American philosophy that Enrique Dussel called ‘the philosophy of liberation’, what is increasingly called ‘decolonial philosophy’, took up the ethical vocabulary of Emmanuel Levinas. My argument remains that Édouard Glissant's relative ethics of opacity is more capable of speaking to today's ethical problems and possibilities than Levinas's absolute ethics of alterity. As I revised this book over the past year and read the work of, as well as engaged in conversation with, a few others – Gerard Aching, Kris Sealey, Nancy Mithlo, Neil Roberts, Allison Weir, LaRose Parris, Frieda Ekotto and Chris Tinson especially – I started to think of the book differently. In its placement in this series, and in the questions it raises, Choose Your Bearing can be read as asking Continental ethics and human rights discourse to take seriously Caribbean philosophy and Indigenous philosophy, and by extension Black Studies and Indigenous Studies, as sites of critical theory, epistemological correctives, and conceptual creation. What results from this engagement is a political theory that can no longer assume that the nation state protects rights, an ethical theory that can no longer withdraw into carefree abstractions, and a human rights discourse that can no longer maintain the goal of ‘developing’ humans, cultures and economies. Perhaps from such a renewed philosophy, one that looks back to Caribbean philosophy in the past century, we will gain ethical modes attuned to the rhythms of this century. At the very least, we will take one step toward a truer academic philosophy, one finally made to the measure of the world.

The Critical-Reformist Tension

This chapter begins from and stays with two tensions regarding theorising the state. The first is perhaps the constitutive tension in scholarship on human rights: the understanding of the modern state as both predatory and protective. In his 2013 Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice, Jack Donnelly observes that ‘the modern state has emerged as both the principal threat to the enjoyment of human rights and the essential institution for their effective implementation and enforcement’. He goes on to place his faith in human rights to prohibit ‘a wide range of state interferences’ and thereby to carve out ‘zones of state exclusion’. In this way, ‘human rights place the people above and in positive control of their government’, a position achieved through ‘extensive rights of political participation’. Donnelly's trajectory moves toward ‘the moral standing of the state’, concluding with ‘paths of incremental change’. His position epitomises what I will call ‘the critical-reformist tension’, which notes and criticises state-caused rights violations before returning to a call for state reform. This first tension is important because many justice-oriented actors feel it today. It leads to conflicting demands for practice. It is carried out in practice when students consider the risk of working as radical artists, activists or community organisers only to go to law school before garnering stable jobs in government or accepting positions at prestigious NGOs.

James Griffin's 2008 On Human Rights typifies a thin version of the critical-reformist tension. Griffin's analysis of human rights violations centres not state violence but relations between rights, such as how a state's enforcement of welfare rights can violate liberty rights. Ultimately, he argues that ‘states are the main agents of security of person’ and that ‘in some states one can vote and enjoy the protection of the police and army without being a citizen, but only citizenship makes their possession secure’. In stressing police protection, Griffin lacks a robust accounting for Indigenous displacement and police violence. His focus on security, which comes at the expense of attending to state predation on made-precarious peoples, recalls A. Dirk Moses’ recent observation that ‘the security imperative can justify permanent occupation, that is, colonial rule’. This point brings me to the second tension.

Introduction

The back cover of Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) suggests that the author's third novel ‘brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first century America’. Arguably though, social, ecocritical and transcultural issues intersect in this narrative: instead of repeating myths of freedom and self-fulfilment found on the open road, it is sceptical about the road's liberating potential. In her reading of Sing, Nicole Dib rightly points out that ‘contemporary critical approaches’ to the road narrative ‘counter the notion of the road as a free and open space for all, whether the notion is depicted in literature or film. However, […] these studies prove the hold that the image of the open road has on the American imagination’ (2020, 140). Scholarship on the road narrative has drawn attention to racialised im/mobilities (Lackey 1997, Laderman 2002, Seiler 2008, Brunnemer 2009), but critics have been slow to mobilise ecocritical perspectives for the study of this genre. Yet, some such perspectives have been emerging in recent years (LeMenager 2012, Seymour 2016, Obernesser 2018, Pesses 2021, Bowman 2022) as scholars begin to conceive of the road novel genre as fertile ground for ecocritical debates. Following the protagonists’ road trip from Bois Sauvage to Parchman prison and back against the backdrop of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Sing links historical and ongoing racialised violence to environmental concerns. Though anxiety about the impact of resource extraction and consumption, such as driving fossil-fuelled cars, is growing, Nicole Seymour stresses that the road novel genre cannot be dismissed a priori as anti-environmental (2016, n.p.). Expressing unease with notions like ‘moving west’, ‘individual mobility’, ‘progress’ and ‘freedom’, Seymour draws attention to ‘how visions of mobility might be enticing or at least meaningful to historically oppressed groups – and conversely, how experiences of oppression are often defined by immobility’ (2016, n.p.). My reading of Sing seeks to think together racialised im/mobilities, ecological concerns and ‘histories of oppression’ which nevertheless allow for ‘new and more caring relations to the land’ (Dillender 2020, 131). All these issues are linked via the road trip, although they have been treated separately in previous scholarship.