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Literary Journalism and the Scales of Justice: A New Mobilities Approach

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Literary Journalism and Social Justice

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Abstract

This chapter uses the lens of mobility justice to explore the multiple interlocking injustices represented in Every Day We Live Is the Future, Douglas Haynes’s 2017 account of life in a contemporary Managua shantytown. One of the leading theorists of mobility studies, Mimi Sheller, argues, “Mobility Justice is an overarching concept for thinking about how power and inequality inform the governance and control of movement, shaping the patterns of unequal mobility and immobility in the circulation of people, resources and information.” Mobility, however, is also a distinguishing feature of literary journalism. A close reading of Every Day We Live Is the Future will illustrate the theme of mobility in Haynes’s book but also the fittedness of these concerns to key generic features of literary journalism.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    “Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2018,” UN High Commissioner for Refugees, 2018, accessed August 03, 2020, https://www.unhcr.org/globaltrends2018/.

  2. 2.

    Mimi Sheller, Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes (London: Verso, 2018), 11.

  3. 3.

    Mimi Sheller and John Urry, “The New Mobilities Paradigm,” Environment and Planning A, Vol. 38 (2006): 208.

  4. 4.

    Mimi Sheller, “Theorizing Mobility Justice,” in Mobilities, Mobility Justice and Social Justice, edited by Nancy Cook and David Butz, 23. London: Routledge, 2018.

  5. 5.

    Sheller, Mobility Justice, 11.

  6. 6.

    Sheller, 1.

  7. 7.

    Mark Kramer, “Breakable Rules for Literary Journalists,” in Literary Journalism: A New Collection of the Best American Nonfiction, edited by Mark Kramer and Norman Sims (New York: Ballantine, 1995), 23.

  8. 8.

    Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (New York: Vintage, 1971), 204.

  9. 9.

    Sheller, 131.

  10. 10.

    Sheller, 131.

  11. 11.

    Sheller, 104.

  12. 12.

    Tim Cresswell, “Mobility,” in The Sage Handbook of Geographical Knowledge, eds. John A. Agnew and David N. Livingstone (London: Sage, 2011), 576–7.

  13. 13.

    Cresswell, 576.

  14. 14.

    Douglas Haynes, Every Day We Live Is the Future (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017), jacket copy.

  15. 15.

    Haynes, 257–8.

  16. 16.

    Haynes, 261.

  17. 17.

    Douglas Haynes, “Writing from the Margins,” Douglas Haynes—Personal Website, accessed August 4, 2020, http://www.douglas-haynes.com/about.

  18. 18.

    Douglas Haynes, Every Day We Live Is the Future, 258.

  19. 19.

    Kramer, 31.

  20. 20.

    Haynes, 92.

  21. 21.

    Haynes, 21.

  22. 22.

    Sheller, 13.

  23. 23.

    Haynes, 41.

  24. 24.

    Haynes, 9.

  25. 25.

    Haynes, 24.

  26. 26.

    The phrase “slow violence” is from Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), a book to which Haynes refers in Every Day We Live Is the Future. See p. 146.

  27. 27.

    Haynes, 212.

  28. 28.

    Haynes, 258.

  29. 29.

    Haynes, 259.

  30. 30.

    Haynes, 254.

  31. 31.

    Haynes, 235.

  32. 32.

    Haynes, 235.

  33. 33.

    Haynes, 235.

  34. 34.

    Haynes, 236.

  35. 35.

    Haynes, 236.

  36. 36.

    Haynes, 236.

  37. 37.

    Haynes, 236.

  38. 38.

    Haynes, 236.

  39. 39.

    Haynes, 236.

  40. 40.

    Haynes, 236.

  41. 41.

    Haynes, 236–7.

  42. 42.

    Haynes, 237.

  43. 43.

    Haynes, 237.

  44. 44.

    Haynes, 237.

  45. 45.

    Haynes, 237.

  46. 46.

    Haynes, 237.

  47. 47.

    Haynes, 3.

  48. 48.

    Sheller, xiv.

  49. 49.

    Norman Sims, True Stories: A Century of Literary Journalism (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 9–10.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of English Language and Literature, Brock University, St. Catharines, ON, Canada

    Robert Alexander

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Correspondence to Robert Alexander .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of English Language and Literature, Brock University, St. Catharines, ON, Canada

    Robert Alexander

  2. Faculty of Arts Department of Media, Communications, Creative Arts, Language and Literature (MCCALL), Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Willa McDonald

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Alexander, R. (2022). Literary Journalism and the Scales of Justice: A New Mobilities Approach. In: Alexander, R., McDonald, W. (eds) Literary Journalism and Social Justice . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89420-7_13

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