Introduction

Since their inception in the early-nineteenth century, rail technologies have co-evolved with America's spaces, infrastructure, economy and cultural imaginaries. Their tracks have remained deeply embedded in its national mythology, and the rhetoric of the technological sublime, ever since. For African American communities, the symbolic capital of railways remained tangled in those national narratives. On the one hand, the ‘freedom trains’ and the Underground Railroad networks that slaves used to escape the slaveholding states extended fairly seamlessly to the narratives of the Great Migration, where African Americans travelled from the agrarian South into the industrialised North in search of greater opportunities. Yet on the other, Jim Crow rail cars, a ‘boxcar’ subculture in the Great Depression, and incidents such the Scottsboro trials of the 1930s began to expose the lingering dilemmas that rail technologies both exemplified and disguised in American culture. Cumulatively, rail systems served both as socio-technical instruments for implementing Jim Crow segregation policies, and potent metaphors for the wider effects of segregation and racism in the United States. For black writers such as Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Bennet, Pauli Murray, Ralph Ellison, Amiri Baraka and others, bathetic critiques and ‘tactical’ appropriations of rail systems and other infrastructure technologies became linked directly to specific strains of resistance to institutional racism. Out of sight and on the periphery of most major settlements, the physical infrastructures of this socio-technical ensemble form part of a grid that becomes visible again only when it fails, or when vulnerabilities in normal operations are exploited for alternative purposes, such as ‘riding the rails’, squatting and vernacular modifications to power supplies. Accordingly, black experimental writers and artists identified these socio-technical assemblages as key arenas in which to diagnose the vicissitudes of everyday life behind the colour line, and to re-invent a future beyond it.

In his 1920s–1930s writing, Hughes created a diagnostic framework for the revolutionary poetics and spatial practices of African American avant-gardes, who both reclaimed and newly articulated a black vernacular technicity in response to ongoing segregationist practices and the Scottsboro trials.