Page - 50 - in >mcs_lab> - Mobile Culture Studies, Volume 2/2020

50 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 6 2o20 (Travel) Rhian Waller | Postcolonial Pictures The cover of Deep South, which sits within the NIM set, incorporates a derelict shop front. The implication is, in contrast with Africa, Mesoamerica and Asia, European and North Ame- rican environments are occupied, stamped with permanent architectural reminders of the resi- dent culture. Analysis: Engines and Elegies Several covers feature the sign of a train passing through an environment. The cover of Last Train to Zona Verde (2014) displays a locomotive in silhouette, while Dark Star Safari (2002) depicts a train curving through a shadowy, half-lit forest. The Old Patagonian Express shows the eponymous vehicle surrounded by a forest in daylight. The photographs are all taken from a distant perspective, again foregrounding an expanse of wilderness. In contrast, the cover image of Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (2012) takes a closer perspective that emphasizes the bulk of the machinery. The first three conform to what Kress and van Leeuwen term the “action image” (2006). Though the image is an abstract, static snapshot of fleeting reality, the vector of the trains suggests travel across the landscape and, effectively, across the page. These images signify movement and an obvious juxtaposition of technology and nature. Here, the presence of humanity is implied but not shown; transportation and technology acts as an indexical link: where there is a moving train, there may be passengers. Therefore, human presence is questionable and any people ‘present’ are in a state of transit. Indigenous and other resident peoples are absent. The forest takes on a parallel role to the Mexican desert- scape; though, this time, the photograph positions the viewer as witness to both wilderness and movement through the wilderness. This, again, has colonial connotations. The railway and train are examples of complex, and contradictory, multi-layered signs. On one hand, the image of the train is rooted in strong associations with white, western technological ascendancy and modernity. The invention and expansion of rail travel in the 19th century shifted “perceptions of geography and the globe itself” (Papalas, 2015), tightening the world and offering access to otherwise remote regions. The train signifies a particularly masculine, muscular technological vision, evoking speed, power, penetration and “colonial acquisitiveness” (Jones, 2018). As a form of mass transit, it indexes notions of class, contrasting the stateliness of the first class experience with poverty, evoked by images of packed compartments and roof-riding passengers. Yet, despite the early vision of the locomotive as a symbol of white, European-American rationalism, progress and imperialism, the train has been co-opted and re-imagined; McCombe (2011) notes how the USA railroad offered “cross-racial identification”, cultural transportation, employment opportunities and escape for disenfranchised black people (although he expresses ambivalence on this front), while Jones notes the deconstruction “of the train as a white ‘tool of civilization’” by Soweto poets, who expose the “absurdities of the apartheid system while simultaneously making train and train station sites of everyday black activity” (2015). In Deep South, (2015), Theroux himself acknowledges the levelling possibilities of rail travel. Despite this, in the case of the Penguin book covers, these competing and paradoxical symbolic associa- tions are sublimated; the iconic sign of the train-as-transport predominates, and its indexing of architecture and infrastructure as a function of colonialism is cemented by Theroux’s writing when he discusses the “muscular” nature of train travel (2008: 167) and describes “the usual municipal preoccupations of a colonizing power — road mending, drainage, or permanent