Governmentality on the Road

In Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville (1972), the US Supreme Court ruled vagrancy laws unconstitutional. These laws were older than the nation itself. Vagrancy laws had arrived with the English colonization of the Americas and granted their enforcers wide leeway to apprehend or expel anyone presumed to pose a potential threat to security, property, or racial regimes of labor and resource distribution. They laid the groundwork for the surveillance of “suspicious persons” in ways that continue to foundationally structure police authority and violence today. Writing for the majority in Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville, William O. Douglas ruled that these laws were unconstitutional because their vagueness placed “almost unfettered discretion in the hands of the police” (Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville, 405 U.S. 156 [1972], 156). He then ventured beyond the Constitution itself to assert that the restriction of free mobility impinges on “unwritten amenities” that, while spelled out nowhere in the Bill of Rights, are nonetheless rooted deep in the heart of a national character articulated primarily in literary tradition: These unwritten amenities have been in part responsible for giving our people the feeling of independence and self-confidence, the feeling of creativity. These amenities have dignified the right of dissent and have honored the right to be nonconformists and the right to defy submissiveness. They have encouraged lives of high spirits rather than hushed, suffocating silence. They are embedded in Walt Whitman's writings, especially in his “Song of the Open Road.” They are reflected, too, in the spirit of Vachel Lindsay's “I Want to Go Wandering” and by Henry D. Thoreau. (164)In his soaring rhetoric, Douglas reclaims the vagrant as a figure of American freedom, relying on an exclusively white, male literary tradition to endow the vagrant with precisely the independence and mobility valorized as affordances of white masculinity—even as this particular case did not involve the arrest of any white men (the plaintiffs were a group of two white women and two Black men arrested while riding in a car together). How does the literary figure of the white, male vagabond so easily and thoroughly eclipse the facts of the case when Douglas seeks to redeem vagrancy from criminalization and recast it as an expression of American freedom?Bryan Yazell's The American Vagrant in Literature reveals the long, established history this rhetorical move already had by the time it was enshrined in legal precedent. As Yazell shows, every element of Douglas's redemption of the vagrant—his reliance on a literary lineage, his emphasis on white male mobility as the highest expression of independence, and his figuration of the vagrant as an embodiment of national character—follows a template honed in the popular genre of the tramp narrative of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yazell argues that the figure of the tramp emerges as an object of both popular literary fascination and a focal point for policy debates over social welfare in an era bookended by major, global financial crises. The tramp, he shows, is not representative of vagrancy more broadly—either as legal category or social condition. Rather, the tramp is an exceptional figure that does particular rhetorical and ideological work to signify a form of marginality that could be reclaimed into productive citizenship. Crucially for Yazell's argument, this literary figure was archetypally white and male in a moment in which the actual enforcement of vagrancy laws was far more likely to target non-white people, and in which poverty, homelessness, or criminalization were not at all the exclusive province of men of any race. As Yazell argues, the white, male tramp is an attractive figure precisely due to his proximity to ideals of liberal subjectivity. Yazell makes a valuable intervention by focusing on this figure as something other than one of total social marginality, disruption, or exclusion. The tramp attracts regulatory frenzy, he shows, not because he is wholly oppositional to the liberal-capitalist state but rather because he seems to hold the potential to be reclaimed into it: “The tramp is a grotesque reflection of the ideal subject in the Anglo-American liberal societies at this time: white, male, and staunchly autonomous” (10).Thus, as Yazell argues, the tramp narrative is “a literary form that facilitates the discourse of state building” by taking a potential sign of capitalism's crises and inevitable human cost and rendering it instead a figure of what might be redeemed for productivity, discipline, and the flourishing of the body politic through proper state intervention (164). This figure, he argues, is therefore one that helps crystallize the scope and concerns of the emerging welfare state by imagining a seemingly oppositional figure as one who has the potential to be reclaimed as the “worthy” poor—and thus also enshrines whiteness at the heart of who is considered a potential beneficiary of the state's ability to (partially and selectively) ameliorate some of the effects of capitalist crisis and immiseration.Across four chapters, The American Vagrant in Literature traces the rise and fall of this specific narrative genre as it intertwines with the establishment of the welfare state in both the United States and the United Kingdom. The first chapter focuses on Mark Twain's A Tramp Abroad (1880) and Josiah Flynt's Tramping with Tramps (1899), arguing that the figure of the tramp enables international comparison between different nations’ approaches to social welfare, progressive reform, and the management of poverty in the wake of global financial crisis. Chapter 2, which focuses on Jack London's The People of the Abyss (1903), W. H. Davies's The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (1908), and Rudyard Kipling's Kim (1901), continues to treat the tramp as a mobile figure in a transnationally circulating popular genre but emphasizes how tramp narratives render their protagonists into paradoxically exceptional figures of national character. The tramp, for both British and American authors, displays an “exceptional embodiment of whiteness, mobility, and adaptability,” thus offering a vantage point for social critique and a figure for those subjects who may be considered most redeemable into citizenship through welfare reforms (79). Chapter 3 considers George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) alongside Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1936) as representations of a later moment in the development of the welfare state, when “tramps as literary figures cease to reflect a dangerous exceptionalism” and instead serve as a metonym for the biopolitical management of populations (93). Chapter 4 traces the uses and limits of the tramp narrative's conventions for social critique by showing its influence on John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939), arguing that Steinbeck draws on long-standing affordances of this genre to portray “white mobility . . . as a form of labour sufficiently exploitable and durable to be worth the state's investment” (125). An epilogue considers the afterlife of this genre by discussing the works of Jack Kerouac as a culmination of the long-standing tradition of tramping literature. Kerouac, Yazell argues, valorizes whiteness in paradoxical relation to the regulatory state, portraying the white tramp as both a figure of freedom and ungovernability and an image of the state's paradigmatic object of biopolitical care.As is likely clear from the chapter summaries, this book is not actually about “the American vagrant.” Rather, it is about the tramp narrative in both British and American literature as this narrative genre intertwines with both nations’ internal debates regarding social welfare in an international, comparative context. As Yazell shows, the literary tradition he traces is in fact a transnational one defined by clear lines of citation, referentiality, and imitation that do not respect national boundaries, even when the texts themselves make thoroughly nationalist claims. A title is hardly the most important feature of a book, but I admit I found myself puzzled by the choice (whether on the part of the author or the press), and I wonder if the disjuncture between the title and the contents may be symptomatic of a more consequential indecision regarding which specific literary-critical conversations Yazell wishes to intervene in and how. This is a short book whose length and scope demands precision and a clear sense of priority regarding its audience and its stakes for that audience. A book that might speak comparatively to both British and American literary studies of the period, clarifying the stakes of the project for scholars in both fields more broadly, would likely need more room. Barring that, choosing one field as a primary audience, even while keeping the transnational archive, may have allowed for more critical and citational depth within the confines of a slim volume. The argument here touches on concepts of broad potential interest to literary scholars across multiple fields, but I wished throughout for a clearer and more explicit articulation of how the project responds to conversations beyond those about vagrancy or the tramp narrative specifically. Yazell reveals the tramp narrative's significant interventions into debates regarding the welfare state across two nations in a crucial time period of both financial crisis and legal innovation. Given more scope to theorize “welfare” and “the state” as contested concepts more broadly, I could imagine the book's potential to intervene in a number of important conversations across multiple fields, but the book as currently conceived is likely to appeal more specifically to scholars already working on the texts, authors, and debates most centrally featured.Just as I was unsure of the stakes of the “American” in the book's title, I also paused over the other key term, “vagrant,” as the book is actually quite clearly about the distinct figure of the tramp. While the vagrant, as a legal category, is definitionally vague, broad, and potentially limitless in its scope, the tramp, as Yazell shows, is a very different figure that is rendered narratively legible in extremely narrow terms: white, male, mobile, and with the capacity (if not always the willingness) to labor. What is most valuable throughout this book is Yazell's insistent focus on the non-transgressiveness of this seemingly oppositional figure, which is instructive for helping to both explain and puncture the mystique of the tramp narrative and its afterlives. Yet the many likenesses between the central literary texts studied—all of which are authored by white men, and all of which participate legibly in the tradition of the (white, male) tramp narrative—led me to feel at times that the chapters were too similar, both in their arguments and in their archives. The book, in other words, may sometimes suffer from what it otherwise astutely diagnoses: a fascination with a charismatic figure that has immense power to draw attention away from the more varied concept of vagrancy it claims to represent.On the one hand, a narrow focus on the tramp narrative—which, as Yazell notes, is constructed precisely though repetition, citationality, and the familiarity of established tropes—illuminates the specific political and cultural work done by this genre. In that sense, Yazell is correct in singling out the tramp figure as distinct, and he is careful to note that this figure is not actually representative of those who either lived in a condition that could be called vagrancy or who were targeted by vagrancy laws. The claim he makes about the political and ideological work of the tramp narrative is convincing, and centering whiteness as a category of analysis is entirely appropriate for a genre that, as Yazell reveals, itself centers whiteness, to lasting and pernicious political consequences for the imagined and material scope of social welfare.Once this work of the tramp narrative was established by the end of the first chapter, however, I wondered whether the argument might have unfolded in more varied and surprising directions if it had been more rooted in engagement with work on race, labor, law, migration, and mobility in fields including Black British cultural studies, African American literature and history, Asian American studies, Latinx studies, and transnational American studies. This could have enabled a view of the figure of the tramp as seen from beyond its most legible canon of archives and methods. For instance, while Yazell cites Bryan Wagner's Disturbing the Peace, a more extensive engagement with Wagner's work could have led to a generative articulation of how police power is at the heart of both the criminalization of Blackness at the center of Wagner's analysis and the administration of the welfare state whose biopolitical incorporation of whiteness is at the heart of Yazell's account. With that relation rendered more explicit, what might a text like Claude McKay's Banjo (1929) have added to the conversation? The novel, after all, stages a very different version of the international comparison that Yazell notes in authors like London and Orwell as it portrays a multiracial, multinational assemblage of drifters in Marseilles, and its subtitle as “A Story without a Plot” places it in conversation with the formal tradition that Yazell traces through authors like Twain and Kipling. Meanwhile, the inclusion of Kim represents a missed opportunity to engage with the distinct function of vagrancy-type legislation in British India and the rich tradition of postcolonial scholarship that has theorized governmentality, bio/necropolitics, and the state from the vantage point of the colony. Connecting the figure of the tramp to queer and feminist scholarship on vagrancy, race, gender, and sexuality in the period (such as Nayan Shah's Stranger Intimacy or Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments) could have expanded the gendered scope of the study beyond the white masculinity that the conventional tramp narrative renders its most legible subject, but which need not constitute the absolute horizon for inquiry that takes this figure as its point of departure.I point out what I see as some missed opportunities for this book not to entirely fault the author but rather to draw attention to a larger material dilemma that many scholars face: different kinds of projects demand different kinds of time, space, and support, and not all projects are equally well-served by all forms, modes, and timelines of publication. Comparative and interdisciplinary work often needs more time and more wide-ranging research than scholarship more legibly contained within one literary tradition or field does. Structural constraints on both academic publishing and academic labor can stand in the way of scholars who wish to do work that needs both time and space for deep engagement with multiple fields, archives, and methods. This constraint is ultimately detrimental to our collective understanding. After all, a comparative, transnational story of how, as Yazell states, “the tramp archetype simultaneously takes on and sublimates the racial question inherent to migrancy into one involving individualism and liberal subjectivity” is a story that is absolutely worth telling (27). I only wish the analysis and its archives had more scope here to both deepen and expand. The story Yazell begins to tell is, after all, of profound consequence for abolitionist thought and action that seeks to imagine and materialize social welfare beyond racial capitalism and the carceral state.