Description
Much has been discussed about the sensation of ease of movement as a central factor in the creation of understandings of “freedom” as realised through travel under contemporary liberal governmentalities (Bigo, 2005; Urry, 1990). However, less has been said about how the technologies of infrastructure that support this movement engender subjectivities of mobility and freedom amongst those for whom such travel is not a reality, nor how such subjectivities can enable conditions of precarity amongst those who develop them.
Based off twelve months’ ethnographic fieldwork in a tourist beach town in Brazil’s northeast, Praia da Pipa, I look at one such infrastructural technology: the road to the town. By looking at the way that residents of this town use the road in their daily lives, I consider the often-surprising ways that they engage with the subjectivities of mobilities it enables. Taking the perspective that the road is a relational (Harvey, 2010) infrastructure, I argue that the aesthetics of modernity it introduces to the town create a normative vision amongst residents of the benefits of travel. Moreover, I argue that in Pipa, the centrality of colonial geopolitical imaginaries of paradise underwrites these subjectivities of modernity in order to enable the further entrenchment of precarious employment practices.
