The Way They Blow the Horn: Caribbean Dollar Cabs and Subaltern Mobilities

Asha Best

Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2016, vol. 106, issue 2, 442-449

Abstract: In this article, I map subaltern mobilities: practices of movement that I define as flexible, vernacular, and specific to postcolonial subjects. I do so through a six-month ethnography of “dollar cabs” used by Caribbean immigrants in Brooklyn, New York—taxis recognized not by exterior color or medallion but by the way they blow their horns, the familiarity between driver and passengers, and other diacritics this article critically attends to. These discursive geographies and practices allow Caribbean immigrants to navigate the U.S. urban landscape and to interact with each other in unique ways. Because dollar cabs often operate outside of dominant structures of licensure, they have been studied primarily as informal paratransit systems. This article offers a critique of the framework of informality as it relates to mobilities of subaltern subjects and argues that, given their focus on systems rather than practices, scholars have foreclosed on the analytical possibilities of fully understanding the social within these geographies of mobility. Through this ethnography I make a significant theoretical and methodological intervention by showing how both international and local subaltern movements and flows have disrupted, produced, and been affected by the global city.

Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00045608.2015.1120148 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:raagxx:v:106:y:2016:i:2:p:442-449

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/raag21

DOI: 10.1080/00045608.2015.1120148

Access Statistics for this article

Annals of the American Association of Geographers is currently edited by Jennifer Cassidento

More articles in Annals of the American Association of Geographers from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().