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Robert Matej Bednar,
Road Scars: Place, Automobility,
and Road Trauma
(Rowman & Littlefield, 2020)
Road Scars
is a highly visual scholarly monograph
about how roadside car crash shrines place the collective
trauma of living in a car culture in the everyday
landscapes of automobility. Roadside car crash
shrines—or what I call road trauma shrines—are
vernacular memorial assemblages built by private
individuals at sites where family and friends have died in
automobile accidents, either while driving cars or
motorcycles or being hit by cars as pedestrians,
bicyclists, or motorcyclists. Prevalent for decades in Latin
America and in the American Southwest, roadside car
crash shrines are now present throughout the U.S. and
around the world. Some are simply small white crosses,
almost silent markers of places of traumatic death.
Others are elaborate collections of objects, texts, and
materials from all over the map culturally and physically,
all significantly brought together not in the home or in a
cemetery but on the roadside, in drivable public space—a
space where private individuals perform private identities
alongside each other in public, and where these private
mobilities sometimes collide with one another in
traumatic ways that are negotiated in roadside shrines.
Based on nearly two decades of fieldwork on the
roads of the American Southwest, this book works
through photography and visual/material/spatial analysis
to show how, one at a time, road trauma shrines perform
a cultural trauma to drivers driving by them, forming a
fragile but palpable and melancholy collective of drivers
who sense road trauma together even if they do not
know that they know road trauma themselves.
