Navigating the Deep South - Mobility, Space, and Racial Boundaries in Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Farrelly’s Green Book

Abstract

Adopting an urban humanities approach, this article analyses Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and Peter Farrelly’s Green Book (2018), emphasizing mobility, spatial practices and racialized boundaries. While Adventures of Huckleberry Finn portrays the river and raft as liminal spaces on the margins of the antebellum South, Green Book depicts the car and highway as integral to the infrastructures of Jim Crow segregation and mid-twentieth-century urban modernity. A comparative analysis of these works reveals that everyday mobilities, whether drifting down the Mississippi or navigating Southern roads, can become technologies of exclusion and opportunities for solidarity. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space and Rick Altman’s model of genre transformation, this article demonstrates how cultural texts convey the physical and symbolic dimensions of urban life, including surveillance, accessibility and intimacy. This approach makes a valuable contribution to urban humanities scholarship by tracing the history of racialized mobility and connecting nineteenth-century literary visions of the American South with twentieth-century cinematic portrayals of the Deep South.