This book explores how spatial displacement correlates to social immobility narratologically by carrying out a hermeneutic of literary trainscapes. Understood as the arrangement of the social and the mobile in the literary representation of movement of people and goods by the railway system across inter-American economies, the book focuses on narratives based at the Panama Canal Zone, across the Central American banana republics, and on the human caravan traversing Mexico towards the U.S. border upon La Bestia.
Paola Ravasio is a post-doctoral researcher at the Center for InterAmerican Studies at Bielefeld University. She holds a Ph.D. in Romance Studies with emphasis on the Central American Caribbean from the University of Würzburg, a triple masters degree in Literary European Cultures from the Universities of Bologna, Strasbourg and Thessaloniki, and a Licenciatura in Classical Philology from the University of Costa Rica.