Interrogating American subculture: The hobo figure and negotiations of invisibility (Jack London, John Dos Passos, Jack Kerouac, Eddy Joe Cotton, Jessica Erica Hahn)

Interrogating American Subculture: The Hobo Figure and Negotiations of Invisibility focuses on a vital community in American culture: the hobo. My project is expansive and interdisciplinary, following the manifestations of the hobo figure through diverse literary and historical texts, including treatments of the hobo by Jack London, John Dos Passos, and Jack Kerouac, the political manifestoes of the I.W.W. and T.A.Z, and numerous long-forgotten, non-canonical hobo autobiographies. I have also conducted field research and personal interviews, leading to the first scholarly treatment of contemporary rail riders and writers, Eddy Joe Cotton and Jessica Hahn. Challenging the assumption that the hobo figure is simply an abstract sign of national economic distress, my project asserts the transgressive nature of the hobo's boxcar journey across the American landscape. Resisting continual attempts by the federal government as well as traditional community groups to locate and define the American populace in terms of geographically and socially specific places, twentieth-century hobos, using their invisibility to create autonomous spaces, forge a distinctive political identity that situates individual freedom and pleasure at its center. This dissertation is an examination of the hobo subculture that is an integral part of American cultural history and literature but yet has been, like the hobos themselves, ignored.