‘Culture on Two Wheels’ Considers Bicycles As Artistic and Cultural Signifiers

Culture on Two Wheels: The Bicycle in Literature & Film , edited and introduced by Jeremy Withers and Daniel P. Shea, is an exhaustive examination of bicycles’ shifting role as signifiers in literature and film over the last 125 years. Perfect for the scholar, cyclist or anyone interested in symbolism in art, the essay collection includes works by 17 academics and riders with diverse perspectives on the subject.

In his forward, Zack Furness notes, “This collection helps to fill the gap in critical academic research on bicycling by encouraging us to consider how bicycles fit into the real and fictive stories we tell ourselves about our values, ethics, feelings, politics, bodies, communities, and public spaces. More broadly, the authors ask us to consider what role images of bicycling might play in terms of narrating our hopes and frustrations about the problematics and possibilities of everyday life.” 

For Victorian cyclists, essayist Dave Buchanan explains, the advent of riding was closely linked to the “literary tourism” movement in which vacationers used bikes to tour the sites of key points in their favorite authors’ lives. For them, bicycling signified simultaneously looking forward—at the time, bicycles still carried an air of modernity and innovation—and backward at the literary achievements of the past. Travel writers such as the husband-and-wife duo of Joseph Pennell and Elizabeth Robins Pennell then shared their adventures with the broader public, further expanding the bicycles scope of influence.

Fast-forward more than a century to the hip-hop music videos of BlocBoi Fame and YnG RobB, which feature fixed-gear bikers rapping about riding. Essayist Melody Lynn Hoffmann examines how, despite the fact that African Americans are the fastest-growing group of bicyclists in the U.S., they are rarely represented in mainstream bicycle-related media. Rappers such as the aforementioned work against this underrepresentation and help to carve out a place for black cyclists in the public eye that serves unique purposes for the black community. Hoffmann examines the difference between white bike advocacy primarily on environmental and cost-saving grounds and black bike advocacy on the grounds of looking cool, giving access to forbidden parts of the city, providing an alternative to gangs and—in the case of music videos like YnG RobB’s “Speedin’ on My Fixie”—opening doors to creative recognition and cold hard cash.