Reading and Writing Highways in the West

A special issue of Western American Literature

Guest edited by Surabhi Balachander and Lauren White

2026 marks the centennial anniversary of Route 66, perhaps the most iconic of the United States’ original highways. While Route 66 was decommissioned as a highway in 1985 after being replaced by the most expensive public works project in history, the US Interstate Highway System, through literature, film, song, and other media, Route 66 remains an exemplar of the significance of highways in American culture. And through, among other things, their facilitation of westward migration and sub/urban expansion, highways are crucial to shaping the landscape of the twentieth and twenty-first century American West. 

While the highway system was designed to move people, goods, and weapons across the country efficiently, it is crucial, as Critical Infrastructure Studies suggests, to look both at and beyond its technical functions. Despite an abundance of scholarship on road trip narratives, which may make use of highways, there is comparatively little critical engagement within literary studies interrogating the structural power of a highway system that displaces, pollutes, and disenfranchises. Looking critically at highways and their cultural representations offers new possibilities for understanding the ways in which, as Winona LaDuke and Deborah Cowen put it, “infrastructure is the how of settler colonialism.” Examining highways surfaces narratives about inequity, dispossession, and climate changed futures. The highway’s conscription into the realm of political theatre, most recently seen in the firing of live ammunition over the I-5 freeway to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Marine Corps, demands critical consideration. Despite the highway’s role in westward expansion and the transportation of weapons, there is a dearth of scholarship examining it as a symbol of empire. Highways, given their large scale, alter environments, human communities, and conceptions of space and time. 

We seek proposals for scholarly and creative essays in literary and cultural studies that foreground federal and state highways in the West.

Possible themes and topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Displacement and migration

• Climate impacts

• Petrocultures

• Highways and housing justice

• Route 66 and other decommissioned highways

• Highways and settler colonialism

• Suburban expansion

• Traffic and commutes

• Highways and performance

• Highways and environmental racism

• Highways and nationalism/American exceptionalism

• Roadkill and wildlife impacts

• Road-related air pollution and noise pollution

• Highways and human health

• Trucking and shipping

• Highways and literary form (e.g. “the freeway novel”) 

• Highways and the future

Please submit your abstract, up to 250 words, to the linked Google Form. The deadline for submissions is December 12, 2025. If an abstract is accepted, a manuscript of 10 to 25 pages will be due by June 15, 2026. Email guest editors Surabhi Balachander at surabhi.balachander@oregonstate.edu and Lauren White at whitel@usc.edu with any questions.

Publication Date: Winter 2026