Bodies in Transit: Navigating the LA Metro as an Autotheoretical Journey

“Bodies in Transit” explores the Los Angeles Metro as a site of complex temporal and cultural aesthetics, examining the ways urban transit infrastructures shape experiences of memory, forgetting, and the uncanny. Moving beyond traditional analyses of race, class, and technology, this paper investigates how public spaces like the LA Metro construct a unique form of urban temporality, where time becomes fluid, fragmented, and nonlinear. Drawing on frameworks from cultural studies, hauntology, and prosthetic memory, the Metro is presented as both a literal and metaphorical vehicle that connects riders not only to different parts of the city but also to its obscured and forgotten histories. Through an interdisciplinary analysis that includes works such as Patricia Jones’ Passing and George Dieter’s Mechanical Metallurgy, the article positions the Metro as a symbol of modernity’s interplay with the past, offering a fresh perspective on urban transit as a mediator of memory and temporal dislocation. Furthermore, the LA Metro is framed as a reflection of the city’s temporal aesthetics, echoing H.G. Wells’ meditations on memory in Experiment in Autobiography and the fluidity of identity explored in Gandhi’s An Autobiography. This article also extends Zipporah Lax Yamamoto’s work on prosthetic memory to consider how the Metro functions as an artificial construct that both preserves and distorts the city’s historical narrative. By examining how the daily experience of riding the Metro evokes a sense of the uncanny—a blending of the familiar and strange—this article offers a novel interpretation of urban temporality and public space.