Faded Neon and Rusted Chrome examines Route 66 as more than a nostalgic road trip—it reveals the highway as a cultural and political technology that naturalizes the ideologies of American empire. Rather than treating Route 66 as a charming artifact of midcentury mobility, this book shows how the road and the stories told about it helped construct a national identity grounded in freedom, movement, and open horizons, even as those narratives obscured profound racial, economic, and infrastructural inequalities.

By tracing how nostalgia circulates through landscapes, roadside ruins, tourism, photography, and preservation culture, the book argues that nostalgia is not merely a feeling but an emotional infrastructure with political consequences. On Route 66, nostalgia smooths over the harms embedded in the built environment—environmental dispossession, segregation, displacement, and uneven development—making them appear as natural features of the American landscape rather than the products of specific historical choices.

Through cultural criticism, mobility studies, and place-based observation, Faded Neon and Rusted Chrome reframes America’s most mythologized highway as a site where fantasy and empire converge. The book illuminates how nostalgia organizes memory and desire, shapes our sense of who belongs on the road, and defines what kinds of futures seem possible in a nation increasingly governed by longing for an imagined past.