Airplane Mode
An Irreverent History of Travel
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4.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Finalist for the New American Voices Award
Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medals of Excellence
This witty personal and cultural history of travel from the perspective of a Third World-raised woman of color, Airplane Mode, asks: what does it mean to be a joyous traveler when we live in the ruins of colonialism, capitalism and climate change?
The conditions of travel have long been dictated by the color of passports and the color of skin.
The color of one’s skin and passport have long dictated the conditions of travel. For Shahnaz Habib, travel and travel writing have always been complicated pleasures. Habib threads the history of travel with her personal story as a child on family vacations in India, an adult curious about the world, and an immigrant for whom roundtrips are an annual fact of life. Tracing the power dynamics that underlie tourism, this insightful debut parses who gets to travel, and who gets to write about the experience.
Threaded through the book are inviting and playful analyses of obvious and not-so-obvious travel artifacts: passports, carousels, bougainvilleas, guidebooks, trains, the idea of wanderlust itself. Together, they tell a subversive history of travel as a Euro-American mode of consumerism—but as any traveler knows, travel is more than that. As an immigrant whose loved ones live across continents, Habib takes a deeply curious and joyful look at a troubled and beloved activity.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Translator Habib examines global travel and the inequalities that underpin it in her trenchant debut. Mixing memoir and history, she recalls how her own trips (and challenges with an expiring student visa) made her realize "how intrepid you are as a traveler depends, at least partly, on how entitled you feel to travel." For example, she contrasts a white friend's "easy charm with strangers" and "ability to condense entire countries into crisp little sentences," with the way "Brown people... did not fit the stereotype of the tourist. We were supposed to be the local color." From there, Habib goes on to describe passport discrimination (both globally and within "Third World" countries) as "akin to a caste system with multiple stratas" and delve into the fascinating 19th-century roots of modern guidebooks. Elsewhere, she traces the often-invisible influences on the desire to travel, noting, for example, that a Thai government program encouraged the proliferation of Thai restaurants worldwide on the "astute calculation" that their dishes would inspire tourism. (Habib realized firsthand just how well that bet paid off when she found herself in a Thai eatery while abroad in Barcelona: "The epiphany was that I was a cliché..... How bracing it is to catch a glimpse of the software that is running me and hundreds of thousands of others... beneath the surface of our wanderlust.") With a perceptive eye and in fluid, intimate prose, Habib nimbly demonstrates how "the more we dig into the history of modern tourism, the more the pickax hits the underground cable connection with colonialism." Jet-setters will be captivated and challenged.
