Airplane Mode: A Passive-Aggressive History of Travel

THIS INTENSELY THOUGHT-PROVOKING READ ABOUT A DEEPLY LOVED ACTIVITY—TRAVEL—MUST SURELY BE THE MOST POWERFUL DEBUT OF THE YEAR.

This witty personal and cultural history of travel from the perspective of a Third World–raised woman of colour asks: What does it mean to be a joyous traveller when we live in the ruins of colonialism, capitalism and climate change?

The conditions of travel have long been dictated by the colours of passports and the colour of skin.
For Shahnaz Habib, travel and travel writing have always been complicated pleasures. Tracing the power dynamics that underlie tourism, this insightful debut parses who gets to travel, and who gets to write about the experience. All the while, Habib threads the historic but ever-evolving dynamics of travel into her personal story as a child on family vacations in India, an adult curious about the world, and an immigrant for whom round trips are an annual fact of life.

Woven throughout the book are inviting and playful analyses of obvious and not-so-obvious travel artefacts: 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 traveller 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.