Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel -- Shahnaz Habib, Hardcover

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.

Author: Shahnaz Habib
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 12/05/2023
Pages: 288
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.97lbs
Size: 8.35h x 5.67w x 1.10d
ISBN: 9781646220151

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal Prepub Alert 07/01/2023 pg. 7
Booklist 09/15/2023 pg. 11
Library Journal 09/01/2023 pg. 100
Kirkus Reviews 10/15/2023
Publishers Weekly 10/16/2023
BookPage 12/01/2023
Shelf Awareness 12/15/2023

About the Author
SHAHNAZ HABIB is a writer and translator based in Brooklyn. She translates from her mother tongue, the south Indian language of Malayalam, and has translated two novels, Jasmine Days and Al-Arabian Novel Factory, the first of which won the 2018 JCB Prize. Shahnaz teaches writing in the MFA program at Bay Path University as well as at The New School. She also consults for the United Nations. Airplane Mode is her first book.