Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel

Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medals of Excellence

Finalist, New American Voices award

This witty personal & 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 & climate change?

The conditions of travel have long been dictated by the color of passports & the color of skin. The color of one’s skin & passport have long dictated the conditions of travel.  For Shahnaz Habib, travel &  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, & 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, & who gets to write about the experience.

Threaded through the book are inviting & playful analyses of obvious & 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 & joyful look at a troubled &  beloved activity.

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“Airplane Mode is a captivating & comprehensive history of travel. Part cultural study & part personal account, it engages with the troubling legacy of colonialism & the particular experiences of brown & Black people traveling. I know of no other book like it, a thrilling read that feels like a whole education in the history of why &  how bodies moved across this not-so-lonely planet.” — Kazim Ali, author of Northern Light