Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel

A playful personal and cultural history of travel from a postcolonial, person-of-color perspective, Airplane Mode asks: what does it mean to be a joyous traveler when we live in the ruins of colonialism, capitalism and climate change?

For Shahnaz Habib, an Indian Muslim woman, travel has always been a complicated pleasure. Yet, journeys at home and abroad have profoundly shaped her life. In this inquiring and surprising debut, Habib traces a history of travel from pilgrimages to empires to safaris, taking on colonialist modes of thinking about travel and asking who gets to travel and who gets to write about it.

Threaded through the book are inviting and playful analyses of obvious and not-so-obvious travel artifacts: passports, carousels, bougainvilleas, guidebooks, expressways, the idea of wanderlust. 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.