Book Review :: Airplane Mode by Shahnaz Habib
Review by Kevin Brown
Shahnaz Habib’s subtitle—An Irreverent History of Travel—is an apt description of her book, as she is, indeed, critical of what most people believe about travel and travel writing. For example, her opening chapter interrogates how guidebooks shape our views not only of where to go, but what to notice when we’re in those places, often leaving out the colonizing empires that lay behind those sites.
She discusses “passport privilege” in her second chapter, contrasting her experience trying to travel on an Indian passport with her husband, who has the much more desirable blue U.S. passport. She goes beyond that idea, though, to explore how passports began as a way of limiting travel, making it clear who gets in and who doesn’t.
In other chapters, she discusses railway systems and how the government and companies often took the land for the lines from Indigenous people groups, ignoring the treaties in the name of progress and tourism. She also explores nature and the outdoors, especially how many people groups—especially people of color—have a lack of access to those spaces.
Habib draws on her family and her hometown to examine why some towns begin to cater to tourists, while others, such as where her family moved, do not, as well as why some people love to travel, while others—like her father—do not. Rather than creating a clear dichotomy, though, she reminds readers that her father traveled through news and books, becoming more aware of the wider world than others who had visited countries across the globe.
Shahnaz Habib doesn’t merely want readers to question the benefits of tourism, as she’s a tourist herself, she admits. Instead, she wants to help them see behind the scenes of the entire idea of tourism, recognizing the people and cultures pushed to the margins, mainly so people with more coveted passports can believe they understand a world they haven’t yet begun to see.
Airplane Mode by Shahnaz Habib. Catapult, December 2024.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrite
