Airplane Mode

Starred review from October 16, 2023
Translator Habib examines global travel and the inequalities that underpin it in her trenchant debut. Mixing memoir and history, she recalls how her own trips (and challenges with an expiring student visa) made her realize “how intrepid you are as a traveler depends, at least partly, on how entitled you feel to travel.” For example, she contrasts a white friend’s “easy charm with strangers” and “ability to condense entire countries into crisp little sentences,” with the way “Brown people... did not fit the stereotype of the tourist. We were supposed to be the local color.” From there, Habib goes on to describe passport discrimination (both globally and within “Third World” countries) as “akin to a caste system with multiple stratas” and delve into the fascinating 19th-century roots of modern guidebooks. Elsewhere, she traces the often-invisible influences on the desire to travel, noting, for example, that a Thai government program encouraged the proliferation of Thai restaurants worldwide on the “astute calculation” that their dishes would inspire tourism. (Habib realized firsthand just how well that bet paid off when she found herself in a Thai eatery while abroad in Barcelona: “The epiphany was that I was a cliché..... How bracing it is to catch a glimpse of the software that is running me and hundreds of thousands of others... beneath the surface of our wanderlust.”) With a perceptive eye and in fluid, intimate prose, Habib nimbly demonstrates how “the more we dig into the history of modern tourism, the more the pickax hits the underground cable connection with colonialism.” Jet-setters will be captivated and challenged.