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Shahnaz Habib

Biography

Shahnaz Habib

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. She also consults for the United Nations. AIRPLANE MODE is her first book.

Shahnaz Habib

Books by Shahnaz Habib

Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel
by Shahnaz Habib - Cultural Studies, Essays, History, Nonfiction, Travel

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, AIRPLANE MODE parses who gets to travel and who gets to write about the experience. Threaded through the book are 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.