Skip to main content

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

Tracing the power dynamics that underlie tourism, AIRPLANE MODE parses who gets to travel and who gets to write about the experience. All the while, Habib threads the historic but ever-evolving dynamics of travel into her personal history as a child on family vacations in India, an adult curious about the world, and an immigrant for whom round trips are an annual fact of life. Woven throughout the book are inviting and playful 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. As an immigrant whose loved ones live across continents, Habib takes a deeply curious and joyful look at a troubled and beloved activity.