This surprising global history of an indispensable document reveals how the passport has shaped art, thought, and human experience while helping to define the modern world.
Narrow escapes and new starts, tearful departures and hopeful arrivals, unwanted scrutiny in the backrooms of officialdom: some of our most memorable experiences involve a passport. In License to Travel, Patrick Bixby examines the passports of artists and intellectuals, ancient messengers and modern migrants to reveal how these seemingly humble documents implicate us in larger narratives about identity, mobility, citizenship, and state authority.
This concise cultural history takes the reader on a captivating journey from pharaonic Egypt and Han-dynasty China to the passport controls and crowded refugee camps of today. Along the way, the book connects intimate stories of vulnerability and desire with vivid examples drawn from world cinema, literature, art, philosophy, and politics, highlighting the control that travel documents have over our bodies as we move around the globe. With unexpected discoveries at every turn, License to Travel exposes the passport as both an instrument of personal freedom and a tool of government surveillance powerful enough to define our very humanity.
License to Travel A Cultural History of the Passport
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About the Book
Reviews
"Patrick Bixby is a gifted storyteller. License to Travel provides a wide-ranging history of the passport, including a systematic survey of its invention, deployment, and literary repercussions, as well as a series of considerations on contemporary issues facing travel, globalization, and immigration. Bixby has gathered spectacular anecdotes that are not limited to British and American culture, but also engage with German, Russian, Chinese, and French examples, which are all very well chosen and discussed in depth."—Jean-Michel Rabaté, Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania"This book makes a delightful, thorough, and sprightly contribution to the fields of cultural studies, mobility studies, and travel philosophy. By bringing together texts across different fields and by seizing the timeliness of the current upheaval of travel during the Covid-19 pandemic, Bixby's book makes for an innovative and informative read around the charged topics of citizenship, belonging, identity, and borders. Employing an easy-to-follow voice and an invitingly open, inquisitive style, License to Travel draws readers into the voyages, conundrums, and passages of an eclectic array of characters and contexts."—Christopher Schaberg, author of Grounded: Perpetual Flight . . . and Then the Pandemic
"Bixby offers us a luminous cross-cultural history of the passport, that precious object that stands at the intersection of the personal and the political. This is an important book for anyone interested in histories of mobility and the politics of border crossing from ancient times to the present."—Deepika Bahri, author of Postcolonial Biology: Psyche and Flesh after Empire
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: "The Most Precious Book I Possess"
Part One: A Prehistory of the Passport as We Know It
1 • Ancient Bodies, Ancient Citizens
2 • Great Sovereigns, Grand Tourists
3 • Modern Bodies, Modern Citizens
Part Two: The Advent of the Passport as We Know It
4 • Modernists and Militants
Part Three: The Passport as We Know It
5 • Expelled and Stateless
6 • Migrants and Marxists
7 • Alien and Indigenous
Epilogue: Good Passports Bad Passports
Notes
Index