Who travels, and where? Who feels entitled to travel, and safe when they do? Who is the observer, and who are the observed? Habib delves into the history of passports and the nature of travel today.

Quotes

In a new place, I am never adventurous; I am cautious....I want to be curious and intrepid; instead, I am confused and lonely. (5)

But what are we to do with the confusion and loneliness of traveling? (8)

Underlying [Francis Bacon's] assumption is the notion that he observer is superior to the observed. (11)

A Room with a View by E.M. Forster (14)

[Agatha Christie's character Joan Scudamore] is a good metaphor for the racialized white experience: how to deprive your soul by centering yourself constantly...Privilege is a stumbling block between the privileged person and the world. (26)

Is loneliness a way of feeling deeply present, of feeling the weight of the choices that have brought you to a particular moment, a particular place? (43)

....a separate term that differentiates citizenship-based discrimination from racism and xenophobia...passportism. (54)

...preventing mobility is the real ancestry of the modern passport. (61)

...the power of a passport to facilitate travel is a corollary to the power of the state to deny passports and prevent travel. (62)

It is a fundamental paradox of visa regimes that the poorer your nation is, the more you have to pay to obtain a visa, while the citizens of wealthy nations pay less or nothing at all. (72)

So much of travel can be about pretending....There are always good arguments for doing new things, and....I am now beginning to see the case for doing only the things you are genuinely curious about. (96)

Growing up, I was surrounded by the swirl of these ancient stories, and my head was the first melting pot I knew. (125)

History is often like a carousel, in which the same movements take place again and again, with different protagonists. (129)

Why is it an achievement to be the first European to reach China? Who is that an achievement for? We rarely hear about the first Asian to reach Europe or the first African to reach the Americas... (143)

Perhaps there was a brief moment there when we could have charted a different relationship to nature that might have saved our planet from the environmental blunders that were set in motion with the Industrial Revolution. (169)

Through its supposedly neutral pursuit of scientific knowledge, natural history managed to reinforce the authority of European surveillance and appropriation of resources. (171)

What if, instead of pretending to be an objective describer of foreign landscapes and peoples, the [travel] writer accepted the limitations of their subjectivity? What if the travel writer, instead of aiming for mastery and confidence, acknowledged that travel is a terribly disorienting experience? (175)

pseudiscovery (178)

Wonder emerges from a willingness to see the other not as something to be explained but as something that cannot be fully understood within the limitations of the traveler's subjectivity. (179)

By transforming themselves from merchants to occupiers, they created the conditions that divided the world into First World and Third World. (207)

wanderlust/insatiability (213)

Perhaps this is the underlying premise of luxury - to not see other people's needs. (215)

From Uluru to the Grand Canyon to Muthanga, the tourist walks freely through lands that Indigenous people have been evicted from. This is the superpower of tourism: it can masquerade as a public good while legitimizing land-grabbing. (242)

For a few moments in history, we had machines but they didn't have us. (225) ( )

Two stars due to the style it was written. Some of the stuff this book brought up, i knew, but I still learned plenty. The editor made a misleading choice in calling this irreverent. It's a serious memoir with a lot of things that I, a white person born in America, never considered. I hope this book is widely read and respected.. ( )