Review: Airplane Mode by Shahnaz Habib

This is a fun little collection of "braided" essays, weaving together history, social commentary, and the author’s own travel experiences. The author is a Muslim Indian woman who immigrated to the United States. She brings a fresh perspective to the discourse around travel, which, due to its costs and visa privileges, tends to be the domain of the white, wealthy denizens of just a select few countries.

Based only on the title, I probably would not have picked up this book: "an irreverent history" sounds like the sort of subtitle that would belong on some reddit-humoured drek. Instead, by "irreverent," I have to imagine the editor has in mind the author’s questioning of the West’s self-mythologizing, such as her critique of Marco Polo:

But if we set aside the question of whether or not Marco Polo was the first European to reach China, there is a more interesting question: 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. But the first European to reach China and the first European to reach India by sea and the first European to reach the Americas? Their names are household names, not because this is a major achievement, but because of the European investment in the idea of the first European to reach these “other” places.

Or her analysis of "authenticity":

Pretty much every guidebook I have read for any Third World country will describe it as a tapestry of cultures or a colorful mix of ancient and modern. If more than half the world is a mix of ancient and modern, perhaps then we should accept that this particular hybridity is the norm, while the vapid industrial modernity of a Western suburb is the exception. If this constant and complex mixing of cultures is the real world, then why do guidebooks still lead us on wild-goose chases for the “authentic”? No one is as anxious about authenticity as a white tourist who rightly suspects that the world has been watered down for their benefit. But authenticity is a moving target; it has a talent for confounding the search. Perhaps the solution then is to understand and embrace the multiple hybrid shapes and forms authenticities can take within the limitations of the tourism project.

It is a critique that I find timely and essential in such an unequal world, where travel seems increasingly to become the point of life and the mode of self-actualization for the upper middle class of the West. 

The author interprets "travel" broadly, with each chapter standing alone as an essay on a particular angle. She covers topics ranging from travel guides, to visa privilege, to religious pilgrimage, to just riding public transit within one’s own city. She includes fascinating and relevant parts of history and literature in her accounts, however the balance leans strongly personal. Those readers uninterested in memoir and introspection would be advised to find a different book.

The author left me with one nagging question. As she points out, travel is something enjoyed primarily by a privileged few, and has destructive effects on the environment and on the culture and economies of touristy areas, and yet on the other hand, travel also provides the opportunity to broaden one’s understanding of the world and the richness of human culture and society. For the lucky traveller who is able to partake in expanding her horizons through travel, what is she to do but wring her hands over the negative externalities. Here, the author has not much to say, though like me, I imagine she also dreams of a world in which everyone can travel, at least occasionally.

Review: 2666 by Roberto Bolaño

What to say about Roberto Bolaño's wild, wild, 1100-page journey of a novel? Did I find the plot gripping, its unending pages flying by? No. But did I find the characters emotionally resonant, such that aspects of the human experience were revealed or made clear to me? Also no. But did I delight in the prose, marveling at the ingenuity of the mind to have fashioned words together in such an evocative way? Once more, no.

But I did really enjoy this book for the unique way it developed its themes. The book is structured as five very different (almost) standalone novels. No single story makes a strong statement about a particular topic, but by touching on a given idea from a variety of angles, the theme comes into focus.

One such example is the idea of how easy it is to escape the horrors of the world and remain in one’s comfortable intellectual community. The first of the five volumes revolves around a tight-knit community of scholars who have devoted their lives to the study and translation of the novels by a mysterious German writer, Archimboldi. As these characters unravel their love triangles and academic tensions, we hear the briefest murmurings of some tragic story in a small town in Mexico. In a few scenes, there are moments of shocking racism and violence, but ultimately these conflicts barely matter. Questions of the heart and intellectual musings occupy the characters. In the second volume, we see more of the unrest and violence in Latin America, and we are introduced to a troubled, drifting woman, but through the eyes of a busy academic. Matters of violence and sexism and racism affect him insofar as they affect the people he loves. When it comes to broad issues affecting humanity, Professor Amalfatino’s more memorable reflections revolve around literature and intellectual culture. The third volume brings us closer still: through the eyes of a reporter, we learn about the startlingly frequent and brutal murders of women in the town of Santa Teresa. But Oscar Fate’s beat is African American affairs and his editor won’t allow him to expense an investigation into issues that affect Latinas. Three different explorations of how sites of knowledge production avoid systemic issues of violence and sexism. The fourth volume hits us over the head with the events in Santa Teresa, striking a format somewhere between a police blotter and a novel. The discovery of each woman’s body is described in detail, as is the largely fruitless investigation into their murder. The author shows us how poverty, misogyny, and American imperialism contribute to these deaths, and hinder their investigation. “No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them,” a character reflects.

Most of these mysteries go unsolved; the author seems to be cautioning us that mysteries in life do not typically have a climactic, satisfying conclusion. Despite Volume 4 resembling a police intrigue more than any other genre, we never find out who murdered all the women in Santa Teresa. Most likely it was many killers. Many killers, and broader socioeconomic problems. Volume 1 sets up the mystery of who Archimboldi really is, but ends without providing any answers — neither to the reader, nor to the scholars desperate to meet him. In Volume 5, the reader learns just about all there is to know about the life of Archimboldi. He is ultimately not a particularly interesting man (notwithstanding his quiet assassination of a bureaucratic Nazi). Nor is he a particularly compelling character, remaining always a little emotionally distant from the reader. Would the scholars that devoted their lives to dissecting his every written word find satisfaction in finally getting to meet him? 

It is a pessimistic novel. Or perhaps that diagnosis goes too far? The author shows us that real peace and happiness can be found in love. But the novel is broadly sorrowful about the state of society and we see few glints of hope for transcending it. Vulgarity and violence (particularly against women) — permeate the novel: the pummeling of the taxi driver in the first volume; the woman pushed into the ravine to her death by her own husband in the fifth volume; the spectator sport of fighting that drives the plot of the third volume; the systematic slaughter of Jews recounted by the unrepentant bureaucrat in Volume 5; and of course the litany of murders of the fourth volume. The refrain "she had been anally and vaginally raped" is repeated so often that I found myself anticipating the blow of hearing it every time another body is found. 

It is a very self-conscious and self-referential work. Bolaño’s characters discuss literature and art, and much of the commentary applies to the novel they appear in ("The style was strange. The writing was clear and sometimes even transparent, but the way the stories followed one after another didn’t lead anywhere."). Bolaño wrote this novel seeing his own death approaching on the horizon, and there are moments where he appears to reflect on his own place in the literary canon:

He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pécuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.

What is that "something that terrifies us all" that Bolaño saw himself as struggling with, in this imperfect, torrential work? It’s a question the book rewards with many answers. Contemplating what these might be, long after you’ve put down the book, is what makes this novel enjoyable.

Review: Capitalism: A Ghost Story by Arundhati Roy

This is a lively and approachable essay collection for introducing the reader to anti-capitalist discourse in modern India. The opening essay, which lends the work its title, is an evergreen socioeconomic analysis of India: how has capitalist production dispossessed the workers? How do Western imperialism and homegrown monopolies shape the laws and relations of production? How do NGOs support this exploitation, despite their lofty rhetoric? And how does gendered and caste exploitation figure into all of this? It's a great read, and I recommend it as a stand-alone piece.

The remaining essays are much shorter, and focus on hot issues of the 2010s: the increasing militarized policing of Kashmir, the Jan Lokpal Bill, and the clandestine capital punishment of Mohammad Afzal, for example. I was unfamiliar with these events, and the discourse around them, and took the opportunity to learn more about India's recent history. Roy seems to cut through the murkiness around these social issues with clarity, highlighting power relationships and financial ties between capitalist firms and the media companies that misleadingly report on these events, and the role of US imperialism and the military industrial complex in taking advantage of these fracture points. Given the temporal and geographical distance between me and this subject matter, however, these are less relevant to my context, and their anthologization is not more than the sum of the parts.

Review: Canada in the World by Tyler Shipley

Canada crafts a narrative about itself as peace-keeping nation, beloved around the world as a friendly force for good. Sure, Canada will reluctantly acknowledge a few stains on its reputation — activism around the residential school system and genocide of the First Nations has grown too loud to ignore. But these historical beats are seen as blemishes, unconnected to Canada’s broader national identity.

In Canada In The World, Tyler Shipley corrects this narrative, starting first with early settler relationships with First Nations to show the through-line between Canada’s settler colonial origins and its continued colonial exploitation domestically and abroad. Shipley emphasizes large structural forces like capitalism, industrialization, and material geopolitical interests, over individual personalities and cultural clashes. With this method, he builds a cohesive narrative that covers several centuries of history in just 500-odd pages. Shipley often takes explicit aim at Canada’s nation-building mainstays like Canada Heritage Minutes and grade 10 history texts, and weaves in familiar media and contemporary history and the occasional personal anecdote. He draws from a vast set of secondary and tertiary texts, summarizing their theses and contextualizing them into his overarching narrative. The result is a compelling, approachable text that should be, for now, the definitive introductory leftist text on Canadian international political history, with a bibliography that lends itself well to further study.

The book is strongest in its first half, which covers Canada’s settler colonial origins up through its tepid opposition to fascism in the mid-twentieth century. The latter half drags somewhat: Canada has been very active in the world during the so-called Cold War and the periods that followed it, supporting oppressive dictators (e.g. Chile) and overthrowing democratic socialist governments (e.g. Ecuador) with the goal of furthering its mining interests and aiding US imperialism. Shipley does an admirable job at trying to summarize the requisite history of dozens of nations to understand Canada’s role in these conflicts and connect them to the unifying theme of his book, but the goal of a comprehensive survey of such activities inevitably results in episodic vignettes packed with names and dates. Still the book compares favorably with Yves Engler’s Canada’s Long Fight Against Democracy (one wonders why Engler bothered at all; he draws from Shipley’s book as a source to create a fully inferior and redundant work), and would pair well with books like Vijay Prashad’s Washington Bullets and Vincent Bevins’ Jakarta Method, which provide more structure into the mechanisms of western foreign intervention.

It is too early to say how well the book will hold up since it was published in 2020. However, the relationship between Israel and Palestine has sharpened in the intervening years and Shipley staked out a position that would have been quite bold just five years ago, but has increasingly been adopted since. His analysis of China will likely age more poorly: he has nothing positive to say about modern day China, despite its lifting of a billion people from poverty and its emphasis on mass education, while praising similar poverty alleviation efforts when they occur in Latin America. Still, it is a fantastic corrective to the mythology of Canada.

Review: Left of Karl Marx by Carole Boyce Davies

Sometimes I wonder what compels someone to write a book. This one seemed like it was written out of a genuine and deep admiration for Claudia Jones, and a desire to impart that joy with other academics. 

For all the author’s high regard for Claudia Jones, the author does not seem to be writing for the next Claudia Jones (there is an interesting aside in the Introduction where the author justifies her use of non-academic (communist!) sources, such as Jones herself). The book is missing a sense of urgency (Jones certainly considered her writing to be of pressing importance) and of scale — it is nearly claustrophobically focused on Jones, failing to ground her writing in the thinking of her time or to much extent explore her influence on the writers and political movements that came after her. 

I’m not convinced that the author really even understands Jones in her context. For example, in Jones’ famous 1950 International Women’s Day speech, Jones affirms solidarity with people facing all types of oppression, linking their struggles with the socialist movement. This, the author claims, is something “more radical than communism”, despite it aligning fully with Lenin’s 1902 work, What Is to Be Done?, a work Jones, as a self-identified Leninist, would have read but that the author seems unaware of. (Relatedly, the title of the book is an allusion to the location of Jones’ gravestone relative to that of Marx, and not a political statement the author argues effectively.) When we come to Jones’ well-documented beliefs with which the author particularly disagrees—Jones’ alignment with the CPUSA’s positions in the 1950s, for example—the author insists this smart, well-read, well-traveled woman has been naively deceived. 

Yet for all the minute focus on Jones, it isn’t even an exhaustive one-stop-shop for understanding her experience as a Black socialist woman. Her exclusion from the CPGB due to racial prejudices is briefly mentioned and the reader is pointed towards a work where some other scholar has elaborated it. Academic convention prevents you from stepping on other people’s toes, I suppose. Someone with fewer constraints should write a book on this very deserving thinker.

As a stand-alone chapter to see if you will enjoy the book’s approach to Jones’s writing, I suggest Chapter 4 (“Deportation: The Other Politics of Diaspora”).