Professor Patrick Bixby discusses the complexity of passports, from freedom to surveillance. Topics cover indigenous passports, literary references, and rankings. The conversation explores passport history, personal tales, international relations, and surveillance. It also touches on contemporary issues like race, citizenship, and challenges for marginalized communities in obtaining travel documents.
Passports represent both freedom and state surveillance, highlighting paradoxes in passport power.
Passports are symbolic of personal identity, political allegiance, and global inequalities, shaping individuals' mobility and privilege.
Deep dives
Evolution of Passports through History
Passports have evolved over centuries from the days of the Old Testament's descriptions of travel permits to the mid-14th BCE's Amarna tablets, the precursor to modern passports. They tell personal stories of travelers and reflect grand narratives of nation-states and international relations. The shift to digital marks for tracking movements has altered the traditional passport experience by removing physical stamps and creating a more automated process.
Importance of Passports in History and Literature
Passports have played crucial roles in historical events, like aiding Jewish individuals to escape the Holocaust during World War II. In literature, passports serve as essential plot devices, as seen in works like 'Farewell to Arms.' They symbolize freedom, escape, and surveillance, reflecting the life and death stakes involved in travel during tumultuous times.
Global Mobility and Passport Privilege
Passport rankings reflect a country's wealth, stability, and international relationships, determining the freedom of its holders. Investment passports offer mobility to those with restricted access, emphasizing the privilege associated with passport power. Passports are not just travel documents but symbols of personal identity, political allegiance, and global inequalities.
The passport - if you can get one - gives freedom, but it also means state surveillance. This is one of the many passport paradoxes observed by author Patrick Bixby, in an account that ranges from indigenous passports to literary references to passport 'rankings'.
Guest: Patrick Bixby, Professor of English at Arizona State University
Author of ‘License to Travel: A Cultural History of th Passport’ (University of California Press)
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