Abstract
Reviewed by: Gordon Pirie, University of Cape Town, South Africa
Chandra Bhimull writes vigorously about the “indelible violence” in airborne mobility and about the way racism has permeated the aviation industry. Her point of departure is immersion in archives about Caribbean aviation, and close readings of personal observations, experiences and narratives about flying to and from the black Atlantic.
There was and is, she argues, a systematised racial politics behind and in air passenger travel that goes beyond isolated acts of injustice and inhumanity. Some of these instances are recounted in little leader texts that introduce the four main sections of the book – the restraint and death of a deportee on a British Airways passenger aircraft outbound from London in 2010 is one such. The event echoes elements of diaspora from an earlier time.
The Section titles (“Opening Up”; “Directions”; “Air Craft” and “Trails”) and inventive subtitles (such as “Descent”, “Uprising”; “Wake” and “Planes”) tease the reader with their ambiguity and suggestiveness. Juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated events follows through tantalisingly: the British airline’s office building in Bridgetown, Barbados, opened the day after the island declared its independence from Britain on 30 November 1966; British author Virginia Woolf wrote about flying (having never herself flown) and co-owned the Press which published at roughly the same time the Trinidadian author, C.L.R. James’ pamphlet advocating political freedom for the British West Indies. Several airline marketing maps and posters are reproduced in Empire in the Air to further illustrate oddities and coincidences and, notably, the subtexts of racialism in British Trans-Atlantic aviation debates and pursuits.
Bhimull’s touching personal account of the racial “outing and othering” of grieving Caribbean migrants in New York City due to their inability to fly easily to a Caribbean island funeral also helps set the stage: erasure of the Caribbean from Empire air route development was part of super-power scheming and dealing. Elsewhere (Journal of Transport History, 33:2 (2012)) Bhimull has analysed the momentous and wilful demise of Caribbean Airways. Here she revisits the associated muddle over nation and Empire in aviation discourse and investigations in Britain. But her book works on a wider canvas with representations and experiences of flight. Her examination uncovers the deeply embedded and encoded structural racism in colonial and post-colonial aviation: racialised skies and racialised subjugation in flight. The Caribbean case shows how aviation and state power coalesced to help create a complex system of regulated but banal aerial mobility that included racial subordination. Some of this derived from the differently valued and differentially accessible ‘planes’ of new mobility: aerial and surface.
Bhimull’s inquiry is in the mould of anthrohistory. Its inter-disciplinarity refreshes and extends aviation history which, she observes, can easily succumb to an inbred (White and Western) myopia. Her book plays and imagines more loosely than convention would dictate. It revels in misfit ideas, fragments and gaps. It works with poetry and can be poetic. Its ethnographies peer deeply.
Empire in the Air “does things that may disturb”, Bhimull warns (p. 16). It does indeed. But the book is anchored in the solid ground of wide and careful reading, and histories of aviation and mobility are all the richer for the disturbance. One can but share her lament that intellectually disempowering forces in contemporary academia are pitted against “alternative” styles of research. Their dividend is immense. Alert and astute, Empire in the Air lifts us onto a new plane.