Abstract
License to Travel is a charmingly written study of the cultural side of “the passport nuisance.” On the basis of secondary sources, it surveys the history of travel documents from classical times to the present, adducing evidence of passport controls and their vicissitudes from the Akkadians and Cicero to Ai Weiwei and Sarah Ahmed.
Bixby addresses all of the key features of passports and makes clear that these have not always come in a single package. Across the centuries, devices vouchsafing a right to travel have taken a variety of forms from cuneiform tablets to folded papers to smartphones. They invariably performed one or more of three functions. First, they sought to identify their bearers. Until the advent of photography, this function was performed by a description of the physical features of the person in question. Today, electronic means may be deployed to achieve greater effect.
Next, passports may serve a facilitative function. When this was their purpose, a potentate would issue them with some version of the language found in the contemporary U.S. passport: “The Secretary of State of the United States of America requests all whom it may concern to permit the citizen/national of the United States named herein to pass without delay or hindrance and in case of need to give all lawful aid and protection.” Words such as these reminded the reader that the potentate's powers extended beyond his or her domains, at least insofar as they were respected. Documents serving this function might seek to smooth trade, diplomacy, or other border-crossing activities.
Third, passports might be used to restrict rather than enhance mobility. Slaves and serfs needed them if they left their plantations. From the other direction, especially by the time of the First World War, people needed passports to enter a country not their own. This is the “the passport as we know it,” as Bixby phrases it. In other words, our world is mainly concerned about the problem of regulating ingress; other than in wartime, the world it replaced tended to be more concerned about egress. This change of concern had to do with a shift in the responsibilities of states in approximately the mid-nineteenth century: from having been concerned mainly about not losing labor power, states acquired a concern about unemployment and making sure their “own” people had enough work and income.
Bixby handles these transformations deftly. He also calls our attention to other important historical changes. We are reminded that, until recently, married women and children were typically listed on the passport together with the husband or father. Women were often not allowed to travel on their own without the permission of the husband. Reading these stories reminds one why some second-wave feminists regarded themselves unhappily as men's property.
A good deal of the strictly “cultural” side of Bixby's account involves the ways in which prominent cultural figures had their lives upset or upended by passport difficulties. Many will know that the U.S. Government took away the passport of world-famous singer, actor, and political activist Paul Robeson, confining him to the United States for a decade when he might have been out promoting human rights and racial equality. They may be less aware that Yasiin Bey (the performer formerly known as Mos Def) tried to use a “World Passport” when he moved to South Africa in 2013. This was one of many examples of people trying to defeat or delegitimize the passport nuisance. Despite Bey's fame, the South Africans did not share his vision of a passportless world and he was denied the right to stay in the country.
This episode points to perhaps the most striking feature of the book–namely, the long historical arc it traces from states’ incapacity through their stringency to their delegitimization. We begin in ancient Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome, where early ideas about states and citizenship were tested out; passports soon became part of the picture. It took millenniums, however, for states to develop the will and the ability to enforce passport restrictions, even in a minimal way. It wasn’t really until World War I and the apotheosis of the national idea that passports became a ubiquitous part of our world (at least that of those who travel “abroad”). But the Second World War brought nationalism and racism into very ill repute, and people have been trying to dismantle the passport nuisance ever since.
The result was growing skepticism about the “goodness” of states and, with it, efforts to move toward a passportless world of which all are members. But this would also be a world without states, or at least without states with obligations to their citizens. I learned from the book that Slavoj Zizek is involved in the most intriguing effort of which I am aware to square the circle of creating states “without a nation” and “without territory” (p. 166), and hence without passports. It is not easy to imagine how this can work, but Zizek's endeavor is as far as it seems possible to go.
At the risk of being self-serving, I would say that License to Travel offers an excellent companion (or alternative) to The Invention of the Passport (Torpey 2018), which focuses on the political and legal side of the phenomenon. For a general reader or an undergraduate classroom, in any case, License to Travel would be an appealing, accessible, and enlightening choice of reading on this subject.