Sometimes for fun, other times for work. To escape political persecution, famine or seek a better future. Cross border This is something that humanity has been doing since time immemorial, even when borders were not imaginary lines determined by a country, but simply geographical boundaries. But today, this border crossing requires the mediation of a small book: the passport.

“The most valuable book I own is my passport,” says the author, without a hint of irony Salman Rushdie in his book Get out of line. Because? When he was born, he only had an Indian passport, which allowed him to visit a number of countries. However, in his teens, when he received a British passport, the world suddenly opened up to him.

In the Permission to travel. History of passport culturemultifaceted American writer, university professor and professor Patrick Bixby examines in brilliant and accessible style the travel documents of musicians and intellectuals, ancient emissaries and modern migrants, to reveal how the booklet has shaped art, thought and human experience from pharaonic Egypt to the overcrowded refugee camps of the XXI century .

A passport, for the author, can be “a talisman for world travelers” and “a summary of life stories for privileged travelers,” but it is also lifeline “for desperate migrants”because “it has a strange power to determine exactly where we may go and where we may not go.”

A small book containing about thirty pages of thick paper, bound in a rough cardboard cover and embossed with the name of the country, a national symbol and said passport or its equivalent in another language. The color can be red, green, blue or black, depending on the country of issue, but it is always the same size so it is easy to manipulate, it complies with international standards established almost a century ago, and it always includes an information page showing the number, a photo of the owner and a series of personal data .

When the edges and corners are badly worn, when the pages are creased and stained, decorated with colorful entry stamps and coveted visas, the document becomes useless. talisman for world explorers and summarized the story of a life for him special tourist or for him desperate migrants. It has the strange power of determining exactly where we can go and where we cannot go.

A passport can hold out the promise of safe passage to a new life far from where we are. This can allow us to escape the dangers, restrictions, or ordinary things of our family environment; This can give us a quick path to the front lines or uncomfortable oversight in the back rooms of bureaucracy. You may give us permission to do so border crossings of all kinds – geographically, but also culturally, linguistically, economically and legally – to seek that which is impossible to obtain in our country, and then bring us back, safe and sound.

In the Get out of line (2002), Salman Rushdie stated without irony (his mother tongue as a global migrant and master storyteller) that “The most valuable book I own is my passport.”. Although he realizes that statements about everyday objects like that may seem hyperbolic, for him it is not an exaggeration. Yes, a passport has a practical function as an important travel document (don’t lose it); Yes, it can display photos that we don’t really like (just ignore them if you can); Yes, this can reassure us and give us a sense of satisfaction that they will do their job and pass the inspection of a border control officer (or, these days, an automated passport checkpoint).

But if we pay attention, passports begin to receive greater psychic investment, carry greater emotional weight, and in the process become “precious” objects of more than practical or material value. For Rushdie, this was largely due to the recognition that not all passport makers carried out their work easily and quietly. The novelist recounts vivid memories of his first passport, an Indian passport he carried in the sixties, whose pages show that its owner I was only able to visit a very small list of countries.

When he received a British passport as a teenager, he felt as if the world had suddenly opened up to him, and soon the little book took him far from home, to an education at Cambridge and the literary circles of London. It is also the book that most directly and succinctly tells the story of the bifurcated Anglo-Indian identity. It was the only book that accompanied the author’s travels to all corners of the world. It was a book that, by demanding freedom of movement for its owner, expressed a great deal of promise about what might happen in his life.

A passport is therefore the most personal of objects, but, as Rushdie’s story shows, this little book only has value in itself when set against the backdrop of the wider history of the nation and empire. The fact that Rushdie had an Indian passport is because, a few months after his birth, in June 1947, India became independent from Britain and stopped using British Indian passports. Around the same time, the division of the subcontinent and the creation of the new nation of Pakistan imposed an international border between Rushdie and most of his family. They will soon need passports to be on both sides of the border.

But for decades, the global geopolitical order would not allow passport holders wide access to India’s new dominions, and even today other countries provide far fewer visa-free facilities to Indian citizens compared to most Western countries. .

It cannot be denied that passports are an object that is closely related to the emergence of nation-states and the development of international relations, therefore passports are always involved in regulating the conditions of citizenship, global migration and the state. asylum requests, national security and other related issues. It is an object that provides official identity to individuals and promotes the efforts of the State in a sense monitor and control the movements of certain communities and population.

This is the eternal paradox of passports: while they promise freedom and mobility, adventure and opportunity, escape and safe haven, they are also an important tool of government surveillance and state power, ostensibly guaranteeing national security and regulating traffic across national borders. border. In other words, it is an object that occupies the same place the encounter between the personal and the political.

This unique location gives passports, very small books, the ability to tell stories that few documents – perhaps no other documents – in historical archives have: they offer a true record of our movement, which is a personal reminiscence and, if nothing else, a travelogue, but always caught up in the currents of wider cultural and political history.

How did we get here? How did the world arrive at these universal requirements and what are the consequences if we cross geographical and cultural boundaries? What impact does a passport have on the emotions and imagination of the people who use it and, like it or not, is this determined by the passport? How do these documents influence our feelings about home and abroad, travel and migration, belonging and dispossession, citizenship and exclusion, national conflict and international cooperation? What can passports tell us about the uneasy intersection between the personal and the political throughout their long history?

These precious books, which we carry close to our vulnerable bodies as we cross borders, carry with them intimate stories about us that nonetheless attest to our place in a much larger narrative. They speak of the aspirations, uncertainties, and spiraling movements of long-rested individuals; they give material form to the rights and privileges, restrictions and pressures that guide these movements.

While our passport files and their predecessors can show where we come from, they also enable us see where we’re going, as the pace of international travel and global migration accelerates, this is forcing us to ask increasingly pressing questions about our place in the world. Investigate history of passport cultureTherefore, we need to consider something important about the promises of mobility, structures of feeling, and instruments of state power that influence us today, perhaps more strongly than ever. Well then, let’s set off and cross the border.