Choreographing the Airport: Field Notes from the Transit Spaces of Global Mobility by Justine Shih Pearson (review)

Choreographing the Airport stages an ethnography of movement. Centered on the international airport as a hub for the experience and constitution of global cosmopolitan culture, this book draws together and interweaves insights and perspectives from mobility and cultural studies, cultural theory, and dance to outline an original and thought-provoking kinesthetic model for reading the affective impact of in-between space. The book opens anecdotally, with a prologue in which the author details the motion sickness she experienced as a child in transit between the US and Australia. The vertigo is not only to do with movement, but with the creation of a dizzying series of selves and senses of self, all being spun out of motion and relocation. The physical, material situation — Australia itself — becomes an in-between space, as though the contradictions and tensions of an identity forged in transit spaces cannot be contained in a solid and stable place; as though the materiality of place is itself brought into question by the ways in which we move through it, reconfiguring both it and ourselves as we do so.

The most significant theoretical connection is perhaps of the kinesthetics of airport space and the question of embodied experience, understood through the practice and articulation of dance. Analysis is interwoven with the author’s field notes — short accounts of experiences any international traveler will recognize — and works through a series of well-argued and persuasive chapters to examine the ways in which spatial organization and practice meet transiting bodies and situated selves.

The chapters are oriented around this theme and work to develop it. The first establishes the central methodologies of the book, offering a fluid and agile analysis of contemporary cosmopolitanism, and bringing it into dialogue with concepts of choreography and dance. A key point of departure is Marc Augé’s “twenty-year-old binary” (7) of places and non-places, drawn from his 1995 Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Justine Shih Pearson makes clear that this binary must be revisited, extended, and examined, to reveal a much more nuanced and complex set of negotiations being staged in transit spaces. Not least, this strategy encompasses the possibility that the “space-between” is not a line between this or that, but a constant zone of indeterminacy, in which all the provisionalities of modern political self-hood can find resonance, become visible, and make themselves available for scrutiny. The book extends this reading through engagement with the work of Edward Soja and Homi Bhabha, as they articulate the concept and potentiality of “thirdspace,” before engaging with the experience of embodied transit, in which the body performs and absorbs the dislocations that the airport produces. These displacements and disassociations, whether experienced as the deficiencies of temporal and spatial awareness in jetlag or in the strange interiority of decontextualized luxury shopping malls, produce, for Shih Pearson, an odd sense of security. The implication is that the multiple in-betweennesses of our own everyday subjective experience cannot help but find resonance in the kinesthetic spatiality of transit.

Chapter 4, “Performing Self at the Border,” focuses on the consequences of all this, as the body itself is produced as a transitional object: context-dependent, subject to investigation, and ontologically determined by instabilities of place. Finally, the book returns explicitly to the political, re-imagined at the scale of the body: how we move, who is permitted to move, the performances that are demanded and elicited in the face of barriers, boundaries, customs, and passport control. Shih Pearson neatly reconnects the transit spaces of the international cosmopolitan traveler with the resurgent “national” apparatuses of security theatre at the border, and makes the astute observation that so often these reemphasized “national” boundaries are being staffed and policed by first-, second-, and third-generation migrants.

This is an articulate, readable, rigorous, and friendly book, offering innovative perspectives on what...