Conclusion

The conclusion reflects on the connection between airline travel and empire, race and racism, and the politics of knowledge. It takes stock of how racial segregation and the ordinary sky came together in the making of the commercial aviation industry. More specifically, it looks at the complex relationship between air route formation, imperial projects, and racial hierarchies. It hones in on the systematic exclusion of the colonial Caribbean from the development of global air networks and the narration of early airline history. It ends by considering how fragments, love, imagination, and affect, as well as a willingness to embrace uncertainty, provide for a more nuanced understanding of the dimensions of power that inform everyday airline travel.

Wake

There are very few photographs of her from then. She grew up in a tiny place, not a small one like the others.1 Her island is set apart, far from the mainland, which is an island too. In one of the photographs, she stands, young and still, hand on her hip, without a smile, in front of a commuter plane. It was there because it had crashed. She was there because it was something different: 3 x 3-inches, black and white....

Planes

Chapter 4 concentrates on how people learned to be in and live with ordinary flight through the everyday sky. Focused on air passage itself, it explores how a flying culture took hold and examines the affective dimensions of airline travel. Analyzing air travel stories, it chronicles what first-generation fliers did and felt inside early airline cabins. The vertical distance between the airplane and the ground profoundly altered the ways air passengers related to colonial landscapes and lives beneath them. The second part of the chapter illuminates how black people on the ground reacted to white people in the sky, and vice versa. It connects the emergence of everyday air travel practices to the upward expansion of empire. The last part of the chapter brings the history of white flight and racial segregation to present-day discussions of aerial mobility and the varying experiences of frequent and infrequent fliers.

Uprising

The English author Virginia Woolf chronicled a woman’s first flight in “Flying over London,” an undated short piece that she most likely wrote in the late 1920s or 1930s.1 The airplane journey began. There were fifty to sixty airplanes grounded “like a flock of grasshoppers” in a shed, a Moth plane among them. The propeller engine started and the pilot made the plane “roar.” The Moth took off, sped-up, and the air travelers ascended....

Groundwork

The first chapter establishes the overarching argument of the book. It explains why a sustained study of race in the advent of airborne mobility is important when trying to understand how airline travel helped to reshape the composition and experience of empire. Airline travel ushered in new ways to imagine, construct, and inhabit time and space. Yet, even as flight altered the conceptual and physical terrains of empire, this nascent technology remained entwined in the racialist ideas and practices that had grounded earlier imperial projects. Advocating for transdisciplinarity, the chapter also discusses how the disciplines of history and anthropology, as well as aviation and diaspora studies, have considered the relationship between race, airspace, and flight. It raises questions about the lack of attention given to the ways in which people and places in, as well as ideas about, the Caribbean helped to establish contemporary systems of global mobility. It explains why fragments, love, and the act of sensing are crucial for perceiving and understanding how air travel reshaped the geometry of empire and transformed networks of power.

Descent

Chapter 6 focuses on the transition from Imperial Airways to the British Overseas Airways Corporation in the late 1930s. Government officials feared that Imperial Airways as the chosen instrument of the state had advanced not the nation but the empire. A contentious and paradoxical claim about British identity, a fierce debate over the limits of a government-backed airline erupted in parliament. Occasionally, remarks about the lack of British air services in the Caribbean and broader Atlantic were made in the context of creating a nationalized airline. A close reading of the parliamentary record not only reveals but also recasts brief references to the region as vital colonial disruptions challenging the vision of nationhood Britain had imagined for itself.

Limit

The men are on the sea somewhere near Dominica. They are aboard Flight, which is a schooner in Derek Walcott’s “The Schooner Flight.” A jet zips loudly over their heads, “opening a curtain into the past.” One says to the other, “One day go be planes only, no more boat.” The other says to him, “Vince, God ain’t make nigger to fly through the air.” They move on....

Lines

In 1949, the famous British graphic design artist, Abram Games, created a poster for the state-owned airline that succeeded Imperial Airways at the start of the decade: BOAC. The poster showcases the new Stratocruiser service between London and New York. The design on the poster is of the horizon on the ocean, as seen from the sky. The central image is a four-page foldout map that is opening up and spreading out, or folding up and closing in. Three places are shown on the map. The United Kingdom is cut out of the center of the right-hand page, and the United States out of the left-hand one. The word “Atlantic Ocean” is spread across the middle pages, as are grid lines, a compass, and the Equator. There are no continents or islands. The right and left pages are red, blue, and white, which are the national colors of both countries. The middle pages are white and black, except for the Equator, which is notably a thin red and blue line....

Oversees

There are two white couples, man and woman, on a beach. They are standing in the water and sitting on the sand pointing at the airplane flying above and across them. The plane is high enough to fly; it is low enough to cast its shadow and to throw shade....

Speedbird

The operational call sign for British Airways, Speedbird, was also the iconic company logo of Imperial Airways. Theyre Lee-Elliott, a noted English artist with a distinctly modernist style, created Speedbird for the airline in 1932. The design was simple: an acute angle with sharp, thin, and straight lines that met in a point, like a chevron. The meaning was straightforward. The symbol stood for the swiftness of flight. Its pointy sleek shape helped Speedbird to look like the common swift, a bird reputed to be among the fastest birds in level flight. Its name called to mind quickness and mastery over nature, which helped to denote power and technological modernity. Speedbird signaled supremacy in the sky....