Watson Events

Now that air travel has finally resumed at its usual pace after the pandemic disruption and that we embrace our condition of passengers and "Cloud People" again, the Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies is pleased to present the launch of Professor Erica Durante’s book, Air Travel Fiction and Film: Cloud People (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

Join us for a discussion with Stuart Burrows, Professor of English at Brown University; Aníbal González, Professor of Spanish at Yale University; Felipe Martínez Pinzón, Professor of Hispanic Studies at Brown University, and Christopher Schaberg, Dorothy Harrell Brown Distinguished Professor of English, Loyola University, New Orleans.

Air Travel Fiction and Film: Cloud People explores how, over the past four decades, fiction and film have transformed our perceptions and representations of contemporary air travel. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, the book provides a comprehensive analysis of a wide range of international cultural productions and elucidates the paradigms and narratives that constitute our current imagination of air mobility. The book advances the hypothesis that fiction and film have converted the Airworld—the world of airplanes and airport infrastructures—into a pivotal anthropological place that is endowed with social significance and identity, suggesting that the assimilation of the sky into our cultural imaginary and lifestyle has metamorphosed human society into “Cloud People.” In examining the representations of air travel as an epicenter of today’s world, the book not only illustrates a novel perspective on contemporary fiction but fills an essential gap in the study of globalization within literary and film studies.

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Co-sponsored by American Studies, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Comparative Literature, Hispanic Studies & Modern Culture and Media