Erica Durante’s "Air Travel Fiction and Film: Cloud People" (Palgrave Macmillan 2020) 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 explains the theories and narratives that constitute our current imaginary of air mobility. Erica Durante 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 transformed human society into "Cloud People." In its examination of 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 important gap in the study of globalization within literary and film studies.
Date
September 3, 2020
Air Travel Fiction and Film: Cloud People
In August 2020, Erica Durante wrote "Air Travel Fiction and Film: Cloud People," a piece exploring how present lifestyle patterns and infrastructure have evolved and how this is illustrated in our air travel practices.