The passport - if you can get one - gives freedom, but it also means state surveillance. This is one of the many passport paradoxes observed by author Patrick Bixby, in an account that ranges from indigenous passports to literary references to passport 'rankings'. 

Guest: Patrick Bixby, Professor of English at Arizona State University

Author of ‘License to Travel: A Cultural History of th Passport’ (University of California Press) 

This story originally aired on 18 July 2024.