Changing Planes: Lines of Flight in Transnational Curriculum Inquiry

Ursula K. Le Guin’s collection of linked short stories, Changing Planes, offers a rhizomatic connection to Deleuze and Guattari’s figuration of the plane of immanence as well as to Zdebik’s ambiguous deployment of ‘plane’ in the passage quoted above. The premise of Changing Planes is outlined in the first story, ‘Sita Dulip’s Method’: The airport is not a prelude to travel, not a place of transition; it is a stop. One of the most intriguing stories in Changing Planes is ‘The Nna Mmoy Language’, in which people do not address each other by name but by ‘ever-varying phrases for a thousand social and emotional connections’. Although the Nna Mmoy themselves are pleasant, no interplanary visitors have yet succeeded in talking with them: ‘Though their monosyllabic language is melodious to the ear, the translatormat has so much trouble with it that it cannot be relied upon even for the simplest conversation’.