Performing Flight

"This book brings performance and flight together in conversation as a means to explore the ways in which human heavier-than-air aviation and space travel have been fundamentally connected to images, gestures, narrative tropes, and performative acts. Performance has shaped the enterprise of flight in public perception and consciousness and in many cases has guaranteed its success as modes of entertainment, travel, research, and warfare. From the early professional aerial entertainers known as barnstormers, whose name was drawn from the itinerant theatre troupes of the nineteenth century, to the emerging industry of space tourism, which now uses performative means to cement its importance as both manifest destiny and an escape route from a failed planet, performance and flight have been inextricably linked in ways that have heretofore been underexamined"--