Scott Magelssen's Performing Flight: From the Barnstormers to Space Tourism was published mid-2020, just as the rapid spread of COVID-19 effectively shut down air travel. Other than 9/11, it is hard to imagine a greater contextual shift from the writing to reading of a book on flight, particularly one that locates “the enterprise of flight in public perception and consciousness” as the political and cultural space where the images, tropes, and performative acts of aviation and space travel are enacted, negotiated, and contested (5). Magelssen positions his book humbly, as six case studies that investigate the diverse ways that “the performative actions of the humans and machines” of aviation and discourses of flight have enacted multiple forms, cultural meanings, and political imaginaries (9). Although his case studies trace a chronology from the barnstorming daredevils of the early twentieth century to the space tourism of the early twenty-first, Magelssen does not seek to produce a full cultural history of flight. Rather, he focuses on three periodized performance modes: early aviation exhibition, the Cold War–era performance of pilots and astronauts, and the twenty-first-century performances of terrorism and tourism.

The first of these is explored through important archival research into the life of Bessie “Queen Bess” Coleman, an African American aviatrix who utilized her aviation skills, the celebrity she accrued from her performance in barnstorm exhibitions, and the discourses of both race and flight as “deliberate act[s] of racial transgression for political gain in agency” (24). This chapter is an important contribution that celebrates Coleman's work as both a singular actor and as one of the many forgotten African Americans who laid the cultural and political groundwork of the civil rights era.

The next chapters take on three different formulations that directly connect Cold War culture to the contemporary moment. In Chapter 2, the mass murder of the American bombing of Hiroshima is read not only as a performance in itself, but also as one that precipitated future performances, including a 1976 simulation piloted by Paul W. Tibbots Jr., “the real-life Enola Gay pilot” and commander, in which he reenacted his bombing run above an audience of forty thousand in Texas (41). The following chapter traces the performative style of the American pilot, a figure heroized in his American white maleness. In one of the most fascinating sections of the book, Magelssen details the ways in which the disembodied voice of the pilot through PA announcements on commercial airline flights is trained as “part of a repertoire of communicative practice . . . and with its own performative strategies” of calm mastery, and depends on the audibility of race, gender, and nationality (57). In Chapter 4, the pilot directly leads to the “invention of the American astronaut,” a “propagandistic” figure (73), whose “Chuck Yeager drawl” (157) was “almost exclusively performative” (73). The significance of this confabulation, Magelssen argues, is the historiographic impact of the Cold War astronaut's “performed look, physicality, gesture, posture, and persona” (87), as this image has consolidated the impression of American exceptionalism based in race, gender, and capitalism.

These chapters may even underrepresent the racial and gendered elements of such performative constructions. For instance, the appeal of the image of the pilot/astronaut is notably grounded in its intended (white) audience. However, Black audiences actively articulated alternative narratives of the cultural and political space of flight, as in media scholar Lynn Spigel's important work on the African American response to NASA in the 1960s, or jazz musician Sun Ra's alternative vision in his film and album Space Is the Place. Additionally, racial profiling—briefly addressed here—has shaped the experience of Black mobility long before 9/11, as extensively detailed by Black studies scholars and historians of slavery and the Jim Crow era. More recently, Rachel Hall's The Transparent Traveler and Simone Browne's Dark Matters (both 2015) have connected that history to contemporary forms of performative and theatrical surveillance of Black and brown travelers.

In the final two chapters, Magelssen shifts to the twenty-first century to address space tourism and 9/11. In the first of these, Magelssen himself takes flight, partaking in a $5,000 “Zero-G” experience “that offers paying customers the chance to play astronaut” by means of a “modified 727 jet” to produce the experience of “free-fall” (95). For all the sheer enjoyment that Magelssen takes in this experience, it leads him to realize that “millionaires who buy their way into space” are really “paving the way for an escape route . . . [from] global catastrophe” that will be available “only to the wealthiest” (107).

Magelssen anticipates the potential difficulties in framing the actions of the 9/11 hijackers as performance, which he describes as having “most daunted” him in his writing (15). His reticence is palpable as he recoils from treating the “pilot-hijackers’ performance” (115) as a virtuosic display of skill. To do so would be “impossible, not to mention tasteless and disrespectful,” even though the hijackers’ “extraordinary speed and efficiency” remains “undeniably notable” (115). Although Magelssen situates himself as one of “relatively few performance scholars” to consider the 9/11 attacks in performance terms (139), there are many more than he accounts for, including Mike Sell and James Harding, who have robustly engaged with Richard Schechner's and Karlheinz Stockhausen's framings of terrorist acts as works of art.

This hesitancy ultimately undermines the political significance of Magelssen's argument. The distasteful fact of the matter is that an aesthetics of violence is baked into the dramaturgy of American flight, as alluded to in his chapter on the Enola Gay. What keeps the image of flight aloft in the American imagination is a technophilia that conceals violence through the aestheticized and distanced act of bombing, further realized in the drone strike. The American infatuation with flight is inextricable from how it aesthetically and anesthetically wields violence that enables the American willing suspension of disbelief that we are not performing violence ourselves.

Despite these issues, Magelssen should be commended for focusing on this topic with sensitivity. Throughout, he thoughtfully engages with performance studies to connect the specificity of the historical archive with contemporary culture and politics. He takes seriously the ways in which flight has not only been central to the American cultural imagination, but also how that figuration is fundamentally shaped by disciplinary regimes of race, gender, and nation. In so doing, Magelssen effectively makes the case for flight's centrality to America's image of itself, with performance as one of its foundational elements.