Abstract
This article uses the history of an unrealized technology to rethink conventional accounts of American spaceflight that cast the space cabin as the ultimate expression of human’s capacity to technologically master their environments. Drawing on archival and published sources, I detail the history of the bioregenerative life-support system, a system in which simple organisms most commonly algae would inhabit the spacecraft and, through a series of interspecies symbioses, maintain cabin conditions and sustain astronaut life. By homing in on the maintenance practices of the system and taking seriously the kinds of interspecies possibilities they would have engendered, this account does the work of recovering how the history of American spaceflight as we know it today was not at all inevitable, and in fact it could well have been a thoroughly multispecies affair. At the same time, by offering an exaggerated example of the ways astronauts during space travel were (and are) in
AL: African-American culture contains a treasure trove of wonderful music. Yet there is this entire category of song that seems to have disappeared from history. I’m thinking about the song
In Atlanta, Georgia with the line, “I’m gonna get me a pistol and hide behind a tree / shoot everybody been messin’ with me.” This is a lyric with a far different sentiment than “We Shall Overcome,” but I don’t know that many people have ever heard it. What kind of songs did Gellert uniquely bring forward?
SG: Yes, your question called to my mind the book
We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement by Akinyele Omowale Umoja. And I certainly take your point. The strident I’ll use the term “radical” nature of the some of the lyrics in the Gellert field archive is precisely what raised eyebrows, approvingly and disapprovingly. It seemed new and different. That is, the songs appeared so distinct from a “We Shall Overcome” sentimen