[January 27th
marks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 1 tragedy,
one of many setbacks and challenges that didn’t deter from the US manned space program from
making history. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five moments or contexts for
NASA’s early years. I’d love your responses and thoughts in comments, as
always!]
On additive
rather than competitive revisionist histories, and their potential limits.
Two prominent
recent news stories have drawn attention to distinct yet complementary sides of
one of the US space program’s most famous and singular events. On December 8th,
2016, former astronaut
and Senator John Glenn passed away at the age of 95, leading to numerous
stories highlighting Glenn’s
1962 space flight in which he became the first American to orbit the Earth
(doing so three times). And in early January of this year, the very different
space flight Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
was stunningly dethroned
from atop the box office charts (after three weeks in that position) by the
film Hidden Figures, a historical
drama (based on historian Margot
Lee Shetterly’s award-winning book) about three female African American
mathematicians (Katherine
Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson) who worked at the segregated
Langley Research Center and whose expertise (Johnson’s in particular in this
case) contributed
immeasurably to Glenn’s groundbreaking flight among many other NASA
efforts. I haven’t had a chance to see Hidden
Figures yet, but the picture
of Johnson meeting actress Octavia Spencer (who plays Vaughan in the film)
at the film’s December 1st NASA premiere is one of my favorite recent
photos.
At the most
superficial level, it might be possible to see Hidden Figures as an example of what I’ve elsewhere described as
the “competitive”
form of revisionist history, one that seeks to replace previously prominent
historical figures with previously under-remembered ones. But I don’t think
that’s really the case at all—Hidden Figures
not only features John Glenn as a character (and one who in a key scene importantly
and accurately stands up for his African American colleagues), but it is
precisely the significance of Glenn’s flight that makes the contributions of
Johnson and her colleagues so similarly vital. Which makes Hidden Figures much more of an example of what I would call an “additive”
revisionist history, one that asks us to remember not only the already-famous
white male Glenn, but also the previously much less well-known African American
women who worked alongside him and helped make this historical turning point
possible and successful. Indeed, I’d say the same of the work of Johnson and
her peers that I did of Lewis Latimer’s contributions to Thomas Edison’s and Alexander
Graham Bell’s inventions in
this post: that if we don’t better remember the work of these (not
coincidentally) Americans of color, we’re both missing the full picture of what
happened and replicating the injustices that were far too often done to these
figures in their own times and lives.
Such additive
revisionist histories are welcome and necessary, and I’m glad that Hidden Figures exists and is doing as
well as it is. But every kind of cultural text and genre has its limits or
shortcomings, and I can’t help but think that the unexpected popularity of Hidden Figures might reflect such a
limit of this particular kind of revisionist history. That is, the story of
Glenn’s flight is a story of stunning and groundbreaking success, and the story
of Hidden Figures is about how even
figures who were oppressed found a way to rise above that oppression and
contribute to that success. That’s true, and an important lesson to boot. But
it’s also very much a feel-good story, and one to which 21st century
Americans can (at least potentially) look to both recognize that we’ve made
progress (African American NASA employees no longer have to use separate
bathrooms or coffee pots) and to argue that even the worst of our past
couldn’t hold back those who were truly determined to overcome. I’m not
suggesting we shouldn’t tell such stories and remember such stories—just that
it’d be important to complement them with (to name one example) a historical
film about the victims of the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated
Syphilis in the Negro Male.” Now that’d be a truly additive revisionist history.
Last NASA post
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other NASA takes you’d share?
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