Cosmic Fragments

Insightful Essays That Deepen the Understanding of the Relationship Between Space, Capitalism, and the Environment. Cosmic Fragments brings together the most recent academic scholarship on the history of space exploration with a particular focus on the connections between spaceflight activities, capitalism, and the environment. The sixteen essays collected here highlight in different ways the internal friction, between the utopian, upward moving, and positivist imperative of the cosmic imaginary, and the frisson manifested in more Earthly dislocations, displacements, and destruction caused by the material reality of space exploration. Drawing insight from postcolonial studies, environmental studies, feminist theory, anthropology, geography, film studies, and STS more broadly, these essays are collectively organized around four broad themes: landscape, empire, waste, and decline. AUTHOR: Asif A. Siddiqi is a professor of history at Fordham University in New York who teaches and writes on the history of science and technology. His latest work has gravitated toward global history with an interest in histories of techno scientific infrastructures in the postcolonial world. He has held visiting positions at Harvard, MIT, the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, Caltech, and Princeton. Siddiqi is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and he is the co-editor of the 'Studies in the History of Science and Technology' series at Johns Hopkins University Press.