ie.talks: The Confines of Cosmopolitanism: A Postcolonial History of Aviation and Jet Age Culture

Vortrag von Phil Tiemeyer am 31.05.2023, 16:15 - 17:45h

Date: Wednesday, May 31, 2023

Time: 4:15 p.m. - 5:45 p.m.

Location: Seminarraum SG2, Sensengasse 3, 1090 Wien

Moderation: Eva-Maria Muschik

Vortrag im Rahmen der "ie.talks"-Veranstaltungsreihe des Instituts für Internationale Entwicklung

Abstract:

    This talk offers an overview of Phil Tiemeyer's book project, offering one of the first attempts by a historian to chronicle the rise of commercial aviation in the non-Western world in the decades after World War II. Like the nearly-complete book itself, Tiemeyer's talk covers three areas of inquiry:

  • political efforts by non-Western states - Yugoslavia­ and Jamaica - to establish airlines of their own in an effort to combat what he calls the West's aerial "cartography of colonialism"

  • social efforts on the part of stewardesses at these newfound airlines to rework sexist paradigms for stewardesses arising in the West during the Jet Age of the 1960s

  • social efforts on the part of gay stewards at these newfound airlines to rework elitist and imperialistic notions of homosexuality arising in the West at the dawn of the Jet Age

Phil Tiemeyer is completing a Masters degree in International Development at the Universität Wien at the same time that he serves as Associate Professor of History at Kansas State University in the United States. Tiemeyer's scholarly research to date has focused on commercial aviation and its importance to queer identity.