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The Sound of Culture
Diaspora and Black Technopoetics
Sales Date: 2015-12-29
Investigates the parallel and intertwined histories of race, technology, and science fiction
The Sound of Culture explores the histories of race and technology in a world made by slavery, colonialism, and industrialization. Beginning in the late nineteenth century and moving through to the twenty-first, the book argues for the dependent nature of those histories. Looking at American, British, and Caribbean literature, it distills a diverse range of subject matter: minstrelsy, Victorian science fiction, cybertheory, and artificial intelligence. All of these facets, according to Louis Chude-Sokei, are part of a history in which music has been central to the equation that links blacks and machines. As Chude-Sokei shows, science fiction itself has roots in racial anxieties and he traces those anxieties across two centuries and a range of writers and thinkers—from Samuel Butler, Herman Melville, and Edgar Rice Burroughs to Sigmund Freud, William Gibson, and Donna Haraway, to Norbert Weiner, Sylvia Wynter, and Samuel R. Delany.
Acknowledgments
Introduction
MODERNISM'S BLACK MECHANICS
Of Minstrels and Machines: Tales of the Racial Uncanny
Karel apek's Black Myth
Prognosticating Echoes: Race, Sound, and Naturalizing Technology
HUMANIZING THE MACHINE
Masters, Slaves, and Machines: Race and Victorian Science Fiction
Melville's Man-Machine
Erewhon: Lost Races and Mechanical Souls
CREOLIZATION AND TECHNOPOETICS
Sexing Robots, Creolizing Technology
Cyberpunk's Dubwise Ontology
The Music of Living Machinescapes: Creolization and Artificial Intelligence
A CARIBBEAN PRE-POSTHUMANISM
Echolocating Surrealism
Sylvia Wynter's Naked Declivity
Caliban's Uncanny Valley
Appendix A: A Playlist
Notes
Bibliography
Index
LOUIS CHUDE-SOKEI is a professor of English at the University of Washington, Seattle. His essays have appeared widely in publications such as African American Review, Transition, and The Believer. He is the author of The Last "Darky": Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora, which was a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award.
"In this exciting new book, Chude-Sokei details the relationships between science fiction, African slavery, industrialization and technological innovation. Chude-Sokei shows how the construction of the Negro as a 'nature', but rebellious, servant was applied to burgeoning industrialization through detailed analysis of writers such as Herman Melville, Mary Shelley and Samuel Butler."
~Paul Grant, Race & Class
""In this exciting new book, Chude-Sokei details the relationships between science fiction, African slavery, industrialization and technological innovation. Chude-Sokei shows how the construction of the Negro as a 'nature', but rebellious, servant was applied to burgeoning industrialization through detailed analysis of writers such as Herman Melville, Mary Shelley and Samuel Butler.""
~Paul Grant, Race & Class
""Chude-Sokei highights the way cultural creolization has the power to move beyond the oppositions between human and sub-human that were the correlates of slavery and western colonization, to form the basis of a new concept of humanness.""
~Graham Douglas, The Prisma
"The Sound of Culture is a brilliant project at the intersection of Caribbean thought, science fiction, minstrelsy, posthumanism, and cybernetics. Chude-Sokei is a scholar unafraid to cross borders as he tracks transnational culture through the lens of race and technology."
~De Witt Douglas Kilgore, author of Astrofuturism: Science, Race and Visions of Utopia in Space
"In this bracingly original book, Louis Chude-Sokei crosses neuromancy with negromancy (as he calls it), calling up the ghosts of historical memory and conjuring new meanings from dead texts. Whether he's reading the minstrel as uncanny robot, creolizing Haraway's cyborg, or calling Afrofuturism to account for its blind spots, Chude-Sokei is as intellectually daring as he is erudite. In The Sound of Culture, he gives us the 'shining' he's got, helping us see the spectral twins of race and technology that haunt our past . . . and our future."
~Mark Dery, cultural critic and the author of Black to the Future, a seminal essay on Afrofuturism
"The Sound of Culture is a brilliant project at the intersection of Caribbean thought, science fiction, minstrelsy, posthumanism, and cybernetics. Chude-Sokei is a scholar unafraid to cross borders as he tracks transnational culture through the lens of race and technology."
~De Witt Douglas Kilgore, author of Astrofuturism: Science, Race and Visions of Utopia in Space
"In this bracingly original book, Louis Chude-Sokei crosses neuromancy with negromancy" (as he calls it), calling up the ghosts of historical memory and conjuring new meanings from dead texts. Whether he's reading the minstrel as uncanny robot, creolizing Haraway's cyborg, or calling Afrofuturism to account for its blind spots, Chude-Sokei is as intellectually daring as he is erudite. In The Sound of Culture, he gives us the 'shining' he's got, helping us see the spectral twins of race and technology that haunt our past . . . and our future.""
~Mark Dery, cultural critic and the author of Black to the Future," a seminal essay on Afrofuturism
"With the daring and precision of an inspired sound engineer, Louis Chude-Sokei skillfully plays the ontological mixing board, creating a masterpiece in which music, literature, science, and cultural theory are dubbed in and out of the text. This startling book is an echo chamber where discourses of race and technology reverberate, confounding outdated notions of the limits of a black poetics.""
~Carolyn Cooper, author of Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture At Large
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