The Sound of Culture

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.

AcknowledgmentsIntroductionMODERNISM'S BLACK MECHANICSOf Minstrels and Machines: Tales of the Racial UncannyKarel apek's Black MythPrognosticating Echoes: Race, Sound, and Naturalizing TechnologyHUMANIZING THE MACHINEMasters, Slaves, and Machines: Race and Victorian Science FictionMelville's Man-MachineErewhon: Lost Races and Mechanical SoulsCREOLIZATION AND TECHNOPOETICSSexing Robots, Creolizing TechnologyCyberpunk's Dubwise OntologyThe Music of Living Machinescapes: Creolization and Artificial IntelligenceA CARIBBEAN PRE-POSTHUMANISMEcholocating SurrealismSylvia Wynter's Naked DeclivityCaliban's Uncanny ValleyAppendix A: A PlaylistNotesBibliographyIndex