The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics

by Louis Chude-Sokei

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 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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

274 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 1, 2015

Reviews

[Ben Bush · Rating 5 out of 5]

An interview I did with Louis Chude-Sokei has become a lushly produced podcast episode from The Organist, a co-production of The Believer magazine and KCRW (NPR, Los Angeles). Per The Organist: "The Nigerian-Jamaican- American writer Louis Chude-Sokei on black cyborgs, black blackface, and the intersections of race, technology, and robotics."

"A lot of the kinds of questions asked about artificial intelligence and robots: Can they think? Are they just mimics? Are they capable of original thought? Do they have souls? Can they have souls? These are the same questions that were asked about negro slaves." -LCS

[in8 · Rating 5 out of 5]

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