The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics

By Louis Chude-Sokei

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0819575771
• ISBN13: 9780819575777
• Release Date: December 2015
• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Length: 280 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 8.9"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher