“Dr. Satan’s Echo Chamber: reggae, technology and the diaspora process,” reprint.

Reprint of an essay first published in 1997.Published versio

Prognosticating Echoes: Race, Sound, and Naturalizing Technology

In his near-classic The Recording Angel (2005), Evan Eisenberg points out that the actual legacy of automata in the twentieth century was machines like the phonograph or gramophone. Since so many automata were used as music boxes and existed for entertainment purposes and for refined contemplation in a European context, it is no surprise that they would evolve as they did in America. This emphasizes something more interesting than their pedigree: that in the years between Joice Heth, the black slave woman that P.T. Barnum passed for an automata, and (Karel Capek’s) R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), the play that would introduce the term “robot” into the English language, ventriloquism and masquerade become increasingly properties of technology. “Mimetically capacious machines” were beginning to define the difference between centuries and, in the United States, between cultural powers and social groups (Taussig 1992). Eisenberg is generally very aware of the relationships between African Americans and the history of sound recording, yet he maintains the common reading of Capek’s robots as merely representing “alienated labor” or as figures of class struggle. But in a country still reeling from racial violence and where, unlike Europe, radical political assertion—of the kind that Capek was also alluding to—was strongly linked to racial politics, the play’s vision of an extremely violent robot war depended on much more immediate concerns. Then of course there is Capek himself, consistently deploying race alongside all those other meanings that made the play as rich a work of literature as it would be an influential work of the genre of science fiction, which was only a few years from being formally named. Yet in the final two sentences of Eisenberg’s passage the racial meanings intrude too far to be ignored. The slave haunting the master, turning on the master, becoming a master, and the master becoming a slave—clearly a great fear of proletarian revolt in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution. And these meanings are present in R.U.R. just as they are in Fritz Lang’s film, Metropolis (1927). In the nineteenth century such an expectation was so strong in the American South that it became a crucial set of narrative tropes: the black rapist, the brutish automaton that sets fire to the plantation, racial revenge as the first gesture of freedom. Those two sentences prefigure the next chapter of the book, which charts in advance of Capek the notion that machines and humans need be figured in a master/slave dialectic. In this tradition the necessary conclusion to that dialectic is not synthesis—as will be the case in cybertheory or “cyborg feminism,” topics of an even later chapter—but violence and supplantation. Capek was not the first to narrate the relationship between human beings and machines in racial terms, but his vision has proven to be the most influential. Interestingly, for Eisenberg the difference between phonograph and robot is arguably based on “soul” or something very like it

Introduction: what was Black Studies?

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00064246.2020.1780857Published versio

Machines and the ethics of miscegenation

https://www.glass-bead.org/article/machines-and-the-ethics-of-miscegenation/?lang=enviewPublished versio

City column on race relations in Portland. The author, a black Bowdoin Colleg

City column on race relations in Portland. The author, a black Bowdoin College professor who recently moved from Los Angeles, discovered that poor white men look to bond with him, assuming they share a resentment of wealthy white communities; and black women say black men don\u27t talk to them. Despite Portland\u27s reputation as a haven for black men, the author faults the liberal establishment for failing to make a meaningful cross-cultural community

Wilson Harris: an ontological promiscuity

[Excerpt] "I’ve always thought that the problem with the literary and cultural politics of the Anglophone world was that we’ve never had an actual, formal surrealist movement. Yes, there are writers and thinkers in the English-speaking world that are verifiably surreal (though not members of the official movement) and many that are described as surrealist, for example the writer who is the focus of this essay, the recently deceased Guyanese novelist, critic, and visionary, Wilson Harris, who passed away in March of this year. And yes, the impact of the Surrealist International was global. As I will discuss, it had a significant impact in the Caribbean, which is partly what justifies discussing Wilson Harris in this context. Though seen as a minor or cult figure, or an example of “art brut,” I’d like to help make clear his standing in a richer tradition of thinking and writing than previously acknowledged. I’d like to also suggest ways that his legacy can and should make a difference."http://asapjournal.com/wilson-harris-an-ontological-promiscuity-louis-chude-sokei/Published versio