The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics Contributor(s): Chude-Sokei, Louis (Author) |
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ISBN: 0819575771 ISBN-13: 9780819575777 Publisher: Wesleyan University Press OUR PRICE: $26.55 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: December 2015 |
Additional Information |
BISAC Categories: - Literary Criticism | American - African American - Literary Criticism | Caribbean & Latin American - Literary Criticism | Science Fiction & Fantasy |
Dewey: 809.889 |
LCCN: 2015015502 |
Physical Information: 0.9" H x 6" W x 8.9" (0.95 lbs) 280 pages |
Themes: - Ethnic Orientation - African American - Cultural Region - Latin America |
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
Publisher Description: 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. |