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.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
MODERNISM'S BLACK MECHANICS
Of Minstrels and Machines: Tales of the Racial Uncanny
Karel apek's Black Myth
Prognosticating Echoes: Race, Sound, and Naturalizing Technology
HUMANIZING THE MACHINE
Masters, Slaves, and Machines: Race and Victorian Science Fiction
Melville's Man-Machine
Erewhon: Lost Races and Mechanical Souls
CREOLIZATION AND TECHNOPOETICS
Sexing Robots, Creolizing Technology
Cyberpunk's Dubwise Ontology
The Music of Living Machinescapes: Creolization and Artificial Intelligence
A CARIBBEAN PRE-POSTHUMANISM
Echolocating Surrealism
Sylvia Wynter's Naked Declivity
Caliban's Uncanny Valley
Appendix A: A Playlist
Notes
Bibliography
Index