Evans, Taylor Scott (Author)
Vint, Sherryl (Advisor)
In this digitally saturated age, the cultural influence of technology has seeped into all areas of social, political, and individual life. At the same time, discourses of technology have long proceeded as if matters of social, political, and individual identity are incidental to technological development. Specifically, themes of technology and themes of race have long been understood as separate and unrelated. I contest this understanding through a sustained examination of the occluded, repressed, and otherwise forgotten truth that American technology arose in a society in which some people were once legally—formally—things, and that these legal forms are nothing other than race. To that end, I read broadly across American cultural production, examining canonical fiction, genre science fiction, and a wide range of ephemera to argue that the culture of the machine age, including the emergence of genre science fiction, was always already a racial project. This dissertation begins by theorizing the racial history of the human. It builds on the work of Sylvia Wynter, Saidiya Hartman, and Fred Moten, who have explored the way modernity depends on blackness for coherence and power, and applies these approaches to the intersection of science, technology, and fiction, putting these scholars in conversation with scholars of speculative fiction and cultures of technology like Leo Marx, N. Katherine Hayles, Mark Seltzer and John Rieder. The first chapter, "The Machine in the Garden was Black," for instance, focuses on the place of slavery in Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden, reappraising many of Marx’s own sources to expose a foundational conflation of slavery and machines in early American culture. Later chapters focus on the figure of the Steam Man, on racial passing in early pulp science fiction, on the emerging post-racial ideologies of John W. Campbell, and on the critiques and anxieties of agency that followed. The dissertation ends with an epilogue posing the question: what if science fiction was always black? This epilogue reframes what came before, dwelling in the Alternative, aiming to clear some ground for a newer set of genres—genres of science fiction and the human alike.
...More
Book
Isiah, III Lavender;
(2011)
Race in American Science Fiction
Thesis
Daoine S. Bachran;
(2016)
From Recovery to Discovery: Ethnic American Science Fiction and (Re)creating the Future
Thesis
Julie Mccormick Weng;
(2016)
Irish Modernism and the Machine
Book
Will Tattersdill;
(2016)
Science, Fiction, and the Fin-de-Siècle Periodical Press
Thesis
Clarissa Ai Ling Lee;
(2014)
Speculative Physics: the Ontology of Theory and Experiment in High Energy Particle Physics and Science Fiction
Book
Messier, Gilles;
(2012)
Our Own Devices: Stories of the Machine Age
Article
Svilpis, Janis;
(2008)
The Science-Fiction Prehistory of the Turing Test
Chapter
Otto, Peter;
(2011)
Inside the Imagination-Machines of Gothic Fiction: Estrangement, Transport, Affect
Thesis
Whitney Sperrazza;
(2017)
Perverse Intimacies: Poetic Form and the Early Modern Female Body
Thesis
Rae X. Yan;
(2018)
"This Seemingly So Solid Body": Philosophical Anatomy and Victorian Fiction
Thesis
Wietske Smeele;
(2018)
The Victorian Posthuman: Monstrous Bodies in Literature and Science
Article
Cassou-Noguès, Pierre;
(2011)
Exploring the Brain, Looking for Thoughts: On Asimov's Second Fantastic Voyage
Chapter
Leishman, David;
(2011)
“The Labours of Men of Genius”: Frankenstein, Fertility and the Female Scientist in the Work of Alasdair Gray
Article
Kwan, Allen;
(2007)
Seeking New Civilizations: Race Normativity in the Star Trek Franchise
Book
Kilgore, De Witt Douglas;
(2003)
Astrofuturism: Science, Race, and Visions of Utopia in Space
Thesis
Nichols, Rachael L.;
(2010)
The Human Animal: Tangles in Science and Literature, 1870--1920
Thesis
DeGraw, Sharon;
(2004)
The Subject of Race in American Science Fiction
Book
Joseph Drury;
(2018)
Novel Machines: Technology and Narrative Form in Enlightenment Britain
Article
Shaoling Ma;
(2018)
Stone, Jade, Medium: A Neocybernetic New Story of the Stone (1905–1906)
Article
Awa Hanane Diagne;
Emily Grenon;
Syeda Hasan;
Holly K. M. Johnstone;
Edward Jones-Imhotep;
Alexander Offord;
Neve Ostry Young;
Sarai Rudder;
(2024)
The Black Androids: A Chrestomathy
Be the first to comment!