At the Borders of Flesh: A Secret History of Race and Technology
When:
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Venue:
Birkbeck Main Building, Malet Street
No booking required
At the Borders of Flesh: A Secret History of Race and Technology
Birkbeck Institute for Social Research
Speaker: Louis Chude-Sokei, University of Washington
Chair: Karen Wells, Birkbeck, University of London
In this talk, based on his new book The Sound of Culture, Louis Chude-Sokei 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, he argues for the dependent nature of those histories, showing how the emergence of race as a concept in Western culture was inextricably linked to the growth of technology. Using a global range of sources - American, British, and Caribbean literature and black musics such as jazz and dub reggae - he shows how race and technology and particularly how blacks and machines have been linked from robotics to artificial intelligence. In fact, science fiction itself, as he shows, has roots in racial anxieties and he traces those anxieties across two centuries and a range of writers, thinkers and musical artists.
Free event, open to all: Book your place
Louis Chude-Sokei is a writer and scholar currently teaching at the University of Washington in Seattle. His work includes the award winning The Last Darky (2006), the recently published The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics (2015) and the forthcoming books, Dr. Satan's Echo Chamber: Essays in Dub and An Immigrant Alphabet, a memoir. He is also the Editor-In-Chief of the newly revamped The Black Scholar, one of the oldest and most renowned journals of black thought in the United States
The Birkbeck Institute for Social Research is a hub for the dissemination and discussion of social research in London and beyond.
Contact name:
Madisson Brown