The Sound of Culture

By: Louis Chude-Sokei

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Hardcover | 9 February 2016

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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. The book includes a specially curated playlist, featuring songs mentioned in the book, to help contextualize its arguments.

Industry Reviews

"In this exciting new book, Chude-Sokei details the relationships between science fiction, African slavery, industrialization and technological innovation. Chude-Sokei shows how the construction of the Negro as a 'nature', but rebellious, servant was applied to burgeoning industrialization through detailed analysis of writers such as Herman Melville, Mary Shelley and Samuel Butler."--Paul Grant "Race & Class" (1/1/2017 12:00:00 AM)
"Chude-Sokei highights the way cultural creolization has the power to move beyond the oppositions between human and sub-human that were the correlates of slavery and western colonization, to form the basis of a new concept of humanness."--Graham Douglas "The Prisma" (5/23/2016 12:00:00 AM)

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