Technology and the African American Experience: Needs and Opportunities for Study (review)

In Technology and the African American Experience Bruce Sinclair and the cast of contributors provide historical accounts of people of African heritage and technology. Sinclair's introduction begins by indicating that the history of race in the United States has not been written with the history of technology in mind; and likewise, the history of American technology has not considered the concept of race. In attempting to think about the connections between race and technology, Sinclair contends that "we must begin the project of constructing a joint history by re-thinking our own assumptions, by borrowing useful ideas from related fields of scholarship, and by selecting examples of methods and subject matter that promise fruitful lines of investigation" (p. 1). This is a great agenda, but unfortunately, he quickly moves past the very interesting complexities of race and the broad politics of racial identification in the United States to African Americans. For a volume that begins by raising questions about race, it would have been intriguing to have seen how the editor would have located blackness within the comparative history of the question of race in the United States.

The main chapters of the book do not necessarily correlate to Sinclair's charge, but they do illuminate certain interesting connections between African Americans and technology. Judith Carney's reprinted Technology and Culture article "Landscapes of Technology Transfers" examines how the rice cultivation skills of African slaves contributed to the rice economies of the southern colonies. Barbara Garrity-Black's "Raising Fish with a Song" describes the manner in which work songs or chantey aided African American fishermen during the Atlantic fish harvest. Both articles display the ways that African and African American cultural experience and knowledge were integrated into American technological processes.

The three essays by Nina Lerman, Amy Slaton, and Lonnie Bunch explore African Americans and technological education. Lerman in "New South, New North" discusses the paradoxes within the term 'industrial education.' Slaton presents a research plan to understand how changing African American demographics have influenced engineering education. Bunch writes about the manner in which African Americans have been presented and interpreted within museum settings.

Kathleen Frantz and Rebecca Herzig contribute the most enlightening essays. Frantz's article, "The Open Road," contends that the automobile, in the early twentieth century, was an important instrument of cultural power that middle- and upper-class African Americans wielded to access technological and individual freedom. Herzig's essay, "The Matter of Race in the Histories of American Technology," is a thoughtful and nuanced approach that probes how scholars can "think simultaneously about technological change and the creation of racial subjects" (p. 157).

"Invention and Innovation," an essay by Portia James, is informative, but it does not ask any new questions of how we think about and understand African American inventors and innovators. Sinclair's two photo essays, "History in the Funny Papers" and "Pictures from an Exposition," provide rich visual images of African Americans but leave one wanting for a critical engagement with the images. Without this analysis, these can be read as another objectification of African American life without contextualization. The final bibliographic essay by Amy Sue Bix subdivides the subject areas of African Americans and technology into eleven sections of literature.

Sinclair's main agenda is to understand how the perceptions of black mental inferiority related to labor and technological activity. The volume provides a partial history of the ways in which people of African heritage have been constructed as less capable than those from European origins. In relation to this work, it would have been tremendously interesting if the introductory essay would have explored the ways in which white privilege and technological domination and control have been constructed and contrasted these with real-life black experiences. One of the major oversights is that the book does not substantively engage African American Studies. The editor has given attention to the history...