The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics by Louis Chude-Sokei (review)

Say you’ve been sent to planet Earth, emissary of a wise and beneficent post-human people. Your mission: to solve the old race problem that causes earth-lings so much misery. Your base of operations: the heart of the Imperium, twenty-first-century America. Your weapon: black technopoetics, a disruptor set to “stun.” You’d be following the secret agenda Louis Chude-Sokei advances in The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics. I say secret because this agenda doesn’t appear with complete clarity until near the book’s end. But Chude-Sokei wants to change the way race works both to differentiate black people from the norm of the (white) Human and justify their subjection to it. He pursues this mission, unexpectedly and with flashes of brilliance, by using the science fiction to challenge cultural stereotypes by way of the future they presume. “To combine race,” he writes, “with a futurism is to subject blackness to the vagaries of temporal transformation” (207). Chude-Sokei wants a blackness open to continuing transformation: “necessarily mutable, contingent, and therefore subject to going beyond itself ” (198). A fantasy?

Only fantasy can tell. Science fiction (generically allied to fantasy, as the shelves of brick-and-mortar bookstores attest) builds futures out of the detritus of contemporary dreams. Chude-Sokei shows how deeply such dreams come stained by histories of racial subjection and colonialism in the West. It’s a gorgeous, sobering insight: science fiction, the escapist pabulum of white geeks, has been about race all along. Chude-Sokei can make it because he approaches science fiction in broadly cultural rather than textual terms as a displaced allegory of social relations that provides an armature for dreaming the future. For him the fundamental feature of the genre, the one that places race front and center, is its obsession with technology, or more colloquially, machines. This emphasis allies science fiction with Italian futurism, a contemporaneous modernism whose celebration of machine aesthetics served an obvious ethnic chauvinism. Here’s the “tell” Chude-Sokei observes and interprets: machines in science fiction mediate social relations between whites and blacks.

To sustain this claim, he works back about a century to document an abiding cultural association between blacks and machines. It isn’t simply that as enslaved labor, transported Africans resembled the machines that would eventually replace them. Chude-Sokei establishes that, culturally speaking, blacks could pass for machines—and vice versa. Minstrelsy opens up this possibility by staging blackface performance as the liminal and empty other to the Human in a way that mimes the otherness of machines. A black automaton would clinch the point. Chude-Sokei finds one in the strange history of Joice Heth, the allegedly 161-year-old “mammy” of George Washington whom P. T. Barnum purchased in 1835 for public display, launching his spectacular career. Heth’s extreme age, her rigidity and blindness, made it hard to distinguish her from an automaton—source of her initial public renown. Barnum later heightened Heth’s uncanny appeal by billing her as an automaton passing for human: a black machine. It would be hard to invent a more powerful instance of the assimilation of machines and blacks, a cultural fantasy that finds fulfillment in 1930 with the Westinghouse Electric Corporation’s design and manufacture of Mr. Rastus Robot, the Mechanical Negro.

These material instances of mechanical blackness give heft to the claim that the conflation of blacks and machines becomes a pervasive motif in science fiction. Chude-Sokei shows how the nineteenth-century writing he calls “Victorian proto-science fiction” advances this association to the point of inevitability. He treats familiar authors in unfamiliar ways to reveal their displaced preoccupation with race and slavery. Herman Melville’s story “The Bell Tower” (1856) assimilates a critique of slavery to an account of a machine slaying its human master. Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871), in Chude-Sokei’s words, “features the discovery of a superior and technologically...