Abstract
If scholars such as Jonathan Sterne (2012), Emily Thompson (2002), Neil Verma (2012) and others mark the second wave of ‘sound studies’, The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics can well be attributed to an emergent third wave: interdisciplinary explorations linking sound and audio technology to contemporary conversations about race relations, gender politics, intersectionality, or post-colonialism (see, for example, Stoever, 2016). Within this third wave of interdisciplinary sound studies scholarship, Chude-Sokei’s book is far less about sound or music and is much more a historical excavation of complex relationships between modernity, slavery, the American technological imaginary, artificial intelligence, and the implications for race relations in America today. It is a text that sits boldly across literary studies, critical science and technology studies (STS), pop history, and afro-futurism. Further still, the contribution of Chude-Sokei’s text is less about the black roots of music technology of 19th- and 20th-century American history; rather, it shines a light on the lesser-known black semiotics of robotics and artificial intelligence: semiotics that are reflected in several key developments of voice, sound and technology.
The main conceptual problematic that the book deals with across four chapters focused on modernism, post-humanism and technopoetics, is the relationship between ‘automata’ and the other – or rather, machines as having always been the anti-humanistic ‘other’. Through a careful, if dense, weaving of historical accounts, critical reading of popular science fiction, psychoanalysis, Caribbean theory and cultural histories of audio technology, Chude-Sokei unveils a unique point: that race relations where black bodies remain the uncomfortable ‘other’ are very much at the heart of post-humanistic anxieties of increasing automation in an American culture haunted by slavery. The book makes the painfully obvious connection between machines, as imaginaries of a technological future, and slave labour – the precursor and catalyst for industrialization. It does so by pointing out the contradictory logics of technology as ‘already white’ and the agrarian equalization of black slaves with nature; contradictions expressed through the trope of the ‘black uncanny’ in popular performances of minstrelsy and blackface (as explored in the works of Čapek, Butler and others – see, for example, Butler, 2017; Čapek, 2001). The story of race and technology, as Chude-Sokei suggests, entails a ‘foundation story not only of modernism but also of the far broader and infinitely more complex modernity structured by the dual anxieties of slavery and industrialization’ (p. 80) – anxieties expressed in the ‘technopoetics’ of artificial intelligence. Further, ‘the very notion of automatism as a Western problem had already become so racialized that the Negro was merely one of the list of doubles for white subjectivity and the human’. Where Chude-Sokei connects these problematics to sound is in reiterating some of the well-known cultural histories of audio technology as it connects to music production and the racialized performative ‘voice’. The first chapter deals tentatively with the phonograph with its staging of audio recording and radio broadcasting equipment as uncanny and sinister, racialized by the ventriloquism of black voices on these post-human, technologized audible media. Along with the second chapter, the text deals with blacks-as-machines through extensive discussions of Karel Čapek’s robotic imaginary, blackface minstrelsy as proto-robotic, and a historic literary analysis of audio engineering terminology such as ‘master–slave’ to refer to a ‘control relation between two devices’ (p. 79). The last two chapters formulate the frames of a ‘black technopoetics’ by historicizing the links between Caribbean thought and notions of hybridity as a ‘technorganic blending in the wake of cybernetics’ (p. 129). As Chude-Sokei suggests, traditions of racial thinking underlie some of the most critical imaginaries of cybernetics and the relationship between bodies and machines. The author’s nuanced critique of Donna Haraway’s (1991) work in cyberfeminism comes somewhat at the expense of an opportunity to engage with fiction that equates women with metaphorical or literal machines reminiscent of slavery; at the same time, the analysis here reveals even more foundational tensions embedded in contemporary robotics: hybridity as uncanny, as the border-crossing between human and the ‘other’. This would have also offered a chance to connect this work to the science fiction imaginings of French ’pataphysics philosophers writing of an exotified Africa (Hugil, 2012). In the last two chapters, Chude-Sokei shifts attention to 20th-century American jazz as the emergence of a ‘new Africa’ (as per Stuart Hall, 1989), thus (re)framing another familiar reference in cultural sound studies and ethnomusicology: jazz as a fetishized proto-phenomenon of technopoetics, reclaiming its analysis through a paradigm of creolization.
In this dense and vastly interdisciplinary project of black technopoetics, Louis Chude-Sokei reaches back to the beginnings of popular culture in American history to create an account that definitively situates contemporary cybernetics within histories of slavery and colonialism, and importantly, at the heart of tensions and anxieties about machines that both fetishize humanity through a racialized body as close to nature, and at the same time establish hierarchies of technology as white (and male) in opposition to the uncanny organics of the ‘other’. The book sets the stage (but does not explore) a wide variety of sonic phenomena characteristic of more contemporary American popular media, several notable examples being blackface minstrelsy in the voice of Darth Vader; robotic sexualities and sex robots as extensions of Japanese hentai; or T-Pain’s gratuitous introduction of autotune as both a sonic trope of black hip-hop, and a phenomenon of early vocoder ventriloquism (Tompkins, 2011). In short, if you are in cultural sound studies you won’t find much on sound in this book; however, it should be on the shelf of anyone engaged in STS and race studies, afro-futurism and critical cybernetic theory, not to mention literary studies of science fiction.