Description: Investigates the parallel and intertwined histories of race, technology, and science fiction
Review Quotes:
"The Sound of Culture is a brilliant project at the intersection of Caribbean thought, science fiction, minstrelsy, posthumanism, and cybernetics. Chude-Sokei is a scholar unafraid to cross borders as he tracks transnational culture through the lens of race and technology."--De Witt Douglas Kilgore, author of Astrofuturism: Science, Race and Visions of Utopia in Space
"With the daring and precision of an inspired sound engineer, Louis Chude-Sokei skillfully plays the ontological mixing board, creating a masterpiece in which music, literature, science, and cultural theory are dubbed in and out of the text. This startling book is an echo chamber where discourses of race and technology reverberate, confounding outdated notions of the limits of a black poetics.""--Carolyn Cooper, author of Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture At Large
"In this bracingly original book, Louis Chude-Sokei crosses neuromancy with negromancy" (as he calls it), calling up the ghosts of historical memory and conjuring new meanings from dead texts. Whether he's reading the minstrel as uncanny robot, creolizing Haraway's cyborg, or calling Afrofuturism to account for its blind spots, Chude-Sokei is as intellectually daring as he is erudite. In The Sound of Culture, he gives us the 'shining' he's got, helping us see the spectral twins of race and technology that haunt our past . . . and our future.""--Mark Dery, cultural critic and the author of Black to the Future," a seminal essay on Afrofuturism
"The Sound of Culture is a brilliant project at the intersection of Caribbean thought, science fiction, minstrelsy, posthumanism, and cybernetics. Chude-Sokei is a scholar unafraid to cross borders as he tracks transnational culture through the lens of race and technology."--De Witt Douglas Kilgore, author of Astrofuturism: Science, Race and Visions of Utopia in Space
"In this bracingly original book, Louis Chude-Sokei crosses neuromancy with negromancy (as he calls it), calling up the ghosts of historical memory and conjuring new meanings from dead texts. Whether he's reading the minstrel as uncanny robot, creolizing Haraway's cyborg, or calling Afrofuturism to account for its blind spots, Chude-Sokei is as intellectually daring as he is erudite. In The Sound of Culture, he gives us the 'shining' he's got, helping us see the spectral twins of race and technology that haunt our past . . . and our future."--Mark Dery, cultural critic and the author of Black to the Future, a seminal essay on Afrofuturism