Racial Technics is a cultural, historical, and theoretical study that traces how competing conceptions of humanity and human freedom have been articulated at the nexus of racial blackness and technicity. Beginning with a re-evaluation of the trace of racial slavery embedded in dominant understandings of media technics as prosthetic “extensions of Man,” the dissertation maps the reciprocal circuits of racial knowledge through which the meanings of technology and its cognates have been consolidated and disrupted in U.S. modernity. Reading twentieth-century black freedom struggles with and against contemporaneous upheavals in the cultures of mediation, the author uses the analytic of “racial technics” to refer to the ways in which contestations over technology— as, paradoxically, an extension of and a threat to liberal visions of self-sovereignty— have been constitutive to the contradictions of racial formation and attendant mediations of the human itself. Setting this heuristic to work across public cultures, media practices, and multiple domains of intellectual history, the dissertation pursues how the relation between race and technics directly bears on an array of philosophical problematics and political antagonisms (over the practice of freedom, over forms of relation, over consolidation of the nation-form, over the futures of the human); and how these categories themselves have been transformed through the subterranean trajectories of their articulation. The dissertation argues that, during the twentieth century, a heterogeneous cohort of black diasporic cultural workers seized upon the question of technology as fertile terrain for re-visioning the question of the human beyond the horizon of the anthropos/technics distinction and the topographies of racial humanism in which this distinction is embedded. The author grounds this argument in three case studies: automation, cybernetics, and electronic media. Each chapter pairs readings of the haunting status of racial blackness in canonical transatlantic theories of media technology with cultural and historical studies that uncover the role of media technologies, as material and figurative resources, in both imagining and managing black freedom struggles. Racial Technics thus assembles an archive of black intellectual and cultural production that reorients the entangled problematics of technics and human freedom beyond the protocols of racial humanism and recent posthumanisms.
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Citation
Litwack, Michael Ian,
"Racial Technics: Media and Machines in the Long Civil Rights Era"
(2017).
Modern Culture and Media Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0736PCR
