"The New Technology is Black": Afronauts, Afrofutureneering, and the Racialization of a New Future’s Past

• In Event: Race and/as Technology - I

Abstract

In 1969, Ishmael Reed, in an interview with a literary newspaper uttered the provocative statement, "The new technology is black." This intriguing sentence is the basis for my paper examining the ways late civil rights movement intellectual theorized a black technoscientific future and how this afrofutureneering informs the ways representations of black bodies are reconfigured in contemporary society. This paper aims to use the concept of intimacy to understand the overlapping relationships between technoscientific futureneering, historical amnesias of race/racism, the use/consumption of black images/bodies, and cultural imaginaries of black authenticity. Drawing on the writings of Frantz Fanon and Stuart Hall, this paper will situate its analysis within the concept of epidermalization. In specific, Fanon and Hall examine the ways racial politics are inscribed upon and within the skin and pigment of black bodies. My analysis will consider the ways epidermalized racial politics supports a global marketing apparatus and reinscribes a reductionist version of blackness–that eliminates struggle–to only focus on transcendent technoscientific transformations.

Author

• Rayvon Fouche, Purdue University