Is This The Future? Black Music and Technology Discourse

Abstract

Introduction. For musical Afrofuturists, the rupture of the Middle Passage and slavery's destruction of African culture are a "dematerialization" (Eshun 192). In diaspora, culture is rematerialized through a variety of techniques, including sound recording. Since the slave is property, she is alienated from the category of the human (Judy 5). This provides the conceptual space in which to argue about the very idea of the human subject and to imagine posthuman manifestations of blackness from figures like brothers (and sisters) from other planets and cyborgs from earth to more diffuse energies such as Ishmael Reed's "Jes Grew" in Mumbo Jumbo (1972) (Williams 154-76). With technological mediations such as sound samples and computer viruses, even apparently inanimate objects "get a life," and so cause anxiety about the boundaries between them (objects or non-subjects) and us (subjects).