On Race and Technoculture

Where does Blackness manifest in Western technoculture? Technoculture is our modern ideology; our world structured through our relationships with technology and culture. Once enslaved, historically disenfranchised, and never deemed literate, Blackness is understood as the object of Western technical and civilizational practices. This presentation is a critical intervention for internet research and science and technology studies (STS), reorienting Western technoculture’s practices of “race-as-technology” to visualize Blackness as technological subjects rather than as “things”. Hence, Black technoculture. Utilizing critical technocultural discourse analysis, Afro-optimism, and libidinal economic theory, this presentation employs Black Twitter as an exemplar of Black cyberculture: digital practice and artifacts informed by a Black aesthetic.

Learning Materials

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Speaker Details

André Brock is an associate professor of media studies at Georgia Tech. He writes on Western technoculture, and Black cybercultures; his scholarship examines race in social media, videogames, weblogs, and other digital media. His book, *Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures*, (NYU Press 2020), the 2021 winner of the Harry Shaw and Katrina Hazzard-Donald Award for Outstanding Work in African-American Popular Culture Studies, theorizes Black everyday lives mediated by networked technologies.

Series: Race and Technology: A Research Lecture Series