UC Riverside UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title The Race of Machines: A Prehistory of the Posthuman Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/90d94068 Author Evans, Taylor Scott Publication Date 2018 License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ 4.0 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE The Race of Machines: A Prehistory of the Posthuman A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English by Taylor Scott Evans December 2018 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Sherryl Vint, Chairperson Dr. Mark Minch-de Leon Mr. John Jennings, MFA Copyright by Taylor Scott Evans 2018 The Dissertation of Taylor Scott Evans is approved: ____________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________ Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside Acknowledgments Whenever I was struck with a particularly bad case of “You Should Be Writing,” I would imagine the acknowledgements section as a kind of sweet reward, a place where I can finally thank all the people who made every part of this project possible. Then I tried to write it. Turns out this isn’t a reward so much as my own personal Good Place torture, full of desire to acknowledge and yet bereft of the words to do justice to the task. Pride of place must go to Sherryl Vint, the committee member who lived, as it were. She has stuck through this project from the very beginning as other members came and went, providing invaluable feedback, advice, and provocation in ways it is impossible to cite or fully understand. Without her support this project’s arguments would be much less complete and the dissertation itself much more not-actually-written. My thanks to Emma Stapely, for serving on my exam committee and turning me on to a perfect and obscure little story of Poe’s. My thanks to Jayna Brown, Erica Edwards, and Fred Moten for also serving on the exam committee (and for a time on the dissertation committee) and providing valuable feedback at critical stages of the work. My thanks to Mark Minch-de Leon and John Jennings for stepping in at the eleventh hour when everyone but Sherryl left for greener pastures, and for reading a long project they had little chance to shape: it is an act of academic generosity I won’t soon forget. Elements of the introduction, chapter 1, and chapter 2 have appeared in American Literature 90.3 (2018) under the title “The Race of Machines: Blackness and Prosthetics in Early American Science Fiction.” An earlier version of Chapter 3 appeared in The v Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 27.1 (2016) under the title “The Technology of Race: White Supremacy and Scientifiction.” My thanks to both journals for their reprint policy. Aaron Roberts, Jeshua Enriquez, Miranda Butler, Irene Morrison, Stina Attebery, and Josh Pearson are the most prominent of a large group of graduate students who have read and commented on drafts of this project, and whose work inspires me daily. My thanks to John Ganim for rather improbably setting off this whole project with his suggestion that: first, I write my seminar paper for his Sovereignty and Medieval Romance class on nineteenth century dime novels; and second, for noting that I still had something to say about the cover images of said novels. Special thanks to Susan Zieger for two incredible seminars which seeded big chunks of my methodology, and for her generous support in years after even though I was no longer her student. Many civilians contributed to this project too. Thanks to Linda, Nya, and the whole team at Cellar Door Books for creating a community outside the university that almost made grad school bearable. Thanks to Franklin Farago, David Rogers, and Jesse Clark for doing the same (only different) over the phone, through messenger, and sometimes even on PlayStation. Thanks to Tyler the trainer for proprioception, and thanks for the Panera Bread in Corona for months of a small table, stable Wi-Fi, tasty food, and no questions asked. Thanks especially to Dr. V, for fixing me so I could actually write. Thanks to all the staff at the UWP, who employed me as a student and employ me still, for the financial security to actually chase this mad dream. Finally: Mom, Dad, and Sarah. Maria Barrios. For you, no words: only love. Thank you all. vi ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION The Race of Machines: A Prehistory of the Posthuman by Taylor Scott Evans Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in English University of California, Riverside, December 2018 Dr. Sherryl Vint, Chairperson In this digitally saturated age, the cultural influence of technology has seeped into all areas of social, political, and individual life. At the same time, discourses of technology have long proceeded as if matters of social, political, and individual identity are incidental to technological development. Specifically, themes of technology and themes of race have long been understood as separate and unrelated. I contest this understanding through a sustained examination of the occluded, repressed, and otherwise forgotten truth that American technology arose in a society in which some people were once legally—formally—things, and that these legal forms are nothing other than race. To that end, I read broadly across American cultural production, examining canonical fiction, genre science fiction, and a wide range of ephemera to argue that the culture of the machine age, including the emergence of genre science fiction, was always already a racial project. vii This dissertation begins by theorizing the racial history of the human. It builds on the work of Sylvia Wynter, Saidiya Hartman, and Fred Moten, who have explored the way modernity depends on blackness for coherence and power, and applies these approaches to the intersection of science, technology, and fiction, putting these scholars in conversation with scholars of speculative fiction and cultures of technology like Leo Marx, N. Katherine Hayles, Mark Seltzer and John Rieder. The first chapter, “The Machine in the Garden was Black,” for instance, focuses on the place of slavery in Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden, reappraising many of Marx’s own sources to expose a foundational conflation of slavery and machines in early American culture. Later chapters focus on the figure of the Steam Man, on racial passing in early pulp science fiction, on the emerging post-racial ideologies of John W. Campbell, and on the critiques and anxieties of agency that followed. The dissertation ends with an epilogue posing the question: what if science fiction was always black? This epilogue reframes what came before, dwelling in the Alternative, aiming to clear some ground for a newer set of genres—genres of science fiction and the human alike. viii Table of Contents Introduction - The Race of Machines, or, A Racial Prehistory of the Posthuman ......1 Racism and the Emergence of Science Fiction ............................................................... 7 A Racial Prehistory… ................................................................................................... 14 …of the Posthuman ....................................................................................................... 23 A Radical Aesthetic of Whiteness ................................................................................. 31 How’d We Get Here? A Methodology and Literature Review ..................................... 43 A Brief Bit of Structure ................................................................................................. 52 Chapter 1 – The Machine in the Garden was Black .....................................................57 Pastoral Slaves............................................................................................................... 70 Critical Whiteness ......................................................................................................... 83 Mere Machine ............................................................................................................... 93 Delusions of Mastery .................................................................................................. 101 Chapter 2 – Racializing Prosthetics, or, Blackness and the Edisonade ....................107 Birth of a Genre ........................................................................................................... 116 Technological Blackness ............................................................................................. 124 Generalizing Mastery .................................................................................................. 138 Teaching Techno-Supremacy ...................................................................................... 148 ix Chapter 3 – White Supremacy and Scientifiction, or, The Technology of Race ......153 Passing in Early Genre-SF .......................................................................................... 159 The Technology of Whiteness..................................................................................... 167 Race as Technology .................................................................................................... 178 Chapter 4 – Post-hu(e)man, or, Race and Rigor .........................................................186 The Spectacle of Logic ...............................................................................................