The Black androids: history and the technological underground

Speaker: Edward Jones-Imhotep (University of Toronto)
Series: Departmental Seminars in History and Philosophy of Science

This talk lies at the intersection of two histories. It explores the place of steam, clockworks, and electricity in the technological history of 19th- and early 20th-century New York City. And it sets that history against a largely unexplored history of the 'Black androids' – a collection of racialised automata, built around these same technologies, that form part of the intersecting histories of slavery, automation, rebellion, science fiction, and artificial intelligence. Created globally in the hundreds between the mid-18th and the late 20th centuries, these machines have been almost completely absent from traditional histories of science and technology, obscuring their place in the combined technological and racial imaginaries of the modern period. In the context of 19th- and early 20th-century America, the Black androids extended a culture of minstrelsy, concentrated along Broadway. Using the advanced technologies of the time, these American androids portrayed Black people in pastoral, leisurely, and non-technological roles, supporting the myth of Black technological disingenuity. The androids' surface, however, masked how those same technologies featured centrally in the lives, imaginations, and self-identities of Black New Yorkers. The talk examines this duality: how the very technologies that drove the androids' racial caricatures also figured centrally in the lives, imaginations, and selfhood of Black New York. From 19th-century steam-men and railway sabotage plots, to electrical workers and the Harlem Renaissance, the talk asks what a descent into the technological undergrounds might reveal about race and machines, about the challenges of history, and about the role of unexplored episodes in challenging our conceptions of technology and pointing us towards new approaches.