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About

I am a PhD candidate in the History and Theory of Architecture at Princeton where I’m working on a dissertation that charts some of the ways blackness and machines have been co-produced. More broadly my research follows how blackness haunts the spatial logics of surveillance, histories of technology, the body, and performance. 

00. Black Technical Being(s): Folk Robots, Domestic Technics, and the Ghosts of the Machine Age, 1870–1940

Dissertation Proposal

The relationship between blackness and machines has been a guiding force of technological innovation, although Black labor is often made invisible by these machines. Black technical being is a conceptual framework that makes this relationship visible by connecting the development of Black folk characters to sites of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century industrial labor. It contends with the strange yet persistent condition of Black labor working with, being likened to, and yet being made invisible by machines, which is at the heart of American industrialization. It proposes that blackness has been the ghost in the machine of this technological progress, and that this spectral presence was shaped by the racialization instituted by the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, organized by the agricultural technics of the plantation, and modernized through the entrenchment of industrial capitalism. Folk characters were vectors of technological progress because they were narrative representations of the shifting mode of Black labor, and were also utilized as the human embodiment of emerging technologies.
An illustration of Westinghouse’s Elecktro robot at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York.
An illustration of Westinghouse’s Elecktro robot at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York.

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