“The Black Androids”: Edward Jones-Imhotep on Technology, Selfhood, and Race
The Division of Literature and Languages welcomed Edward Jones-Imhotep to campus on Tuesday, March 5, for his talk “The Black Androids: History and the Technological Underground.” Jones-Imhotep, Director of the University of Toronto’s Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, presented on a research project into the history of Black androids and Black relationships to technology.
Although the project would go on to encompass other concepts, Jones-Imhotep’s research began with the history of Black androids. Jones-Imhotep was first introduced to the topic while researching his review “Ghost Factories,” which dealt with automata representing white individuals and the ways they reflected the creation of a self-made white identity. In the process, Jones-Imhotep uncovered several references to Black androids, automata that presented racist depictions of Black people.
The Black androids helped to construct what Jones-Imhotep termed a “myth of Black technological ingenuity,” in which Black people were incompatible with technological innovation, by depicting these androids in stereotypical primitive roles. Jones-Imhotep drew a distinction between the Black androids and later Afrofuturist androids, as the former reacts against Black liberation, while the latter actively furthers it. Jones-Imhotep noted that the high points of Black android production coincided with historical moments of slave revolts and abolition movements.
Jones-Imhotep’s initial research into the Black androids, conducted with a group of undergraduate students, evolved to look into larger topics of technology and race, coalescing around the idea of a “Black technological self.” The talk briefly outlined topics in the research project based on this idea, including the electrification of Harlem and the formation of a network of Black mechanics in Manhattan at the turn of the last century. From there, Jones-Imhotep delved deeper into Black revenge plots against steam technology industries to focus on the story of Joseph Burton, a young Black man involved in a sabotage plan.
In 1914, threats were made to the Cunard Line of steamships, vowing to plant hidden coal torpedoes within the RMS Aquitania unless a ransom was paid. These threats “lay their finger on the pinch points of 19th-century capitalism,” reflecting a strategic plan to target steam power. At the designated money drop, detectives caught and arrested one Joseph Burton.
After his arrest, the news was preoccupied with Burton’s racial and personality characteristics. Patent papers for an electric dynamo were found by police with Burton’s name on them, leading Burton to be seen as posing the “imminent and immediate threat of intelligence” as a Black man with technological skills. However, although police claimed the patent was official, there was no record of such a patent being issued.
The team’s research went beyond the official police and court records, toward a reconstruction of Burton’s personal life. Jones-Imhotep related how Burton “wanted to fund the development of a hydroplane and an electric dynamo” with the ransom money. Burton worked at a printing press, where Jones-Imhotep theorized he could have forged the patent. This forged patent represented Burton’s establishment of his identity through his relationship to technology, a way for him to “impress himself into his historical moment” and “inhabit the world in the way he imagined himself.”
Jones-Imhotep closed his talk by locating his research in the broader framework of the history of technology, in which Black androids have not figured up until this point. He cautioned against “the dangers of hiding technology as a standalone category,” instead placing it in conversation with race to uncover the “counter-histories” of technology in opposition to mainstream narratives. Considering both the history of Black androids as a white supremacist construction of race and Black utilization of technology for liberatory purposes, Jones-Imhotep left the audience with the question, “What would it mean to inhabit the underground?”