Bibliography for Doing AntiRacist History of Technology

In recognition of the Movement for Black Lives and a widespread acknowledgement that revisions have been sorely needed to the Doing History of Technology section of the SHOT website, a volunteer group of SHOT members convened to redress the issue by compiling this list of books, articles, and other sources in history of technology and related fields that are anti-racist, anti-colonial, and inclusive in sentiment. We did so by soliciting recommendations for a revised list of Classics to replace bibliographies listed on the SHOT website. In retaining the word “classic,” we aim to problematize the perceived neutrality of the term.

This effort is a work in progress and will be updated and re-organized periodically. To contribute additional sources, or contact the organizers of this page, use this form. 

Articles and Chapters

• Daniel M. Albert, “Primitive Drivers: Racial Science and Citizenship in the Motor Age,” Science as Culture10:3 (2001): 327–351
• Geneviève Bédoucha, “The Watch and the Waterclock,” in Technological Choices: Transformation in material cultures since the Neolithic, ed. Pierre Lemonnier (London: Routledge, 1993), 77-107.
• Chandra D. Bhimull, Empire in the Air: Airline Travel and the African Diaspora (New York: NYU Press, 2017).
• Keith Breckenridge, “The Biometric State: The Promise and Peril of Digital Governance in the New South Africa,” Journal of Southern African Studies 31(2): 267-282
• Moses Chikowero, “Subalternating Currents: Electrification and Power Politics in Bulawayo, Colonial Zimbabwe, 1894-1939,” Journal of Southern African Studies 2007 vol. 33 (2): 287-306.
• Alexandra Cook, “Plant Science and Technology,” chapter 4, Cultural History of Plants, vol. 4, ed. Jennifer Milam (Bloomsbury Academic, forthcoming 2021).
• Shadreck Chirikure, “The Metalworker, the Potter, and the Pre-European African ‘Laboratory,’” ch. 3 in Mavhunga, ed., What do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa? (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2017).
• Ivan da Costa Marques, ed., “History of Computing in Latin America,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Special Issue 37:4 (2015).
• Ron Eglash, “Broken Metaphor: The Master-Slave Analogy in Technical Literature,”Technology and Culture2 (2007): 360–369.
• Ron Eglash and Julian Bleecker, “The Race for Cyberspace: Information Technology in the Black Diaspora,” Science as Culture10 (no. 3, 2001): 353–
• Rayvon Fouché, “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud: African Americans, American Artifactual Culture, and Black Vernacular Technological Creativity.” American Quarterly 58 (no. 3, 2006): 639–
• Rayvon Fouché, “The Wretched of the Gulf: Racism, Technological Dramas, and Black Politics of Technology,” The Black Scholar 36 (no. 4, 2006): 7–12.
• Libbie Freed, “Networks of (colonial) power: roads in French Central Africa after World War I,” History and Technology 26, no. 3 (2010): 203–223.
• Jeff Guy and Motlatsi Thabane, “Technology, Ethnicity, and Ideology: Basotho Miners and Shaft-Sinking on the South African Gold Mines,” Journal of Southern African Studies, vol. 14, no. 2 (Jan. 1988).
• Gabrielle Hecht, “Hopes for the Radiated Body: Uranium Miners and Transnational Technopolitics in Namibia,” Journal of African History 51:2 (June 2010): 213-234.
• Gabrielle Hecht and Paul N. Edwards, “History and the Technopolitics of Identity: The Case of Apartheid South Africa,” Journal of Southern African Studies 36:3 (September 2010): 619-639.
• Allen Isaacman, “Displaced People, Displaced Energy, and Displaced Memories: the Case of Cahora Bassa, 1970-2004,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 38, 2 (2005):201-238.
• Jenny Ungbha Korn, “Expecting penises in Chatroulette: Race, gender, and sexuality in anonymous online spaces,” Popular Communication, 15:2 (2017): 95-109.
• Pauline Kusiak, “‘Tubab’ technologies and ‘African’ ways of knowing: nationalist techno‐politics in Senegal,” History and Technology 26:3: 225-249.
• Jung Lee, “Invention without Science: ‘Korean Edisons’ and the Changing Understanding of Technology in Colonial Korea.” Technology and Culture 54 (no. 4, 2013): 782–
• Nina E. Lerman, “‘Preparing for the Duties and Practical Business of Life’: Technological Knowledge and Social Structure in Mid-19th-Century Philadelphia,” Technology and Culture 38, no. 1 (1997): 31–59.
• Carlos E. Martín, “Mechanization and ‘Mexicanization’: Racializing California’s Agricultural Technology,” Science as Culture 10:3 (2001): 301–326.
• Karl Marx, “Machinery and Large-Scale Industry,” in Marx, Karl (ed.), Capital (1867; London: Penguin, 1971): 493–494.
• Stephan F. Miescher, “Building the City of the Future: Visions and Experiences of Modernity in Ghana’s Akosombo Township,” Journal of African History, 53 (2012): 367-90.
• Projit Bihari Mukharji et al., “Open Conversations: Diversifying the Discipline or Disciplining Diversity? A Roundtable Discussion on Collecting Demographics Data,” Isis 111 (June 2020): 310–353.
• Lisa Nakamura, “Indigenous Circuits: Navajo Women and the Racialization of Early Electronics Manufacture,” American Quarterly 64 (Dec. 2013): 919–
• Ann Nelson, “Commentary: Diversity in Physics: Are You Part of the Problem?” Physics Today 70 (May 2017): 10–11.
• Emily Osborn, “Casting aluminum cooking pots: labour, migration, and artisan production in West Africa’s informal sector, 1945-2005,” African Identities, Vol. 7, no. 3 (August 2009): 373-386.
• Emily Osborn, “Containers, Energy, and the Anthropocene in West Africa,” in Gareth Austin, ed., Economic Development and Environmental History in the Anthropocene: Perspectives on Asia and Africa (Bloomsbury 2017), 69-93.
• Åsa Össbo and Patrik Lantto, “Colonial Tutelage and Industrial Colonialism: reindeer husbandry and early 20th-century hydroelectric development in Sweden”, Scandinavian Journal of History, 36:3, (2011): 324-348.
• Minh-ha T. Pham, “Visualizing the ‘MisFit’: Virtual Fitting Rooms and the Politics of Technology,” American Quarterly 67 (March 2015): 165–
• Kapil Raj, “Thinking without the Scientific Revolution: Global Interactions and the Construction of Knowledge,” Journal of Early-Modern Science21 (2017): 445–58.
• Margaret W. Rossiter, “Which Science? Which Women?” Osiris 12 (1997): 169–
• David Serlin, “Confronting African Histories of Technology: A Conversation with Keith Breckenridge and Gabrielle Hecht,” Radical History Review 127 (January 2017): 87-102.
• Paul A. Shakel and David L. Larsen. “Labor, Racism, and the Built Environment in Early Industrial Harpers Ferry” in Lines That Divide: Historical Archeologies of Race, Class, and Gender, James A. Delle, Stephen A. Mrozowski, and Robert Paynter eds. (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2000)
• David Skinner and Paul Rosen, “Opening the White Box: The Politics of Racialised Science and Technology,” Science as Culture3 (2001): 285–300
• William K. Storey, “Guns, Race, and Skill in Nineteenth-Century Southern Africa,” Technology and Culture4 (2004) 687–711.
• John Thornton, “Precolonial African Industry and the Atlantic Trade, 1500-1800,” and ensuing debate, especially Austen and Manning, African Economic History 19 (1990): 1-54.
• Julia Tischler, “Negotiating Modernization: The Kariba Dam Project in the Central African Federation, ca. 1954-1960,” in Peter J. Bloom, Takyiwaa Manuh, and Stephan F. Miescher, eds. Modernization as Spectacle in Africa (Indiana University Press, 2014).
• Laura Ann Twagira, “Introduction: Africanizing the History of Technology,” Technology and Culture 61, no. 2S (2020): S1–S19.
• Laura Ann Twagira, “‘Robot Farmers’ and Cosmopolitan Workers: Technological Masculinity and Agricultural Development in the French Soudan (Mali), 1945–68,” Gender & History 26(3): 459-477.
• Tinde Van Andel, “The Reinvention of Household Medicine by Enslaved Africans in Suriname”, Social History of Medicine29 (no, 4, 2015): 676–94.
• Geoff D. Zylstra, “Whiteness, Freedom and Technology: The Racial Struggle over Philadelphia’s Streetcars, 1859-1867,” Technology and Culture 52 (no. 4, 2011): 678-702

Books

• Michael Adas, Dominance by Design: Technological Imperatives and America’s Civilizing Mission (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006)
• Jennifer Karns Alexander, The Mantra of Efficiency: From Waterwheel to Social Control (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008)
• David Arnold, Everyday Technology: Machines and the Making of India’s Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013)
• Ruha Benjamin, Captivating Technology (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019)
• Ruha Benjamin, Race after Technology (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2019)
• James Boggs, The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker’s Notebook (1963; New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009)
• Lundy Braun, Breathing Race into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014)
• Francesca Bray, Technology and Gender Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997)
• Francesca Bray, Technology, Gender and History in Imperial China: Great Transformations Reconsidered (New York: Routledge, 2013)
• André Brock, Jr., Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures (New York: New York University Press, 2020)
• Meredith Broussard, Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018)
• Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019)
• Robert D. Bullard, Glenn S. Johnson, Angel O. Torres eds., Highway Robbery: Transportation Racism & New Routes to Equity (Cambridge: South End, 2004)
• Sarah E. Chinn, Technology and the Logic of American Racism: A Cultural History of the Body as Evidence (London: Continuum, 2000)
• Henrique Cukierman, Yes, Nós Temos Pasteur – Manguinhos, Oswaldo Cruz e a história da ciência no Brasil [Yes, we have Pasteur – Manguinhos, Oswaldo Cruz and the history of science in Brazil], (Rio de Janeiro: Relume Dumará – FAPERJ, 2007)
• Deborah G. Douglas, United States Women in Aviation 1940–1985 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1990)
• Ron Eglash, Jennifer L. Croissant, Giovanna Di Chiro, and Rayvon Fouché, eds. Appropriating Technology: Vernacular Science and Social Power (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004)
• Rayvon Fouché, Black Inventors in the Age of Segregation: Granville T. Woods, Lewis H. Latimer, and Shelby J. Davidson (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005)
• Venus Green, Race on the Line: Gender, Labor, and Technology in the Bell System, 1880–1980 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001)
• Sandra Harding, The Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies Reader (Durham, Duke University Press, 2011)
• Jennifer Hart, Ghana on the Go: African Mobility in the Age of Motor Transportation (Indiana, 2016).
• Gabrielle Hecht, Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade (MIT Press & Wits University Press, 2012)
• Harold Adams Innis, Empire and Communications (1950; Rowman & Littlefield, 2007)
• Sarah J. Jackson, Moya Bailey, and Brooke Foucault Welles, #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020)
• James H. Jones, Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment (New York: Free Press, 1981)
• Martha B. Katz-Hyman and Kym S. Rice, World of a Slave : Encyclopedia of the Material Life of Slaves in the United States (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Greenwood, 2011)
• Blair M. Kelley, Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy V. Ferguson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2010)
• Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1994)
• Theodore Kornweibel, Jr., Railroads in the African American Experience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2010)
• Colleen Kriger, Pride of Men: Ironworking in 19^th century West Central Africa (Heinemann, 1999).
• Angela Lakwete, Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine and Myth in Antebellum America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005)
• Sean Hsiang-Lin Lei, Neither Donkey nor Horse: Medicine in the Struggle over China’s Modernity (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2014)
• Roy Macleod and Deepak Kumar (eds.), Technology and the Raj: Western Technology and Technical Transfers to India 1700–1947 (New Delhi: Sage, 1995)
• Giacomo Macola, The Gun in Central Africa: A History of Technology and Politics (Ohio University Press, 2016).
• Bimal Krishna Matilal, Jonardon Ganeri, and Heeraman Tiwari,The Character of Logic in India (SUNY Press, 1999)
• Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, The Mobile Workshop: The Tsetse Fly and African Knowledge Production, MIT Press 2018.
• Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, Transient Workspaces: Technologies of Everyday Innovation in Zimbabwe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015)
• Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, ed. What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017)
• Charlton D. McIlwain, Black Software: The Internet and Racial Justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter (Oxford University Press, 2020)
• Eden Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011)
• Eden Medina, Christina Holmes, and Ivan da Costa Marques, eds. Beyond Imported Magic: Essays on Science, Technology, and Society in Latin America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014)
• Hiromi Mizuno, Aaron S. Moore, John DiMoia, eds., Engineering Asia: Technology, Colonial Development, and the Cold War Order (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018)
• Thomas S. Mullaney, The Chinese Typewriter: A History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017)
• Lisa Nakamura, Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (University of Minnesota Press, 2007)
• Alondra Nelson, Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party & the Fight Against Medical Apartheid (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013)
• Scott Reynolds Nelson, Steel Drivin’ Man: John Henry, The Untold Story of an American Legend (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006)
• Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: New York University Press, 2018)
• Deirdre Cooper Owens, Medical Bondage (Athens: University of Georgia, 2018)
• Richard Paul and Steven Moss, We Could Not Fail: The First African Americans in the Space Program (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015)
• Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, Colored Travelers: Mobility and the Fight for Citizenship before the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2016)
• Carroll Pursell, ed. A Hammer in Their Hands: A Documentary History of Technology and the African-American Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005)
• Daniel Rood, The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery : Technology, Labor, Race, and Capitalism in the Greater Caribbean (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2017)
• Benoy Kumar Sarkar, Education for Industrialization: An Analysis of the Forty Years’ Work of Jadavpur College of Engineering and Technology 1905–45 (1946; Kolkata: The National Council of Education, Bengal, 2017)
• Smritikumar Sarkar, Technology and Rural Change in Eastern India 1830–1980 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014)
• Suvobrata Sarkar, Let There Be Light: Engineering, Entrepreneurship and Electricity in Colonial Bengal, 1880-1945 (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2020)
• Antina von Schnitzler, Democracy’s Infrastructure: Techno-Politics and Protest After Apartheid (Princeton University Press, 2016).
• Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures: The Untold Story of the African-American Women Who Won the Space Race (London: Harper Collins, 2017)
• Bruce Sinclair, ed. Technology and the African-American Experience: Needs and Opportunities for Study (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004)
• Jagdish N. Sinha, Science, War and Imperialism: India in the Second World War (Leiden: Brill, 2008)
• Amy Slaton, Race, Rigor, and Selectivity in U.S. Engineering: The History of an Occupational Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010)
• Patricia Carter Sluby, The Inventive Spirit of African Americans: Patented Ingenuity (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004)
• Gretchen Sullivan Sorin, Driving While Black : African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights. (New York, NY: Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W.W. Norton & Company, 2020).
• Dorceta E. Taylor, Toxic Communities: Environmental Racism, Industrial Pollution, and Residential Mobility (New York: New York University Press, 2014)
• John Michael Vlach, Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993)
• Nira Wickramasinghe, Metallic Modern: Everyday Machines in Colonial Sri Lanka(New York, NY: Berghahn Books, 2014)

Organizers:

Anna Åberg

Donna J. Drucker

Charnell Chasten Long

Alana Staiti

Bess Williamson

Geoff Zylstra

Contributors:

Janet Abbate

Hyungsub Choi

Eileen Clancy

Alexandra Cook

Henrique Cukierman

Yulia Frumer

Penelope Hardy

Gabrielle Hecht

Chris Hesselbein

Mar Hicks

Jenny Ungbha Horn

Rachel Maines

Anto Mohsin

Arwen Mohun

Fabian Prieto Ñañez

Yoehan Oh

Suvobrata Sarkar

Ramesh Subramanian

Aristotle Tympas

Miaofeng Yao

Additional contributors chose to remain anonymous.