Making a Way out of No Way

Abstract

This chapter closes out Distributed Blackness by extrapolating from Black digital practice to a theory of Black technoculture, examining Black cultural discourses about technology’s mediations of intellect, sociality, progress, and culture itself. In doing so, it reviews various approaches to theorizing Blackness, Black bodies, Black culture, and technology. These approaches include Afrofuturism; but this chapter supplements Afrofuturism by suggesting that Black technoculture is invested in the “postpresent” rather than speculating about Blackness’s future within some yet to be established sociopolitical technological reality. Black technocultural theory insists that the digital’s virtual separation from the material world still retains ideologies born of physical, temporal, and social beliefs about race, modernity, and the future.