A Hundred Tiny Hands: Slavery, Nanotechnology, and the Anthropocene in Midnight Robber

Abstract

ABSTRACT:This essay examines the use of nanotechnology in Nalo Hopkinson's novel Midnight Robber and how it gestures toward the historical triangulation of the slave, machine, and labor. The novel's Afro-Caribbean characters are infused with nanomites that monitor social behaviors and ecological processes in service of a global population management. This scalar recalibration recalls physicist Richard Feynman's 1959 lecture on nanotechnology, which envisions miniaturizing the technical "master-slave" system wherein "slave hands" (e.g., mechanical parts) are remotely controlled by "masters" (e.g., operating software). By tracking the evolution of nanotechnology vis-à-vis the "master-slave" metaphor and Midnight Robber, I demonstrate that the imaginaries of nanotechnology derive from the relationships engendered by racial slavery. The novel clarifies how this evolution obscures the ways racial blackness is part of the technological legacy of slavery itself and illustrates that any consideration of the slave-machine-labor constellation must attend to the model of racial blackness that constellation produced.