Technology and Culture最新文献

{"title":"African Environmental Crisis: A History of Science for Development by Gufu Oba (review)","authors":"Rohini Patel","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a933108","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a933108","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>African Environmental Crisis: A History of Science for Development</em> by Gufu Oba <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Rohini Patel (bio) </li> </ul> <em>African Environmental Crisis: A History of Science for Development</em><br/> By Gufu Oba. Abingdon: Routledge, 2020. Pp. 258. <p>Historian and environmental scholar Gufu Oba’s <em>African Environmental Crisis</em> is an excellent analysis of the unfolding and longevity of the “African environmental crisis hypothesis” (AEC) during the colonial and postcolonial periods in East Africa, a hypothesis that located the causality of environmental degradation on African peoples and Indigenous forms of land-use systems. Oba draws out the history of this hypothesis to show how it was constructed at various moments under colonial empires in East Africa since the nineteenth century and how it emerged at the intersection of environmental change, colonial development schemes, and scientific knowledge production under empires. The significance of the AEC was how it functioned to undermine Indigenous land use and in turn served to justify the imposition of imperial scientific and development regimes, while ignoring the material environmental consequences of the latter.</p> <p>Oba focuses on Tanganyika, Uganda, and Kenya in East Africa, identifying this as an important region where several ideas of the AEC took shape. Oba organizes the book into three thematic parts with chronological overlap. In part 1, the reader gets a rich historical analysis of the precolonial complexity of Indigenous African forms of land use and subsistence and European colonial explorers’ mixed impressions of the landscapes, including an important precedent of the AEC in the form of an unfounded desiccation hypothesis. But with harsh events, from epidemics to plagues, at the end of the nineteenth century, British and German imperial administrations took the opportunity to establish scientific research stations across the region, imposing new infrastructures of imperial science.</p> <p>This sets the basis for understanding the emergence of the AEC by the 1930s. It was animated locally by these events and by global and scientific theories, including the projection of discourses ignited by the Dust Bowl of the U.S. plains onto African environments. Part 2 inspects practices and infrastructures of imperial sciences at different points in the mid-twentieth century, including the experimental character of science for development enfolded in agronomic and range science, expansion of social science research, and administrative strengthening of technical assistance development models into the 1950s. Part 3 inquires into species changes like the tsetse fly and locusts and imperial responses, which took the form of noxious chemical technologies from arsenic to dieldrin, aerial spraying, and surveillance tools, among other methods.</p> <p>Oba meticulously uses a range of archival sources and ","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141743664","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Dark Star: A New History of the Space Shuttle by Matthew H. Hersch (review)","authors":"Michael J. Neufeld","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a933141","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a933141","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Dark Star: A New History of the Space Shuttle</em> by Matthew H. Hersch <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Michael J. Neufeld (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Dark Star: A New History of the Space Shuttle</em><br/> By Matthew H. Hersch. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2023. Pp. 315. <p><em>Dark Star</em> (a title taken from an obscure science fiction movie) is not a comprehensive technical history of NASA’s space shuttle program, nor does it contain much new information. (For that, see the work of Dennis Jenkins.) Rather, it is a scathing critique of what Hersch sees as a project doomed from the start by space agency leaders’ fixation on a winged, reusable rocket plane as the means to drastically reduce the cost of space launch. Conceived as part of the infrastructure of an ambitious post-Apollo space program, it became instead NASA’s last chance to sustain human spaceflight as its budget began falling even before the first lunar landings. In order to save the shuttle, the agency made major design concessions to secure Air Force participation and to reduce peak expenditures in the lean 1970s. The result was a “bad design” (p. 160) that NASA accepted on the <strong>[End Page 1066]</strong> assumption that the shuttle would soon be redesigned or replaced—it never was. As a result, “<em>the shuttle failed because it was designed to fail</em>” (p. 12; italics in the original).</p> <p>Hersch is critical of the most important scholarly work on the topic, Diane Vaughn’s <em>The Challenger Launch Decision</em> (1996). That book is a sociological analysis of the first shuttle accident in 1986, and Vaughn asserts that the disaster’s root cause was poor management, leading to the “normalization of deviance” and the refusal to recognize that a catastrophic failure of one of the solid-rocket boosters (SRBs) was imminent. Hersch argues instead that NASA managers succumbed to “fatalism” (p. 160) because they knew that the shuttle’s design was flawed. Mounting the orbiter on the side of a huge external tank that shed insulating foam, often striking the orbiter’s fragile reentry protection system, and next to segmented SRBs that could burn through or explode, doomed the system to an accident. Making matters worse, the design constraints made it impossible to install an escape system for the full crew.</p> <p>I am in fundamental agreement with Hersch’s critique of the shuttle, which I have long considered the United States’ worst space policy decision. (Full disclosure: I am mentioned in passing in the acknowledgments and my work is cited and quoted.) But he often pushes the argument too far. In his analysis of the <em>Challenger</em> accident, he makes his disagreement with Vaughn into a binary choice: either it was a short-term management failure, or it was a long-term result of a bad design (pp. 149–56). Yet in his epilogue, he concedes that it could be both (p. 217). He condemns the segmented SRB (in which the solid pr","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"66 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141743505","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Mexican Icarus: Aviation and the Modernization of Mexican Identity, 1928–1960 by Peter B. Soland (review)","authors":"Michael K. Bess","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a933110","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a933110","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Mexican Icarus: Aviation and the Modernization of Mexican Identity, 1928–1960</em> by Peter B. Soland <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Michael K. Bess (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Mexican Icarus: Aviation and the Modernization of Mexican Identity, 1928–1960</em><br/> By Peter B. Soland. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023. Pp. 256. <p>Peter B. Soland’s <em>Mexican Icarus</em> explores the intersection of culture, technology, and celebrity in modernizing Mexico. The author notes that it is “the first monograph-length, scholarly analysis of aviation development in Mexico” (p. 16). He considers how the aviation industry, and aviators in particular, played a key role in the reconstruction of the Mexican state and society following the 1910 revolution. The strengths of <em>Mexican Icarus</em> lie in Soland’s narratives of the people (mostly men, as he acknowledges) who championed aviation; their biographies serve as framing for a larger national narrative of how elites and average people interpreted the importance of flight. For example, Soland writes about Emilio Carranza—from a wealthy northern family and the nephew of a former president—who became known as the “Mexican Lindbergh” for his aeronautical feats. Following a plane crash that took his life, in death he became a “martyr” of modernization, which inspired others to take up flight.</p> <p>As Soland shows, however, most Mexicans could not afford the costs for training to become pilots. People wrote the left-populist president Lázaro Cárdenas for financial help, but the economic conditions of the 1930s and 1940s meant that many aviators either came from wealth or had backgrounds in the Mexican armed forces. Despite the barriers to flight, Soland does share one inspiring and astonishing case of a young man from the countryside making good on his dream to be an aviator. Miguel Carrillo Ayala built his own plane, relying on manuals translated into Spanish and a focus bordering on obsessive to achieve his goal. The government took notice and supported his work; when he flew from his hometown in Michoacán and landed in Mexico City, the achievement made headlines across the country. Soland notes that the extraordinary circumstances of Carrillo’s journey highlighted the challenges most people faced if they hoped to fly.</p> <p>Reading <em>Mexican Icarus</em>, one comes away with an understanding that most Mexicans experienced flight as spectators. Whether consuming news reports on the radio or in print, or attending the takeoff and landings of celebrity “goodwill aviators” or the funeral of one of these “martyrs” after a crash, average people were passive consumers of aviation. In this way, the line between aviators and celebrities was a thin one. For decades, aviators like Carranza, Francisco Sarabia, and others captivated the public’s imagination, especially in the collective ceremonies surrounding their deaths. Soland notes a turnin","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141743668","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"In the Land of Marvels: Science, Fabricated Realities, and Industrial Espionage in the Age of the Grand Tour by Paola Bertucci (review)","authors":"Alan Marshall","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a933116","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a933116","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>In the Land of Marvels: Science, Fabricated Realities, and Industrial Espionage in the Age of the Grand Tour</em> by Paola Bertucci <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Alan Marshall (bio) </li> </ul> <em>In the Land of Marvels: Science, Fabricated Realities, and Industrial Espionage in the Age of the Grand Tour</em><br/> By Paola Bertucci. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023. Pp. 168. <p>Paola Bertucci’s book is a well-written and engaging study about a 1749 visit to Italy, the land of “marvels,” by the “intelligent traveler” Jean Antoine Nollet, a French “philosopher . . . [and] a man of true worth” (p. 25). Those visiting Italy in the period often came armed with stereotypes that presumed Italians were more prone than most to believe in the “marvelous” over the “truth,” and Nollet was no different. It was an era of “fabricated realities” with a contemporary craze for electrical cures, and Nollet aimed to undermine those he saw as impostors. It is this debate, over four chapters, an introduction, and a conclusion, that Bertucci seeks to examine.</p> <p>In fact, the manuscript diary of Nollet that lies at the center of Bertucci’s book reveals that Nollet’s scientific travels were also a cover for a more secret mission he undertook for the French state. He was there not only to battle the land of marvels but to uncover the mysteries of the Italian silk industry. We are familiar enough in our own day with such economic espionage, yet Bertucci, sensibly enough, eschews that phrase as far too modern an interpretation for what Nollet was actually up to. Instead, she argues that he was really a philosophic gentleman on a state-sponsored “intelligent” tour. While Nollet did disguise his actual intentions and often used dissimulation to gain evidence, the Italian silk industry in fact proved all too open to him as a man of letters (p. 17).</p> <p>This intelligent traveler also undertook to examine the contemporary Italian enthusiasm for medical electrical cures. In this respect, Nollet was keen to undermine what he saw as Italian self-deception. In an era where wheel-cranked electric machines could bring with them not only the sparks of shock (literally, in some cases) but also an understanding of electricity’s supposed curative properties, Nollet sought to restore order and control in a printed philosophical duel. Here his reasoned “truth” about the subject of electricity could not only vanquish the Italian love of the marvelous but also <strong>[End Page 1019]</strong> remove it from the hands of quack practitioners, who were seen by him as a major threat to scientific truth as presented by the French Academy.</p> <p>Nollet’s especial bête noire was Gianfrancesco Privati. Privati’s electrical medicated tubes were supposedly designed for the curing of medical ailments, but they were also a means to sell his encyclopedia. They were shown off in electrical soirées, where hand-cranked el","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"39 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141743489","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Cult of Creativity: A Surprisingly Recent History by Samuel W. Franklin, and: The Creativity Complex: Art, Tech, and the Seduction of an Idea by Shannon Steen (review)","authors":"Stina Teilmann-Lock","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a933122","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a933122","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>The Cult of Creativity: A Surprisingly Recent History</em> by Samuel W. Franklin, and: <em>The Creativity Complex: Art, Tech, and the Seduction of an Idea</em> by Shannon Steen <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Stina Teilmann-Lock (bio) </li> </ul> <em>The Cult of Creativity: A Surprisingly Recent History</em><br/> By Samuel W. Franklin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023. Pp. 253. <em>The Creativity Complex: Art, Tech, and the Seduction of an Idea</em><br/> By Shannon Steen. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2023. Pp. xi + 246. <p>Creativity is encouraged in everyone, except accountants. Accountancy aside, society seemingly cannot have enough of creativity. According to the World Economic Forum’s <em>The Future of Jobs Report 2023</em>, the second most sought-after skill of employers is “creative thinking” (out sought only by “analytical thinking”). Two recent volumes, Samuel W. Franklin’s <em>The Cult of Creativity</em> and Shannon Steen’s <em>The Creativity Complex</em>, explore the roles and exploitations of creativity in the United States. Both monographs historicize the notion of creativity (in line with recent scholarship such as A. Reckwitz, <em>The Invention of Creativity</em>, 2017; T. Beyes and J. Metelmann (eds.), <em>The Creativity Complex</em>, 2018; W. P. McCray, <em>Making Art Work</em>, 2020) and shed light on the ways in which creativity, over the past century, has been instrumentalized, commercialized, and promoted as a solution to problems ranging from boredom in school to sales optimization and ecosystem collapse.</p> <p>In the United States, creativity research has been a big deal in psychology and business studies since the mid-twentieth century, as such well funded by, among other sources, public money. Research outcomes have included “creativity tests,” psychometrics of “highly creative” individuals, “divergent thinking,” methods for “creative problem-solving,” fostering of “creative thinking” across industries, and more (see V. Glăveanu, <em>The Creativity Reader</em>, 2019).</p> <p>In <em>The Cult of Creativity</em>, Samuel W. Franklin points to the paradoxical character of the notion of creativity. It is commonplace and sublime; it makes work less alienating while it optimizes workers’ performance; it encompasses both Don Draper and Louise Bourgeois. Creativity is the darling of management gurus and starving artists alike. Franklin, elegantly, submits that the contradictory character of the concept of creativity is its special force: it reconciles tensions between the “individual and mass society, the extraordinary and the everyday, the spiritual and the crassly material, the rebellious and the status quo” (p. 7). The notion of creativity has become a lens for us to <strong>[End Page 1030]</strong> see social change in a particular light and to come to terms with deep-seated tensions of contemporary society. In nine chapters, Franklin’s book pre","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"25 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141743491","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Media Ruins: Cambodian Postwar Media Reconstruction and the Geopolitics of Technology by Margaret Jack (review)","authors":"Peter Manning","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a933115","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a933115","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Media Ruins: Cambodian Postwar Media Reconstruction and the Geopolitics of Technology</em> by Margaret Jack <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Peter Manning (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Media Ruins: Cambodian Postwar Media Reconstruction and the Geopolitics of Technology</em><br/> By Margaret Jack. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2023. Pp. 264. <p>It is still common today for news coverage, film, and much human rights scholarship to depict Cambodia as a broken, corrupt, authoritarian, violent, dysfunctional, and amnesiac cultural and political space. Such tropes risk the reproduction of pathologizing and flattening representations of Cambodia that present a helpless country whose postgenocide present is inescapably defined and trapped by its own violent history. In <em>Media Ruins</em>, Margaret Jack offers an important corrective to these tendencies by developing a historical account of the material relations within and with media infrastructures across Cambodia’s multiple historical transitions and conflicts. Jack does so with an emphasis on contingency, a commitment to nuance in her reading of the histories of Cambodia’s media architecture, and a strong sense of relational Cambodian agency within these accounts.</p> <p><em>Media Ruins</em> speaks across disciplinary audiences. The book places histories of material media infrastructures in Cambodia into dialogue with themes in memory studies, postconflict and peacebuilding responses, and more orthodox histories of Cambodia’s recovery from the Khmer Rouge genocide (1975–79). Readers with a background in memory studies are asked to take seriously the role of material objects and artifacts within processes of both memory and forgetting—including transmitters, radios, projectors, film reels, <strong>[End Page 1017]</strong> and the audiovisual (representational) content disseminated through them. For readers with a background in human rights, peacebuilding, or transitional justice, <em>Media Ruins</em> asks us to think through processes of social and cultural transition from violence away from more conventional institutional spaces, such as the ballot box or courtroom. For area studies readers, or those interested in more disciplinary histories of Cambodia, <em>Media Ruins</em> develops several important new angles on the histories of political control and contestation during Cambodia’s prewar and postgenocide periods. Jack adeptly situates the material architecture of media within these stories as sites that are both constituted by and deeply constitutive of their historical contexts.</p> <p>Reading <em>Media Ruins</em>, two important concepts developed by Jack tend to stay with you. The work of “infrastructural restitution” is the signature concept running throughout the text. By this, Jack refers to the creative practices that seek to restore and reconstruct media artifacts and infrastructures. This work is undertaken by a range of actors. Some are t","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141743486","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Technology and the Common Good: The Unity and Division of a Democratic Society by Allen W. Batteau (review)","authors":"Thomas A. Stapleford","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a933120","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a933120","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Technology and the Common Good: The Unity and Division of a Democratic Society</em> by Allen W. Batteau <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Thomas A. Stapleford (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Technology and the Common Good: The Unity and Division of a Democratic Society</em><br/> By Allen W. Batteau. New York: Berghahn Books, 2022. Pp. 205. <p><em>Technology and the Common Good</em> provides an ambitious but sometimes loosely argued synthesis that combines critical perspectives on technology with Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Prize–winning analyses of the political economy of shared resources. In her 1990 book <em>Governing the Commons</em> and subsequent research, Ostrom examines how, despite the “tragedy of the commons” predicted by rational choice theory, communities have in fact found ways to manage shared goods, whether natural resources, shared spaces, or more metaphorical commons such as knowledge. Batteau aims to build on Ostrom’s work by highlighting the critical role modern technology has played in both creating and governing the physical and metaphorical commons of contemporary life. In Batteau’s eyes, as in much of this literature, common goods are both the source and site for struggles to identify and shape <em>the</em> common good.</p> <p>The strongest parts of Batteau’s book explore how modern technology has created new common goods and thus the need for new governance strategies (e.g., chs. 4 and 5). For example, airflight opened a new common physical space, airspace, but likewise created the need to regulate and control movement through that space, eventually instantiated in elaborate national and international policies governing air travel. More metaphorically, we can think about the common “spaces” of the radio frequency spectrum (allocated by <strong>[End Page 1026]</strong> governments for various purposes) or the virtual “commons” of social media platforms such as Facebook. Beyond creating new commons, modern technology has extended the ability of human action in one locale to affect common goods in far distant places (just think of global warming, for example), thereby extending and integrating previously localized common goods into broader, at times global, common goods that demand an appropriately global governance strategy. Of course, modern technology has not only constructed or altered these commons; it has also become essential to managing them.</p> <p>To this promising line of analysis, Batteau has wedded a more tendentious and underdeveloped historical thesis, namely that while material culture and artifacts have existed since the beginnings of human civilization, “technology” per se is a more recent phenomenon. Batteau has different stories about precisely what distinguishes “technology” (in his usage) from other material culture and when this new form emerged. Thus on the very first page, he attributes it to the coining of the word “technology” in 1612 (though this occurred","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"57 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141743501","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Cyborg Caribbean: Techno-Dominance in Twenty-First-Century Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican Science Fiction by Samuel Ginsburg (review)","authors":"Michael Niblett","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a933109","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a933109","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>The Cyborg Caribbean: Techno-Dominance in Twenty-First-Century Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican Science Fiction</em> by Samuel Ginsburg <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Michael Niblett (bio) </li> </ul> <em>The Cyborg Caribbean: Techno-Dominance in Twenty-First-Century Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican Science Fiction</em><br/> By Samuel Ginsburg. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2023. Pp. 170. <p>Recent years have seen a remarkable surge in speculative fiction from the Caribbean. This is not without precedent, of course. The unfathomable violence of the plantation complex and the brutal estrangements of colonial society have long pushed Caribbean authors toward fabular, allegorical, and irrealist forms of representation, from the “marvellous realism” of Alejo Carpentier or Jacques-Stéphen Alexis, for example, to the genre-defying novels of Wilson Harris or Simone Schwarz-Bart. But since the turn of the century, a rich seam of explicitly science fiction work has appeared by writers as diverse as Karen Lord, Stephanie Saulter, Rita Indiana, Tobias S. Buckell, Curdella Forbes, Cadwell Turnbull, Kacen Callender, Yoss, and Rafael Acevedo. Much of this work is concerned with using the conventions, tropes, and devices of science fiction to register and challenge the racism, classism, sexism, and ecocide on which the modern capitalist world-system is founded. But why use science fiction to this end, and why now?</p> <p>A version of this question animates Samuel Ginsburg’s timely and important study, <em>The Cyborg Caribbean</em>. Focusing specifically on technology’s role in colonial and imperial domination, Ginsburg analyzes twenty-first-century science fiction narratives from Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico to “better understand the cultural, political, and rhetorical legacies of techno-dominance and resistance” (p. 4). Science fiction has come to prominence as a means to address such issues, suggests Ginsburg, not only because it is generically well suited to exploring the relationship between technology and power but also because over the last decade or so “the line between real life and science fiction in the Caribbean” has become ever more blurred (p. 5). Ginsburg’s examples range from rumors of weaponized supersonic devices being used against U.S. embassy staff in Havana to the invasion of Puerto Rico by digital currency investors hoping to turn the island into a “crypto utopia” in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. Add to this the impact of climate breakdown and the apocalyptic scenarios it threatens, and it becomes clear why, in the words of Dominican science fiction writer Odilius Vlak, “it is the genres of science fiction and fantasy that have the resources to contend with our reality” (quoted in Ginsburg, p. 6).</p> <p>The four central chapters of <em>The Cyborg Caribbean</em> each address the history, legacy, and literary representation of a different techn","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"39 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141743666","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Communications in Turkey and the Ottoman Empire: A Critical History by Burçe Çelik (review)","authors":"Sirri Emrah Üçer","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a933114","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a933114","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Communications in Turkey and the Ottoman Empire: A Critical History</em> by Burçe Çelik <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Sirri Emrah Üçer (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Communications in Turkey and the Ottoman Empire: A Critical History</em><br/> By Burçe Çelik. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2023. Pp. 254. <p>Burçe Çelik’s book represents a novel and bold contribution to the field of Turkish studies by providing a comprehensive two-century-long history of telecommunications. Instead of focusing on individual networks, she introduces a conceptual framework that unifies singular networks within a temporal continuity. This contribution brings to mind Horwitz’s <em>Communication and Democratic Reform in South Africa</em> (2006), as Çelik adds topics of ownership and the development of material telecommunications infrastructure to the discursive analysis of communication. Her study is also in close resonance with the accounts of other critical Turkish communication scholars like Haluk Geray and Funda Başaran. The strength of the book comes from its long-term and multinetwork approach to Ottoman/Turkish communications/telecommunications history. However, this also exposes some areas open to criticism.</p> <p>Çelik’s analytical framework comprises both geopolitical and social elements. The geopolitical aspect encompasses topics such as the peripheralization of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey in the global capitalist division of labor, the material development of the telecommunications network, and the shift in ownership from the government to international companies. The social element of Çelik’s analysis divides Ottoman/Turkish history into two periods: what she calls the “non-capitalist modernization” before 1950 and the “transition to capitalism” after World War II. The social element also introduces “silenced communities,” including Armenians, Kurds, women (particularly working-class women), and progressive youth, as key actors in communication history, beyond the more prominent “noisy actors” such as the state, military, political elites, and “top-down” modernizers. Çelik argues that the “non-capitalist modernism” of the late Ottoman and early <strong>[End Page 1015]</strong> Republican periods was closely linked to reform efforts aimed at restoring the “circle of justice” within a social context characterized by an “oriental political society” where communities opposed the government, rather than a “Western-style civil society” with individuals opposing the government.</p> <p>Çelik introduces the concept of “capitalist imperialism” and mentions “noisy actors” such as international companies and organizations. However, her proximity to a political stance that views the late Ottoman Empire and early Turkish Republic as a militarist colonizer rather than a passive periphery limits the role assigned to international capital markets, companies, and organizations in the geopolitics of telecomm","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"14 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141743485","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Learning with Light and Shadows: Educational Lantern and Film Projection, 1860–1990 ed. by Nelleke Teughels and Kaat Wils (review)","authors":"Deac Rossell","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a933126","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a933126","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Learning with Light and Shadows: Educational Lantern and Film Projection, 1860–1990</em> ed. by Nelleke Teughels and Kaat Wils <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Deac Rossell (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Learning with Light and Shadows: Educational Lantern and Film Projection, 1860–1990</em><br/> Edited by Nelleke Teughels and Kaat Wils. Turnhout: Brepols, 2023. Pp. 267. <p>The second of three books spawned by the nationally funded B-Magic collaborations between six universities in Belgium, arriving just after Sabine Lenk and Natalija Majsova’s <em>Faith in a Beam of Light</em> (2022; reviewed in the July 2023 issue of this journal) and before Kurt Vanhoutte and Leen Engelen’s <em>The Magic Lantern in Leisure, Entertainment and Popular Culture</em> (forthcoming), this volume with its two companions also announces the new Media Performance Histories series, as part of the Techne collection at Brepols Publishers. Concentrating on the classroom use of projected images in Belgium, this anthology follows its funded mandate with brief excursions to Switzerland, Britain, and Austria, which are academically funded separately. Very little context is given here to magic lantern culture before the founding of Belgium in 1830, and minimal attention is paid to pedagogical concepts used outside the country’s borders, so public lectures are recognized here as a dominant popular educational practice only in the second half of the nineteenth century (p. 51), and most institutional links are to the Belgian phenomena of university extensions and popular universities. True for Belgium, but this leaves aside other histories like that of the Mechanics’ Institutes in Britain, which began in the first half of the century with some 700 active institutes, serving over 120,000 members by 1851. Equally, the focus here on magic lantern slide projection disregards the optical bench used in many classrooms, a kind of disassembled magic lantern that supported projection of a variety of experiments as well as lantern slides, a common instrument in the period under examination, but which only appears in the book after 1919 in the teaching of Robert Pohl at Göttingen University (ch. 7).</p> <p>Several chapter authors note there is only a sparse literature relevant to the themes of the book, all of which are anthologies that are cited when relevant, including Charles Ackland and Haidee Wasson’s study of nontheatrical but not necessarily educational films, <em>Useful Cinema</em> (2011); Devin Orgeron, Marsha Orgeron, and Dan Streible’s wide-ranging <em>Learning with the Lights Off</em> (2012); Anne Quillien’s splendidly illustrated yet pedagogical <em>Lumineuses Projections!</em> (2016); and Martyn Jolly’s Australia-centric <em>The Magic Lantern at Work</em> (2020). <em>Learning with Light and Shadows</em> has some advantages over these prior works in its more concentrated focus, and it supplies much new specific literature that wi","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"128 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141743495","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}