By Joel Brown | Photograph by JANICE CHECCHIO

Think of African American studies and robots probably aren’t what comes to mind. But the new director of CAS’ African American Studies Program points out that the way we think about robots and artificial intelligence today is the same way white people once thought about black people. In fact, he says, the word robot was coined by a Czech playwright, from an old Slavonic word for forced labor.

“Do they have intellect? Do they have souls? Can they make choices? Are they human? Now, where have we heard these questions before?” says Louis Chude-Sokei, a professor of English and holder of the George and Joyce Wein Chair in African American Studies. He’s also the editor-in-chief of The Black Scholar, ranked by Princeton as the top journal of black studies in the United States.

Chude-Sokei, who was born in Nigeria and grew up in Jamaica before moving to Los Angeles in time for his teen years, has spent most of his academic career probing race and technology. His most recent book, The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics (Wesleyan University Press, 2015), discusses issues as diverse as the racial anxieties in Victorian science fiction and the ways that idiosyncratic dub reggae artists like King Tubby created futuristic soundscapes without access to cutting-edge technology.

Music [is] a way to understand the history of black interactions with technology.

— Louis Chude-Sokei —

“It became clear to me that black people were manifesting the most sophisticated electronic music around, whether it’s dub or jungle or techno or hip-hop,” says Chude-Sokei, who earned a bachelor’s and a PhD in English from UCLA, while supplementing his teaching assistant’s salary with work as a reggae bassist and DJ. “It led me to use music as a way to understand the history of black interactions with technology.”

He sees the digital divide as a projection of the racist conviction that people of color cannot keep pace with a high-tech world (the National Urban League’s State of Black America 2018 report reveals that less than five percent of employees in social media and tech companies are black). “Looking at the history of dub is looking at people with no access to real formal education or technology who’ve taught themselves how to dream, imagine, and produce in jerry-rigged technology, and have then impacted the world,” he says.

While he loves talking music and sci-fi, Chude-Sokei has a lot more on his mind. He plans to expand the offerings of the African American Studies Program—it just added a new faculty member, Joyce Hope Scott (Wheelock’80), a clinical professor of African American studies—in concert with BU’s growing efforts toward greater diversity and inclusion. He says he’s energized by the encouragement he’s received from the University for ideas to grow the program, support that he says is rooted in student interest.

Enrollment in African American studies is up—32 students now minor in the subject, compared with just a handful five years ago. The growing interest, he says, may stem from what some people call the post-Ferguson moment and increased activism à la Black Lives Matter, or it might be the galvanizing effect of the current administration in Washington. He intends to take advantage of the moment.

And the program has already hosted two conferences, one of them titled Pornography, Perversion, Play: Black Women and Radical Sex.

“Some of the most intense ideas out there are being produced by black women thinking about sex and lesbianism and queer identity,” he says. “These women have produced award-winning scholarly work, and I want BU to be unafraid to showcase it.”