Techno-Prosthetic Romantic Futurism

Digibritannia!

It's an interesting historical coincidence that the critical effort to think post-territorially about British imperialism doesn't emerge until after the advent of the Internet and earlier technologies of sampling and recombination. [1]   Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic is an effect as much of the turntable and the laptop as of historical method--more so, if you consider that the whole point of method is to produce and police certainty. [2]   The Black Atlantic is digital by definition and, as hybrid history, post-British.

Notes

1. Here historiography gets remixed by the technologies that reproduce it. It's an even more material practice than the historical formalisms described by Fredric Jameson in Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke UP, 1992).

2. See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard, 1995).

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