‘Our Technology Was Vernacular’: Radical Technicities in African American Experimental Writing

Abstract

Chapter 5 focuses on technicities of African American vanguardists, including Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Bennett, Ralph Ellison and Amiri Baraka. These writers joined the civil rights lawyer and writer Pauli Murray in recognising illegal rail travel and other appropriations of infrastructure as signifyin(g) spatial practices. Building on research by sociologists, historians of technology and literary critics, the chapter uses a techno-bathetic framework to explore how railroads became signifyin(g) machines for the everyday technicities of black life throughout the twentieth century. The long-running crises sparked by the Scottsboro trials encouraged African American avant-gardes to formulate a vernacular, counter-servile technicity that served as a hinge between rhetorical and spatial practice. When Ellison claimed that ‘[o]ur technology was vernacular’, the shared valences he identifies between language, technology and strategies of adaptation and appropriation elides closely with Rayvon Fouché’s conception of ‘black vernacular technological creativity’ and Henry Louis Gates, Jr’s definition of motivated signifyin(g). African American vanguardists dragged the invisible and over-determined rail networks, and the spaces that framed them, back into plain sight, and made them the targets of sustained attack. The chapter argues that by doing so, these writers practiced a nuanced vernacular technicity articulated across the longue durée of industrial modernity.