Zombies, Robots, Race, and Modern Labour

Abstract

The myth of the zombie, of the living dead, is a work myth. 1 [Slavery] reduces man to a mere machine. 2 In Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, the unnamed protagonist is denounced by an African American war veteran as "a walking zombie! … a walking personification of the Negative … ! The mechanical man!" As a black man subservient to white controllers, the protagonist is a non-human "thing" who does the "bidding" of his masters. 3 The image recalls the stage of Hegel's master-slave dialectic at which the slave seems to exist solely for the master, possessing no independent consciousness. 4 Ellison's equation of zombies and robots as emblems of such "negation" was not new. Mechanical men and the living dead had long been working together in U.S. literature of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries to embody the dehumanizing effects of racial oppression and (relatedly) labour exploitation. Conceived as soulless bodies or mindless matter, undead and mechanical figures emblematized how slavery and wage-labour relations reduced persons to things. They also registered the mindnumbing effects of repetitive, alienated labour, and of racial ideologies that denied black interiority. These were not their only symbolic functions, of course: in different ways, each figure had been linked variously with anxieties about colonial dispossession, the subordination and objectification of women, ideological indoctrination, market expansion, techno-scientific progress, and the 1 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (New York and London: Continuum, 2004), 470. 2 Frederick Douglass, "The Nature of Slavery" (1855): http://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/45/my-bondage-andmy-freedom/1512/the-nature-of-slavery-extract-from-a-lecture-on-slavery-at-rochester-december-1-1850/ (accessed 14 September 2015).

Do Robots Have Race?: Race, Social Construction, and HRI

“…However, the cultural resonances of robots quickly included the institution and history of slavery, which became especially pronounced when the project of robotics was embraced in the United States. The popularity of stories about robot uprisings in science fiction all too clearly represents the working through of social and political anxieties about slavery and colonialism [26,27]. As Louis Chude-Sokei [28] has argued, the debate in literature and popular culture about whether robots are -or could become -sentient parallels, with eerie precision, the historical debate about whether Africans might have souls.…”