Technology and Culture

Since historian of technology Bruce Sinclair's pronouncement that "the history of race in America has been written as if technologies scarcely existed, and the history of technology as if it were utterly innocent of racial significance" (Technology and the African-American Experience, 2004), scholarship on the relations between race and technology has proliferated, driven by a desire to flesh out the ways in which African Americans played hugely significant roles in the history of American technology, from the nineteenth century to the present, breaking ground as scientists and mathematicians, astronauts and aviators, and inventors and investors, among work in countless other fields. In short, the last two decades have seen accounts of Black contributions to American science and technology, finally, break wide open.

But such work has also given way to scholarship in the history of technology that refuses to treat the categories of race and technology as fundamentally separate, instead pushing to trace the imbrications of technology and race in fruitful ways. W. H. K. Chun, for instance, considers race as technology, tracing how historically race has been used to marshal logics of comparison and sorting. This shift from what Chun calls the what to the how of race also motivates Robert J. Topinka's Racing the Street (2020), in which he interrogates the ways "race as a technology gathers, sorts, and assembles particularities into manageable networks." In rhetorical terms, Topinka explains, "race responds to a crisis in metonymy; as the relationship between the part and whole breaks down, race supplies resources for the [End Page 367] canon of arrangement" that, sadly, "persist [in] tropes that sustain modern social arrangements."

Written with these predecessors in mind and attempting to complicate the urtexts of the American railway pastoral like Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden (1964), Miriam Thaggert's Riding Jane Crow breaks new ground, using the advent of the American railroad system both as a lens for analyzing how race functions as a "set of techniques, practices, and materials that … make the particular body recognizable, analyzable, and archivable within the totality" (p. 10) and how Black women negotiated these techniques as mostly racist onslaughts that compromised their mobility, freedom, and often safety.

Thaggert's thoroughly researched work interrogates the railroad as an "overlooked dimension of U.S. travel," focusing on the "material and psychic costs of gender and racial discrimination" that "segregated travel created for Black women" (p. 18). Following the work of Black luminaries Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, Ida B. Wells, and Pauli Murray, Thaggert reveals the dominant trope of Black women's travel: paralepsis, a method of "emphasizing a point by claiming not to discuss it," which allowed these women to address the unspeakable experiences of racism that each encountered on the American railroad. Paralepsis reveals Black women's "embarrassment [at] not receiving the respectability they expected" and that their first-class tickets presumably guaranteed (p. 18).

In addition to tracing the railway experiences of such powerful Black women, Thaggert importantly gives sway to the materiality of the railway experience, exploring baggage and boxcars, conduct manuals for Black women travelers, the expectations and treatment of Pullman maids, the racial dynamics of the first-class car, and various larger theoretical and historical discussions about the democratic implications of Black women's mobility in the nineteenth century. Thaggert's book does double duty. It investigates what she calls a "twin occurrence," at once arguing that the "nation's mechanical trajectory 'forward' is entwined with the attempted retrenchment of African American social progress" (p. 4), particularly as it manifested in the articulation of Black female identities that were tied up in negotiating "mobility in the face of constraint" (p. 14). In sum, then, Thaggert's exhaustive archival research and emphasis on the complex overlapping of identity and materiality in Black women's experience offers a powerful and much-needed corrective of Leo Marx's and Wolfgang Schivelbusch's whitewashed versions of the American railroad imaginary...