Echoing the Echoes: Technopoetics in Dub

In the African diaspora, Jamaica is one of the primary spaces where the discourse of racial or cultural roots becomes sutured to technology and where the political legacies of race, slavery, and imperialism become enshrined in the public sphere of popular music alongside dreams of sex, escape, and concordant notions of transformation. This is at the core of what the author calls a “black technopoetics,” central to the long history of interactions between race and technology, from industrialism and slavery to Afrofuturism and artificial intelligence. This essay, in response to the generous and generative prodding of Wayne Marshall and Tsitsi Ella Jaji, allows the author to further explicate its roots in response to traditional notions of “roots” and emergent discourses of black futurity.