The American Automaton: Racial Capitalism’s Ideal Minority

Abstract

Posthumanist and multispeciesist scholars have embraced the idea that AI and robots should be seen as more than profit making entities. However, a wider acceptance of this paradigm shift will require confronting the reality that society’s devaluing of AI is not just a production of humanist values, but of racist ones. My paper traces the trajectory of the automaton from relative glory, as objects of either religious devotion or amusement, to their sharp turn toward laborers after the end of the Civil War. Studying both the real and literary automatons with black features that emerged in America during this period alongside the voices of black Americans like Frederick Douglass, I demonstrate how society’s ability to imagine the once-lauded creations was compromised first by their racialization as black during Reconstruction. I position the automatons made in this delicate period between the end of slavery and the beginning of the Second Industrial Revolution as a result of both white society’s need to craft its identity against a fully subordinate, inhuman other, and capitalism’s desire for unpaid labor.