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Chapter 2 - Black Steam

Patents, Portals, and the Counterhistories of the Victorian Android

from Part I - Mechanical Automata

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 March 2024

Suzy Anger
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia, Vancouver
Thomas Vranken
Affiliation:
University of the South Pacific
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Summary

One of the earliest patents for an automaton in Victorian America was for a steam-powered android, drawn as a caricature of a Black man. Most histories of the so-called Steam Man tend to treat this automaton in one of two ways: Historians of science have addressed the machine indirectly, drawing general connections between Victorian Black androids, white femininity, and imputed inferiority; literary and cultural studies have addressed the Steam Man directly as a product of Reconstruction-era white anxiety over free Black labor. In this chapter, we argue for a different way of understanding the Steam Man and other Victorian Black automata, one that sees them as concealing historical truths about the Black technological self in nineteenth-century America. We follow a counterhistory of the mechanics that underpinned Black automata and show that, although androids like the Steam Man portrayed Black people in pastoral, leisurely, and nontechnological roles, their reliance on blackface minstrelsy ultimately concealed the intimate relationships between Black Victorian Americans, contemporary technologies, and the self

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Chapter
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Victorian Automata
Mechanism and Agency in the Nineteenth Century
, pp. 48 - 69
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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