A Will for the Machine : Computerization, Automation, and the Arts in South Africa

Sanders, Mark

University of Chicago Press（2025/12発売）

• 製本 Hardcover:ハードカバー版／ページ数 256 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9780226844602

Full Description

This study takes up the relations among computerization, labor, and the arts in South Africa.

There are many books about the history and discourses of computerization in the United States but relatively little about these phenomena anywhere in the Global South. In A Will for the Machine, Mark Sanders outlines South Africa's entry into the computer age in the 1960s and '70s and explains how it coincided with the high point of apartheid. South Africa's government viewed automation and computerization as one way of barring Black Africans from skilled work and reserving it for whites. Sanders unpacks this peculiar history, relates it to early twentieth-century struggles around mechanization in mining and telephony in South Africa, and analyzes responses to it by the writers Miriam Tlali (1933-2017) and J. M. Coetzee (b. 1940), the artist William Kentridge (b. 1955), and Handspring Puppet Company. Showing how the arts realize ideas about the ethics and politics of automation, Sanders contributes to debates about locally divergent understandings of computer technology and human-computer interaction.

Contents

List of Figures

Introduction
1 The Meaning of Automation
2 Computer Poetry
3 Race and Labor, Women and Machines
4 The Puppet Theater
Conclusion

Acknowledgments
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index