Photo credits to Cydney Scott.

Prominent Boston University Professor of English and African American Studies Louis Chude-Sokei will publish a new book that explores the synchronous evolution of blackness and artificial intelligence. Titled Machines of Flesh and Blood: How Race Made Technology, the nonfiction book will be published in 2025 by Viking.

According to Publisher’s Marketplace, Chude-Sokei’s new work is a “cultural history of race and technology that makes a paradigm-shifting case for how our ideas about Blackness and AI have evolved together and what that means for the world tomorrow.”

Machines of Flesh and Blood promises to be an exciting read for those interested in the links between race and technology! The UK rights to the book have been sold to Bonnier Books UK at auction.

Along with being a Boston University faculty member and scholar, Louis Chude-Sokei is also the director of the African American and Black Diaspora Studies Program at the university. He was born in Nigeria, grew up in Jamaica and the United States, and currently lives in Boston.

He has published many books including The Last Darky: Bert Williams, Black on Black Minstrelsy and the African Diaspora (2006) which was a finalist for both the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the George Freedley Award, The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics (2016), and the recent memoir Floating in A Most Peculiar Way (2021).

Congrats to Chude-Sokei on the new book!