This course will be organized around a particular critical question: how can we articulate racial and ethnic formations, histories, or political and intellectual traditions with postmodern technoculture studies and its claims about the increasing technological mediation of embodiment in general within the contemporary media ecology? We will be interested both in understanding, critiquing, and redressing the relative lack of attention to questions of race within technoculture studies, while also considering the critical potential for work on race and ethnicity of the kinds of cultural changes associated with new media and communications technologies. The course will situate popular narratives and speculations about an emergent “posthuman” condition alongside postmodern critiques of humanist and liberal subjectivity. The readings for the course will be drawn from cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk science fiction, with a particular focus on interventions by writers of color, along with the responses of multicultural writers to new technologies and technocultural narratives. While the primary focus will be on American writers, we will include readings that open out onto global and post-colonial formations. Key critical texts for the course might include N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman; Paul Gilroy, Against Race; Lisa Nakamura, Cybertypes; and Troy Duster, Backdoor to Eugenics; along with essays by Donna Haraway, Stuart Hall, Harryette Mullen, Philip Brian Harper, Wendy Chun, Emily Apter, Alexander Weheliye, Hans Moravec, and Andy Clark. Fictional texts will most likely be chosen from the following list (please note we will not be reading all of these texts): Samuel R. Delany, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand; Octavia Butler, Dawn; Gwyneth Jones, White Queen; John Wright, The Golden Age; Geoff Ryman, Air; Bruce Sterling, Distraction; Ishmael Reed, Flight to Canada; Gerald Vizenor, Hotline Healers: An Almost Browne Novel; Guillermo Gomez-Pena, The New World Border and/or Dangerous Border-Crossers; Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist; Ruth L. Ozeki, My Year of Meats; along with stories by Ted Chiang, Mary Soon Lee, Nalo Hopkinson, Nisi Shawl, Jonathan Lethem, Paul Di Filippo, Charles Stross, and Cory Doctorow. We will spend some time on visual culture, possibly including films like The Matrix and Greg Pak’s Robot Stories, graphic novels such as the Transmetropolitan series, and some examples of new media art by Alex Rivera and/or the Mongrel collective. We will probably also spend some time on music, using Paul D. Miller/DJ Spooky’s book (and CD) Rhythm Science.