Overview

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.

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Reviews

“In the sea of AI slop, A Will for the Machine is our life raft. Rejecting the hype and generalities that normally encrust discussions of automation, Sanders offers us historical depth and cultural specificity. He nimbly navigates across disciplines, forms, and decades to delineate the ways in which literature and the arts mediate local understandings of technology. Erudite, perceptive, and lively, this book shows what is possible when writing on machines.” * Rebecca Roach, University of Birmingham * “Sanders sets out to consider the history of automation in South African society by reading a series of writers’ and art-makers’ works for their engagement with automation per se and its attendant social consequences. Focusing on one national context allows Sanders to point toward larger payoffs for studies of automation and culture more broadly. This is a characteristically ambitious project, executed with sophistication, that will appeal broadly to scholars of race, gender, performance, and visual arts across the Global South.” * Andrew van der Vlies, Adelaide University *

Author Information

Mark Sanders is professor of comparative literature and English at New York University and extraordinary professor of Afrikaans and Dutch at Stellenbosch University. He is the author of four books, including Learning Zulu: A Secret History of Language in South Africa, Ambiguities of Witnessing: Law and Literature in the Time of a Truth Commission, and Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid.

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