Adriano Elia, Serena I. Volpi, "Blacknology. Black Literature, Culture, and Technology"

As one of the rare academic endeavors to tackle Black Studies in Italy, the volume presented here stands out as a successful effort to provide scholars and students with a comprehensive overview of the cultural production by the Black diaspora. And it does so, as indicated on the book cover, by exploring the intersection between Black culture and technology – hence the title, Blacknology – in a wide array of texts, cultural movements, media productions, and literary genres, across a time span of forty years, from the early 1980s up until today. In a time when digital technology is rapidly morphing from an advantageous tool in the hands of humans into a “potentially threatening” (8) power structure owned by just a handful of individuals, reading and understanding how the Black community sought to appropriate historically repressive technologies, own them, and transform them into emancipatory cultural productions is of capital importance.