abstract: This essay argues that southern African American writers criticized and warned against unchecked technological advancement in their fiction, offering ways to protest or subvert narratives that connected whiteness and progress. Dominant narratives of technological progress in the American South often depict white people as the primary drivers and users of modern technology and depict technology as an unequivocal social good. Charles Chesnutt and Zora Neale Hurston notably employ tropes of hauntings in and around mills as resistance to a pattern of Black people's labor and identities being consumed by the industrial system.
Kaitlyn Smith (Thu,) studied this question.