Toward the end of the nineteenth century, understandings of the human body underwent a radical revision. With the advent of new medical technologies that could perceive corporeal interiors, such as the ophthalmoscope (1847) and the X-ray (1895), bodies became subject to new regimes of perception. Scientists began to view the body in terms of thermodynamics, and Frederick Winslow Taylor’s scientific management sought to economise physical labour, while inventions such as the typewriter (1873), phonograph (1877) and cinema (1891) began to incorporate bodies into new media environments. As the techniques of mass production formalised by Henry Ford spread across the globe, the manufacture of new technologies of mobility like the car and the aeroplane produced a more interconnected world. Each of these phenomena participated in the recasting of racial relations and ideologies: the X-ray, for example, was used for ‘epilation’ (cosmetic hair removal) to clear ‘dark shadow[s]’ from ambiguous skin colour, participating in the technological ‘refashioning of white racial identity’ (Herzig 2005: 162–3). New media pluralised methods of bodily and cultural transmission, from the commercialisation of recorded African American music (‘race records’) in the interwar period to ethnographic sound recordings and cinematic depictions of the body. Taylorism depended upon implicit beliefs about racial and national aptitudes; Fordism utilised neo-colonial theories of ‘race development’.

Despite these confluences, scholars now recognise that, as Bruce Sinclair notes, ‘The history of race in America has been written as if technologies scarcely existed, and the history of technology as if it were utterly innocent of racial significance’ (2004: 1). Although scholars like Rayvon Fouché (2005) and Alondra Nelson (2002), and fields including Afrofuturism, have gone to great lengths to address such gaps, modernist studies has produced little comparable work. Pioneering studies of modernism and technology by Tim Armstrong (1998) and Sara Danius (2002), for example, make few references to race or racial identity, despite their investment in the ‘socially constructed’ meanings and perceptions of the body (Armstrong 1998: 4). This is one symptom of what Michael Bibby calls the ‘racial formation of modernist studies’, which ‘overwhelmingly focuses on white authors’, even as the ‘new modernist studies’ have sought to produce a more inclusive field (2013: 486).