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A compelling history of how race and the automaton shaped American literary modernism.

Machines have long symbolized progress, efficiency, and the future. Yet in American literature and culture, they have also been central to a more complicated, insidious history. In Creatures of Habit, Joshua Lam uncovers how the figure of the human automaton became a powerful metaphor for race in the United States, revealing how technological modernity and racial thinking became intertwined.

From the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century, the book traces how ideas about instinct, habit, reflex, and automatism were entangled with scientific theories of race. Bringing the history of the human sciences into conversation with modernist literature, Lam shows how African American authors transformed the figure of the automaton from a tool of dehumanization into a forceful critique of white supremacy. Through original readings of works by W. E. B. Du Bois, Pauline Hopkins, Jean Toomer, and Gertrude Stein, among others, the book demonstrates how modernist writers reimagined the relationship between race, agency, and automatic behavior. Rather than accepting prevailing narratives of racial uplift or technological progress, these writers exposed how seemingly neutral conceptions of habit, labor, and industrialism reinforced racial hierarchies, even as they imagined new forms of resistance.

By reframing American modernism through African American literature and the history of science and technology, Creatures of Habit offers a fresh account of the movement's cultural foundations. Essential for scholars of Black studies, literary studies, critical race theory, modernism, science and technology studies, and American cultural history, the book illuminates how debates over automation and artificial intelligence are deeply rooted in the nation's literary and racial past.