In God and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology, Adrienne Mayor opens up ancient history to new interpretations by adopting a rather capacious definition of technology, one that many scholars of the ancient world—according to Mayor—may reject out of hand. Focusing on biotechne, or artificial life, Mayor accepts any figure from the texts and artifacts of the ancient world which was “made, not born” as a technological creation. Mayor argues that ancient cultural constructions of technology were less about the inner workings of a black box (e.g., a giant metal robot) than about the imagining of such things existing in the first place. In nine chapters, Mayor recasts various myths and figures of the ancient Greek world in this new light. Gods and Robots serves as an important step in revealing how the idea of technology has functioned in ways both mythic and material from the beginning of recorded history.
Keyword: cultural history
Review of Being Muslim: A Cultural History of Women of Color in American Islam by Sylvia Chan-Malik (NYU Press)
Sylvia Chan-Malik’s Being Muslim argues that Muslim women of color in the United States have historically engaged with Islam as concurrent rejoinders to systemic racism and those national and cultural patriarchies directed against them. Chan-Malik centers the divergent experiences and insurgent faith practices of women of color, particularly African American women, within the fundamental character of Islam in the 20th and 21st US. Through the juxtaposition of multiple methodologies—archival, discursive, affective, and oral historical—Chan-Malik follows her subjects’ complex lives rather than inserting them within expedient political or academic discourses that often subsume the intersectional politics of US women in Islam.