BiblioVault - Books about Nanotechnology

Black behind the Ears

Dominican Racial Identity from Museums to Beauty Shops

Ginetta E. B. Candelario

Duke University Press, 2007

Black behind the Ears is an innovative historical and ethnographic examination of Dominican identity formation in the Dominican Republic and the United States. For much of the Dominican Republic’s history, the national body has been defined as “not black,” even as black ancestry has been grudgingly acknowledged. Rejecting simplistic explanations, Ginetta E. B. Candelario suggests that it is not a desire for whiteness that guides Dominican identity discourses and displays. Instead, it is an ideal norm of what it means to be both indigenous to the Republic (indios) and “Hispanic.” Both indigeneity and Hispanicity have operated as vehicles for asserting Dominican sovereignty in the context of the historically triangulated dynamics of Spanish colonialism, Haitian unification efforts, and U.S. imperialism. Candelario shows how the legacy of that history is manifest in contemporary Dominican identity discourses and displays, whether in the national historiography, the national museum’s exhibits, or ideas about women’s beauty. Dominican beauty culture is crucial to efforts to identify as “indios” because, as an easily altered bodily feature, hair texture trumps skin color, facial features, and ancestry in defining Dominicans as indios.

Candelario draws on her participant observation in a Dominican beauty shop in Washington Heights, a New York City neighborhood with the oldest and largest Dominican community outside the Republic, and on interviews with Dominicans in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Santo Domingo. She also analyzes museum archives and displays in the Museo del Hombre Dominicano and the Smithsonian Institution as well as nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European and American travel narratives.

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Mondo Nano

Fun and Games in the World of Digital Matter

Colin Milburn

Duke University Press, 2015

In Mondo Nano Colin Milburn takes his readers on a playful expedition through the emerging landscape of nanotechnology, offering a light-hearted yet critical account of our high-tech world of fun and games. This expedition ventures into discussions of the first nanocars, the popular video games Second Life, Crysis, and BioShock, international nanosoccer tournaments, and utopian nano cities. Along the way, Milburn shows how the methods, dispositions, and goals of nanotechnology research converge with video game culture. With an emphasis on play, scientists and gamers alike are building a new world atom by atom, transforming scientific speculations and video game fantasies into reality. Milburn suggests that the closing of the gap between bits and atoms entices scientists, geeks, and gamers to dream of a completely programmable future. Welcome to the wild world of Mondo Nano.

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Nanotechnologies

Michel Wautelet

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2009

How can single atoms be manipulated? Are the laws of physics still valid at the nanostructure scale? How could nanotechnologies help cure disease? What are the application fields of nanotechnologies and what ethical issues do they raise? These questions and many others are answered in this clearly presented, fascinating book.

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Nanovision

Engineering the Future

Colin Milburn

Duke University Press, 2008

The dawning era of nanotechnology promises to transform life as we know it. Visionary scientists are engineering materials and devices at the molecular scale that will forever alter the way we think about our technologies, our societies, our bodies, and even reality itself. Colin Milburn argues that the rise of nanotechnology involves a way of seeing that he calls “nanovision.” Trekking across the technoscapes and the dreamscapes of nanotechnology, he elaborates a theory of nanovision, demonstrating that nanotechnology has depended throughout its history on a symbiotic relationship with science fiction. Nanotechnology’s scientific theories, laboratory instruments, and research programs are inextricable from speculative visions, hyperbolic rhetoric, and fictional narratives.

Milburn illuminates the practices of nanotechnology by examining an enormous range of cultural artifacts, including scientific research articles, engineering textbooks, laboratory images, popular science writings, novels, comic books, and blockbuster films. In so doing, he reveals connections between the technologies of visualization that have helped inaugurate nano research, such as the scanning tunneling microscope, and the prescient writings of Robert A. Heinlein, James Blish, and Theodore Sturgeon. He delves into fictive and scientific representations of “gray goo,” the nightmare scenario in which autonomous nanobots rise up in rebellion and wreak havoc on the world. He shows that nanoscience and “splatterpunk” novels share a violent aesthetic of disintegration: the biological body is breached and torn asunder only to be refabricated as an assemblage of self-organizing machines. Whether in high-tech laboratories or science fiction stories, nanovision deconstructs the human subject and galvanizes the invention of a posthuman future.

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Neurotechnology and the End of Finitude

Michael Haworth

University of Minnesota Press, 2018

A bold philosophical investigation into technology and the limits of the human

A daring, original work of philosophical speculation, Neurotechnology and the End of Finitude mounts a sustained investigation into the possibility that human beings may technologically overcome the transcendental limits of possible experience and envisages what such a transition would look like. Focusing on emergent neurotechnologies, which establish a direct channel of communication between brain and machine, Michael Haworth argues that such technologies intervene at the border between interiority and exteriority, offering the promise of immediacy and the possibility of the mind directly affecting the outside world or even other minds.

Through detailed, targeted readings of Kant, Freud, Heidegger, Croce, Jung, and Derrida, Haworth explores the effect of this transformation on human creativity and our relationships with others. He pursues these questions across four distinct but interrelated spheres: the act of artistic creation and the potential for a technologically enabled coincidence of idea and object; the possibility of humanity achieving the infinite creativity that Kant attributed only to God; the relationship between the psyche and the external world in Freudian psychoanalysis and Jungian analytical psychology; and the viability and impact of techno-telepathic communication.

Addressing readers interested in contemporary continental philosophy and philosophy of technology, media and communications, and science and technology studies, Neurotechnology and the End of Finitude critically envisions a plausible posthuman future.

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