Post-soul futurama: African American cultural politics and early Detroit techno

Techno is a globally successful genre of electronic dance music that can trace its origins to Detroit in the early 1980s, but it has been generally overlooked in academic, historical and critical analyses of 1980s African American music in the United States. This study will consider the cultural context of early techno, its relationship to European electronic music, the birth of the ‘techno’ genre in the UK, the founding myths and histories of techno, and its potential for helping us understand transformations in African American cultural politics in the ‘postsoul’ era.