Mark Dery | |
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 Mark Dery | |
| Born | (1959-12-24)December 24, 1959 (age 65) Braintree, Massachusetts |
| Occupation | Cultural critic, freelance journalist, lecturer |
| Nationality | American |
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Mark Dery (born December 24, 1959)[1] is an American writer, lecturer andcultural critic. An early observer and critic of online culture, he helped to popularize the term "culture jamming" and is generally credited with having coined the term "Afrofuturism" in his essay "Black to the Future" in the anthologyFlame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture.[2] He writes about media and visual culture, especially fringe elements of culture for a wide variety of publications, fromRolling Stone toBoingBoing.
Dery was born inBoston,Massachusetts. He grew up inChula Vista, California.[3] He earned aB.A. fromOccidental College in 1982. He is ofAnglo-Irish-Scottish descent with some distantFrench ancestry.[4]
From 2001 to 2009, Dery taughtmedia criticism,literary journalism, and the essay in the Department of Journalism atNew York University.[5]
In January 2000, he was appointed Chancellor's Distinguished Fellow at theUniversity of California, Irvine.[6] In the summer of 2009, he was a scholar in residence at the American Academy in Rome, Italy.[7] In 2017, he taught "Dark Aesthetics" (the Gothic, the Grotesque, the Uncanny, the Abject, and other transgressive aesthetics) at Yale University.[8]
An early contributor to the study ofcyberculture and the cultural effects of the digital age, Dery has written forThe New York Times Magazine,The Atlantic Monthly,The Washington Post,Lingua Franca,The Village Voice,Rolling Stone,Spin,Wired,Salon.com,BoingBoing, andCabinet, among other publications. Dery’s books include monographs such asEscape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century (1996) as well as the edited anthologyFlame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (1994) and a collection of essays,I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-By Essays on American Dread, American Dreams (2012). BothEscape Velocity andI Must Not Think Bad Thoughts have been translated into other languages.
In 1990, Dery'sNew York Times article "The Merry Pranksters and the Art of the Hoax" offered an early discussion in the mainstream media of the practice of "cultural jamming" by an emergent generation of activists.[9]
InFlame Wars, Dery wonders, in an essay titled "Black to the Future," why "so few African-Americans write science fiction, a genre whose close encounters with the Other – the stranger in a strange land – would seem uniquely suited to the concerns of African-American novelists?"[2] In the piece, Dery interviews three African-American thinkers —science fiction writerSamuel R. Delany, writer and musicianGreg Tate, andcultural criticTricia Rose — about different critical dimensions ofAfrofuturism, and it is in his introductory essay to "Black to the Future" that Dery coins the term 'Afrofuturism', which now figures prominently in studies of black technoculture.[2] He defines it as:
Speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth- century technoculture — and, more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future — might, for want of a better term, be called Afro futurism.[2]
Dery's essay "Cotton Candy Autopsy: Deconstructing Psycho Killer Clowns" inThe Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink (1999) is his close reading of the "evil clown" meme.
In 2018, Dery released a biography of the artist and illustratorEdward Gorey, entitledBorn to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey. Widely reviewed,[10][11][12][13][14][15] the book is the first biography of the eccentric figure, putting Gorey's idiosyncratic creations into a more personal context.[16]
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