Mark Dery


Mark Dery is an American author, lecturer and cultural 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 anthology Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture. He writes about media and visual culture, especially fringe elements of culture for a wide variety of publications, from Rolling Stone to BoingBoing.

Early life and education

Dery was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He grew up in Chula Vista, California. He earned a B.A. from Occidental College in 1982. He is of Anglo-Irish-Scottish descent with some distant French ancestry.

Teaching

From 2001 to 2009, Dery taught media criticism, literary journalism, and the essay in the Department of Journalism at New York University.
In January 2000, he was appointed Chancellor's Distinguished Fellow at the University of California, Irvine. In the summer of 2009, he was a scholar in residence at the American Academy in Rome, Italy. In 2017, he taught "Dark Aesthetics" at Yale University.

Writing career

An early contributor to the study of cyberculture and the cultural effects of the digital age, Dery has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, The Washington Post, Lingua Franca, The Village Voice, Rolling Stone, Spin, Wired, Salon.com, BoingBoing, and Cabinet, among other publications. Dery’s books include monographs such as Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century as well as the edited anthology Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture and a collection of essays, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-By Essays on American Dread, American Dreams. Both Escape Velocity and I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts have been translated into other languages.
In 1990, Dery's New 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.
In Flame 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?" In the piece, Dery interviews three African-American thinkers — science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany, writer and musician Greg Tate, and cultural critic Tricia Rose — about different critical dimensions of Afrofuturism, 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. 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."
Dery's essay "Cotton Candy Autopsy: Deconstructing Psycho Killer Clowns" in The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink is his close reading of the "evil clown" meme.
In 2018, Dery released a biography of the artist and illustrator Edward Gorey, entitled Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey. Widely reviewed, the book is the first biography of the eccentric figure, putting Gorey's idiosyncratic creations into a more personal context.

Books