Copyright Allison Masangkay ©
All rights reserved.
Do Androids Dream In Color?:
Phenohype Is A Cyborg
Published by Phenohype | September 15, 2020
Order Now:
Phenohype Shop | Smashwords
ABOUT THE BOOK
Do Androids Dream in Color? is a series of vignettes, each exploring a life experience that has shaped Allison Masangkay / Phenohype’s identity as a sick and disabled queer Filipinx femme artist. This visionary book combines essays, theory, speculative fiction, sounds, and visuals to analyze and interrelate Phenohype’s joys, traumas, and ruminations alongside their proximity to whiteness as a young non-Black, Filipinx being.
Covering topics such as popular culture, racial capitalism, family, friendship, and grief, each piece illustrates how systems of oppression among humans’ relationships with each other are reproduced when humans engage with technology, and vice versa. They cite knowledge of Black, Indigenous, and people of color to navigate spaces where they encounter white supremacy—including the DJ booth, their childhood home, social media, or their own body.
Phenohype’s literary debut urges us to begin reflecting on the technology and power we all embody, to begin manifesting better futures for each and every one of us.
Order Now: Phenohype Shop | Smashwords
CONTRIBUTORS
Photography by Sonia Xu
Visual art by DanteZoë, Jonathan Soren Davidson, Coley Curry, and Allison Masangkay
Sound art by Candex Seokyi Louie, Nic Masangkay, and Allison Masangkay
PRAISE
"In Allison Masangkay's Do Androids Dream In Color?: Phenohype Is A Cyborg, the future is neither utopian or dystopian, or even separated from now. But the takedown of the artificial binary—whether it be the code that builds the digital world, the codes that classify humans, the codes that justify and reinforce power—is merely the starting point. Beyond that, a sharp, intricate, vulnerable dive into art, music, trauma, healing, power and pain through a Filipinx lens emerges, providing what I hope will become a blueprint for BIPOC agency in a technological landscape through storytelling and reimagining ourselves outside the ones and zeroes."
— Geo Quibuyen (aka Prometheus Brown), Blue Scholars & Beatrock Music rapper, Hood Famous Bakeshop co-founder
"Allison Masangkay’s (pronouns: she/they) book, Do Androids Dream in Color?: Phenohype is a Cyborg, challenges me to think about race in different ways. Masangkay takes me with her viewing race as technology, a man-made construct that can be manipulated, hacked, and decoded. She pushes me to imagine new realities completely outside of white supremacist systems, pulling from both Indigenous and Filipinx frameworks to create a new lens on issues like mental health and chronic pain. Her words introduce me to the world of Afrofuturism and her music, accessed by scanning QR codes with your phone at certain parts of the book, fills my ears with electronic music that includes samples of traditional Filipinx instruments. To dive into Masangkay’s work is to have a multimedia experience where I get to live a reality that fully embodies a Brown life free of oppression.
What I connected to most in Masangkay’s book is her clarity interrogating race as a Non-Black Person of Color. They mindfully reflect on developing DJ practices that divest from racial capitalism while also modeling accountability practices to oppose the Black cultural appropriation that is too common in the music industry. At age 25, Masangkay is grappling with systemic concepts at a level I had no real understanding of at the same age. Seeing the tools, language, and knowledge the next generation has to have these conversations gives me a lot of hope for the future and what Filipinx American voices can contribute to it."
— Jasmine Pulido, writer-activist (via The South Seattle Emerald)