Background
Dery, Mark Alexander was born on December 24, 1959 in Boston, Massachusetts, United States, in the family of Jean-Paul and Leslie Ellen (Killam) Dery.
Dery, Mark Alexander was born on December 24, 1959 in Boston, Massachusetts, United States, in the family of Jean-Paul and Leslie Ellen (Killam) Dery.
Mark got his Bachelor in English Degree at Occidental College, Los Angeles, in 1982.
From 2001 to 2009, Mark 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 summer 2009, he was awarded a scholar-in-residence position at the American Academy in Rome, Italy.
Mark 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, "Suck.com", and Cabinet, among other publications. He has been a featured guestblogger on the pop-tech website Boing Boing.
Dery’s books include The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink and Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century, which has been translated into eight languages. He edited the anthology Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture and wrote the monograph Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of Signs.
An early writer on technoculture, Dery helped inaugurate cyberstudies as a field of serious inquiry with the anthology "Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture" (1994), which he edited. Flame Wars kick-started the academic interest in cyberfeminism and Afrofuturism, a term Dery coined in his essay "Black to the Future" (included in Flame Wars) and a key theoretical concept driving the now-established study of black technoculture.
In it, Mark 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 in an attempt to define the aesthetic. The essay is in part based on Henry Louis Gates's assertion that "he Afro-American tradition has been figurative from its beginnings. How could it have survived otherwise?"
“Church of the Subgenius.”
Mark describes himself as “Unrepentantly leftist.”
Quotations: My larger goal, as a writer, is to write a cultural criticism that combines the lapidary craftsmanship of J. G. Ballard, the mordant social satire of William S. Burroughs, the historiography of Mike Davis, and the deadeye aim of Noam Chomsky. Following in the footsteps of Georges Bataille, I’m interested in the unspeakable and the unthinkable—the unlit, unfre¬quented comers of society, the nethermost regions of the self: freaks, forensic pathology, psychopharma¬cology, the occult, true crime, conspiracy theory, cannibalism, madness, medical museums, Art Brut, weird science, sexual deviance, soft tissue modifica¬tion (by tribal peoples and postmodern primitives), creature features, alien abductions, Situationism, sur¬realism, science fiction, Satanic ritual abuse, the gro¬tesque, the carnivalesque—in short, extremes and excess of every sort. I want to induce, in my reader, the vertigo that comes from leaning too far over the edge of the cultural abyss.
Married Margot Sarah Mifflin on June 20, 1992. They have one child Thea Nicola.