Race in Cyberspace

Race in Cyberspace. Kolko, Beth E., Lisa Nakamura, and Gilbert B. Rodman, eds. New York and London: Routledge, 2000.

CONTENTS listed here:

Reviewed briefly by Alondra Nelson and Thuy Linh N. Tu on line in Politics and Culture, 2001, Issue 1 (published 10 August 2010). Reviewed at greater length by Doris Dewitt, "Race Space," Science Fiction Studies #90 = 30.2 (July 2003): 323-26, our initial and primary source.

From the Politics and Culture review: As the editors make clear, thinking about “race” only in terms of zeros and ones - or “black and white” - is a limited way of understanding the complexities of real and virtual life in the 21st century.

The essays in this noteworthy collection challenge this Manichean logic from diverse perspectives, including textual analysis, participant observation, media analysis, and critical theory; each chapter works in its own way to bring into relief the racial politics of cyberculture. Race in Cyberspace is the first concerted effort to tackle the dearth of research, writing and theorizing about race in the emerging discourses of cyberculture, and similarly important, among the first to systematically expose a presumption of what one contributor terms ”cyberwhiteness” in existing scholarship. Contributors provide many examples of why race matters as much, if differently, online, as it does offline. (Alondra Nelson and Thuy Linh N. Tu)

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============== From Dewitt's "Race Space" review in SFS, opening, starting with a headnote:

“There is no race. There is no gender. There is no age. There are no infirmities. There are only minds. Utopia? No, Internet.”

This voice-over from the (in)famous mid-1990s MCI television commercial, “Anthem,” becomes a refrain among the twelve essays that constitute Race and Cyberspace. Although not quite a dystopian treatment of the Internet, the volume as a whole is conceived as a contribution to the growing body of scholarship that challenges such uncritical celebrations of cyberspace as a zone free of racism, sexism, and other modes of oppression. [... The editors] justify their particular focus on race — as opposed to gender, age, “infirmities,” etc. — by pointing out that while substantial work already exists on gender and cyberspace, race has by contrast been largely unexamined. Whiteness, as a result, has too often become the default setting of the Internet, not just for programmers and users but for technoculture scholars as well. (pp. 323-24)

Dewitt notes that the essays "consistently approach both race and cyberspace from a social constructionist perspective" (p. 324), in a substantial set of venues, handling such topics as David Crane's argument "that blackness becomes a signifier of the 'real' in such films as Virtuosity and Strange Days"; Tara McPherson on neoConfederates on the Web in the intriguingly titled, "I'll take my Stand in Dixie-Net: White Guys, the South, and Cyberspace"; and "the racist subject position imposed on users of the computer game Shadow Warrior discussed in "The Revenge of the Yellowfaced Cyborg: The Rape of Digital Geishas and the Colonization of Cyber-Coolies in [...] Shadow Warrior," an essay by Jeffrey A. Ow (p. 325 [we have corrected a typo in the SFS review]).

RDE, Initial Compiler, 17 July 2019