Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T12:19:57.780Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Cyberrace

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Lisa Nakamura
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Remember cyber? surely one of the most irritating and ubiquitous prefixes of the nineties, cyber quickly became attached to all kinds of products (the Sony Cybershot camera), labor styles (cybercommuting), and communicative practices (cyberspace) that have now become so normalized as already digital that the prefix has dropped out of the language. Photography, work, and social discourse no longer need be flagged as cyber since we can more or less assume that in postindustrial, informationalized societies they usually are. Cyber migrated widely during the nineties, but the legal scholar Jerry Kang's article “Cyber-race,” which appeared in the Harvard Law Review in 2000, was the first to attach this prefix to race. Kang answers the question “can cyberspace change the very way that race structures our daily lives?” with an affirmative: “race and racism are already in cyberspace.” He then proposes three potential “design strategies” for lawmakers to deal with the problem of race and racism in cyberspace: the abolitionist approach, in which users take advantage of the Internet's anonymity as a means of preventing racism by hiding race; the integrationist approach, in which race is made visible in online social discourse; and the most radical one, the transmutation approach. Strategies for transmuting race in cyberspace reprise some of the discourse about identity and performativity that was often associated with Judith Butler—“it seeks racial pseudonymity, or cyber-passing, in order to disrupt the very notion of racial categories. By adopting multiple racialized identities in cyberspace, identities may slowly dissolve the one-to-one relationship between identity and the physical body” (1206).

Type
The Changing Profession
Information
PMLA , Volume 123 , Issue 5: Special Topic Comparative Racialization , October 2008 , pp. 1673 - 1682
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 by The Modern Language Association of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Abbate, Janet. Inventing the Internet. Cambridge: MIT P, 1999.Google Scholar
Aneesh, A. Virtual Migration: The Programming of Globalization. Durham: Duke UP, 2006.Google Scholar
Bailey, Cameron. “Virtual Skin: Articulating Race in Cyberspace.” Trend 334–46.Google Scholar
Banks, Adam J. Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground. NCTE-LEA Research Ser. in Literacy and Composition. Mahwah: Erlbaum; Urbana: Natl. Council of Teachers of English, 2006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bell, David, and Kennedy, Barbara M., eds. The Cybercultures Reader. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2007.Google Scholar
Boler, Megan. “Hypes, Hopes, and Actualities: New Digital Cartesianism and Bodies in Cyberspace.” New Media and Society 9.1 (2007): 139–68.Google Scholar
Castronova, Edward. Synthetic Worlds: The Business of Culture and of Online Games. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005.Google Scholar
Chun, Wendy. Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics. Cambridge: MIT P, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chun, Wendy Hui, and Keenan, Thomas. New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader. New York: Routledge, 2006.Google Scholar
Cisco Systems, Inc. “The Human Network.” Cisco. 21 May 2008 <http://www.cisco.com/web/about/humannetwork/>..>Google Scholar
Consalvo, Mia. Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames. Cambridge: MIT P, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dibbell, Julian. “A Rape in Cyberspace.” Scribble, Scribble, Scribble: Selected Texts, Published and Unpublished. 23 Dec. 1993. 11 June 2008 <http://www.juliandibbell.com/texts/bungle_vv.html>.Google Scholar
Ellison, Nicole, and Boyd, Danah. “Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship.” Journal of Computer Mediated Communication 13.1 (2007). 11 June 2008 <http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1>.Google Scholar
Everett, Anna. Learning Race and Ethnicity: Youth and Digital Media. John D. and Catherine T. Macarthur Foundation Ser. on Digital Media and Learning. Cambridge: MIT P, 2007.Google Scholar
Foster, Tom. The Souls of Cyberfolk: Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2005.Google Scholar
Fusco, Coco. The Bodies That Were Not Ours and Other Writings. London: Routledge, in collaboration with inIVA, Inst. of Intl. Visual Arts, 2001.Google Scholar
Galloway, Alexander. “Starcraft; or, Balance.” Grey Room (2007): 86–107.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gonzalez, Jennifer. “The Appended Subject: Race and Identity as Digital Assemblage.” Kolko, Nakamura, and Rodman 27–50.Google Scholar
Guins, Raiford, and Cruz, Omayra Zaragoza. Popular Culture: A Reader. London: Sage, 2005.Google Scholar
Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Routledge, 1991.Google Scholar
Kang, Jerry. “Cyber-race.” Harvard Law Review 113 (2000): 1130–208.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kaplan, Caren. “Transporting the Subject: Technologies of Mobility and Location in an Era of Globalization.” PMLA 117 (2002): 32–42.Google Scholar
Kolko, Beth E., Nakamura, Lisa, and Rodman, Gilbert B. Race in Cyberspace. New York: Routledge, 2000.Google Scholar
Lee, Rachel C., and Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia. Asian America.Net: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Cyberspace. New York: Routledge, 2003.Google Scholar
Lovink, Geert. Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture. New York: Routledge, 2007.Google Scholar
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT P, 2001.Google Scholar
McGahan, Christopher. Racing Cybercultures: Minoritarian Art and Cultural Politics on the Internet. Routledge Studies in New Media and Cyberculture. New York: Routledge, 2007.Google Scholar
Miller, Toby. “Gaming for Beginners.” Games and Culture 1.1 (2006): 5–12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. The Visual Culture Reader. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2002.Google Scholar
Nakamura, Lisa. Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet. New York: Routledge, 2002.Google Scholar
Nakamura, Lisa. Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007.Google Scholar
Nakamura, Lisa. “Race in/for Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet.” Works and Days 13.1–2 (1995): 181–93.Google Scholar
Nelson, Alondra. “Introduction: Future Texts.” Social Text 20.2 (2002): 1–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nelson, Alondra, and Tu, Tuy, with Hines, Alicia. Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life. New York: New York UP, 2001.Google Scholar
O'Reilly, Tim. “What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software.” O'Reilly. 30 Sept. 2005. 1 May 2008 <http://oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html>.Google Scholar
Patterson, Zabet. “Going On-line: Consuming Pornography in the Digital Era.” Porn Studies. Ed. Williams, Linda. Durham: Duke UP, 2004. 105–23.Google Scholar
Raessens, Joost, and Goldstein, Jeffrey H. Handbook of Computer Game Studies. Cambridge: MIT P, 2005.Google Scholar
Shah, Rajiv C., and Kesan, Jay P. “The Privatization of the Internet's Backbone Network.” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 51.1 (2007): 93–109.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shimizu, Celine Parreñas. The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene. Durham: Duke UP, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Silver, David. “Margins in the Wires: Looking for Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Blacksburg Electronic Village.” Kolko, Nakamura, and Rodman 133–50.Google Scholar
Terranova, Tiziana. “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy.” Social Text 18.2 (2000): 33–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Terranova, Tiziana. Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age. London: Pluto, 2007.Google Scholar
Trebay, Guy. “She's Famous (and So Can You).” New York Times 28 Oct. 2007. 5 June 2008 <http://www.nytimes.com>.Google Scholar
Trend, David. Reading Digital Culture. London: Blackwell, 2001.Google Scholar
Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon, 1995.Google Scholar
Williams, Patricia. Seeing a Colorblind Future: The Paradox of Race. New York: Noonday, 1997.Google Scholar