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).

For me, entering this profession involved the broader context of native american and indigenous studies as well as native American literary studies. My scholarship, pedagogy, and professional connections have relied on a synergy between texts as Native authors have crafted them and the social, political, and experiential contexts from which those authors and their texts emerged. Though plenty of work in Native literary studies does not draw on the broader field of Native studies, my own approach has most often placed me firmly in the overlapping space between the two.

In his now classic essay of race discourse analysis, “race under representation,” David Lloyd observes that “the discourse of race … undergoes a crucial shift in the late eighteenth century from a system of arbitrary marks to the ascription of natural signs” (69). The consequent fetishistic obsession with phenotype and somatology holds hegemonic sway over discourses of racial difference from that moment up to the early 1900s and the 1920s, when anthropological relativism and the cultural pluralism of Horace Kallen and Robert Park (of the Chicago school) eclipse nineteenth-century biological racism, at least in the United States.

In her book Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination, avery gordon writes that “to study social life one must confront the ghostly aspects of it”—the experiential realities of social and political life that have been systematically hidden or erased. To confront the ghostly aspects of social life is to tell ghost stories: to pay attention to what modern history has rendered ghostly and to write into being the seething presence of the things that appear to be not there (Gordon 7–8). By most accounts, Vietnam was the site of one of the most brutal and destructive of the wars between Western imperial powers and the people of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Yet public discussions and commemorations of the Vietnam War in the United States often skip over this devastating history, thereby ignoring the war's costs borne by the Vietnamese—the lifelong costs that turn the 1975 “fall of Saigon” and the exodus from Vietnam into “the endings that are not over” (Gordon 195). Without creating an opening for a Vietnamese perspective of the war, these public deliberations refuse to remember Vietnam as a historical site, Vietnamese people as genuine subjects, and the Vietnam War as having any kind of integrity of its own (Desser).

Americans have grown up with the idea of race. Race, we are taught, is real because skin color, facial features, and other bodily attributes mark a person definitively as a member of a particular race. This claim is made despite the often astonishing physical differences among people said to belong to the same race or the necessarily arbitrary line drawn between races when the visibility test fails to produce any differences (thus allowing for the possibility of “passing”).

In his essay titled “Drawing Blood” for Harper's magazine in June 2006, written as a response to the Muhammad cartoon affair, Art Spiegelman argued convincingly that a cartoon is, first and foremost, a cartoon. It sounds straightforward, but is it really? Following Spiegelman, we can define caricatures as charged or loaded images that compress ideas into memorable icons, namely clichés. A cartoon must have a point, and a good cartoon can change our perspective on the ruling order. Spiegelman opens his discussion with classical caricatures such as Honoré Daumier's 1831 depiction of King Louis-Philippe as Gargantua and George Grosz's 1926 attack on the “Pillars of Society” (“Stützen der Gesellschaft”) as beer-drinking, pamphlet-reading, swastika-wearing men without brains. Spiegelman acknowledges these cartoonists as “masters of insult,” who often had to face trial or imprisonment for their transgressions (45). The question is whether the twelve cartoons of Muhammad, published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten on 30 September 2005, are in any way compatible with the great tradition of caricature.

Initiated in think tanks following world war II, neoliberalism took hold of political imaginaries in the late 1970s and the 1980s as capitalist enterprises vigorously sought to expand their market reach in the face of structural challenges and adjustments, economic and political. Technologies of travel, communication, and information flows became speedier and more sophisticated, further shrinking distances and compressing time. Associated regimes of population management and rule accordingly were pressed into forging novel strategies.

There was never anything merely black or white about brazilian notions of race and the differences attributable to it. IT IS easy to see today that the poor tend to be darker than those in the middle and upper classes and that those of darker color are most often poor. Yet there are dark-skinned persons in positions of power and prestige, and many whites live cheek by jowl with nonwhites, especially but not only in poor neighborhoods. Despite regional variations, Brazil is characterized by the complex interweaving of racial and social categories, making it hard to separate color from class as the predominant marker of differentiation. Racial identity has always been a tangled business, and in the past the existence of a finely ranked but permeable social order meant that society could absorb individual mobility without becoming egalitarian.

Over the last few decades, my work has been animated by the fundamental question, how can we make strange the universalist claims or assumptions of the epistemologies with which we work in order to reveal their cultural specificity? It is a question that also emerges in connection with modes of racialization. Thus, one should not simply compare types of racialization, as though they were commensurable, but ask what one can do to show the work these concepts perform in relation to specific histories and languages. My own familiar methods of articulating processes of racialization became thoroughly destabilized on a recent visit to India, where the functions of caste appeared to trump questions of racialization in critical discussions. But before entering this minefield of complexities and contradictions, let me summarize the previous work with which I've been associated.

How shall we face the enormous evidence of impersonation as a central cultural practice in the development of national discourses in the Americas?

It is well known that, in December 1773, a ship named Dartmouth sat idle in Boston Harbor, prevented from unloading her cargo by the governor in protest of the import tax and prevented from leaving the harbor by customs rules. As the customs period came to a close, a group of newly patriotic Bostonians came up with a plan to resolve the crisis. One historian recounts, “a chorus of Indian war whoops sounded outside the hall and a party of what looked like Indian men ran to the wharf, entered the ships, and proceeded to dump the tea in Boston Harbor” (Deloria 2). And the rest, as they say, was history: the Boston Tea Party has since functioned as favored tale of origin for American independence and national identity.