Digitizing Race (Lisa Nakamura) – Review

Book Review – Lisa Nakamura (2006) Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet, London: Minnesota.

For those of you with a soft spot for the anthropomorphized cartoon dog surfing the Internet, Lisa Nakamura abolishes such nostalgia, and misunderstanding. Half way through Digitizing Race, she coolly declares  ‘…nobody believes anymore that on the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog…’ (p.155). Interrogating the myth of online disembodiment, and the concomitant deceit of neoliberal colour-blindness is what essentially coheres this book. Contrary to the utopian readings of techno-culture, analyzing Internet space as a site of racial re-embodiment is at the heart of Nakamura’s project…

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