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Critical Reception of "Race In/For Cyberspace: Identity tourism and racial passing on the internet" by Lisa Nakamura

As cyberspace presents itself as a new and utopic paradigm for democratic participation that transcends the lines of racial difference, a radically different interpretation re-locates racial identity (negotiation and construction), performativity and relations within conventional categories. Lisa Nakamura's "Race In/For Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet," has served as a seminal work on the politics of racial identity in digital communities, garnering nearly 300 Google Scholar citations. Alondra Nelson and Thuy N. Tu, among others, couch the work of Lisa Nakamura amidst the scholarship that addresses contemporary racial representation and performance in cyberspace and resists the binary conception of race in more mainstream discourse on the “high-tech transformation” of our social world through increased participation in cyberspace. According to Nelson and Tu, Nakamura's work critically challenges the conception that race can mirror the dichotomous logic and language of computerization, asserting that it is more complex than the binary structure of computational logic. While Nakamura’s analysis of racialized identities holds weight in cyber-discourse analysis around racial performativity, construction and negotiation, a critical response to the text focuses on the extent to which Nakamura may have over-stated the intention of “white” people who participate in these cyberspaces to exploit race and power. Some appreciate the extent to which Nakamura details how the status quo power structures are very much in existence in new technology, including the internet, and they attempt to draw attention to the idea that not all dominant group members (ie. Caucasians) have the intention of replicating racial power in these spaces. Such critiques further contend that many white people who frequent cyberspace may very well see it as a space that transcends race and opens up exploration into a variety of identities. Nevertheless, the larger analysis of "Race In/For Cyberspace" resists and critiques the conception of race neutrality on the net and shares Nakamura’s call for more discourse around race and racism in cyberspace (See citations 2-5).

Affirmations ring for the complex nature of (cyber) race relations and identities that Nakamura discusses in the piece; however, more current readers challenge the piece by placing it within a techno-historical context. Noting that the essay was written at a time that corresponds to limited graphical web browsers (See citations 8&9), such readers question how racial construction and performance play out in a more visual-based medium. How does the evolving format of cyberspace re-configure the tools of (self) representation?