a fuller treatment of a various communities of color

Future treatments of this subject might discuss multiple communities of color and the ways in which access to technology may be more varied and uneven. Surely gender, whiteness, and class issues would play much larger factors in that analysis, three areas that Banks doesn’t venture into much. While he is influenced by a general post-structuralist stance, mainly Foucault (although he never directly uses him), Banks does tend to talk in terms of a totalizing and essentialized Black discourse and set of practices. He may have good reason, but it’s never addressed. Maybe this criticism stems from his mostly rhetorical approach. The main illustrations in the book that he extrapolates from (e.g., Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, BlackPlanet members, African American Architects, and Southern quilt-makers) are each read in almost purely rhetorical ways. Their material conditions are discussed, and even to some extent the politics and modes of production in each case, but no serious treatment of the ways in which technology works to (re)construct, interpellate, or (re)articulate agency or subjectivity. He gestures to these things, but because his discussion is limited to a rhetorical exegesis, it stays far from direct discussions of subjectivity or agency. Now, this criticism is arguably unfair to Banks, in that it turns this book into one not about how to define and create technological access in ways that transform African American lives and communities but into one about the ways access to technology constructs identity and agency – a different project for sure. Yet a discussion of agency seems important to bring up when one discusses questions of social transformation.

-- -- --

• It tended to construct “race” in binary terms.
• Its discussions begged for a fuller treatment of various communities of color.
• Additional critical theory would have strengthened the book's arguments.