Race in Cyberspace concentrates on how minority cultures gain access to and are
represented in the digital world. The argument is not new. Film studies offers
its own critique of the representation of African-Americans in early movie production (Birth
of a Nation, for example), and literary studies has long since
critiqued its own troubled usage of African-American characters and language (William Faulkner's
Dilsey or Mark Twain's repetitive "nigger").
Do we expect, then, cyberspace to be any different? If minority discourse
has been kept out of the other mediums of communication (film, literature), why
do we believe that the newly emerging medium of digital communication will look otherwise?
It seems that the place to engage with cultural studies and the digital, then, is
not over questions of representation, but with questions of power.
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