Coco Fusco, 'At your service: Latin women in the global information network’
In: The Bodies that were not ours and other writings. By Coco Fusco. London and New York: Routledge in collaboration with the Institute of International Visual Arts, 2001, 186-201.
Once upon a time when black intellectuals used to elaborate their arguments against racism and colonialism, they would be compelled to explain that they did come from places that existed, that they did have a culture, or that they were in fact human. I think of them as I reflect on the suggestion that in the age of digital technology "we" don't need to be concerned with the violent exercise of power on bodies and territories anymore because "we" don't have to carry all that meat and dirt along to the virtual promised land. I think of them because I have been visiting places where the hardware of the digital revolution is assembled, and the people are not a part of this culture, and the conditions that they work and live in form the underside of the post-human. If we are to comprehend how identity and subjectivity are being reshaped in the digital age, we must look at the relationship between the desire to enable minds to fantasmatically disengage from bodies and the actuality of technologies that objectify bodies and bodily activity, thus disengaging them from minds. Digital disembodiment's fiction of transcendence relies on the expulsion of the abject interrelations between bodies and technologies from the virtual imaginary.
Clearly, I am not the first person to question the universal applicability of the digital revolution's emancipatory rhetoric, or to ask who gains and who loses by ignoring the political realities in which these technologies develop. There are many ways in which the question of access to the electronic wonderland has been posed to demonstrate how imbalances of power in the material world carry over into the virtual domain.
The approaches of artists and theorists to address the problems of identity and access in the digital domain tend to fall into a few basic categories. The first goal for many artists of color is to demonstrate that not being white does not necessarily mean that one is a techno-primitive or a technophobe. These demonstrations are buttressed either by claiming the legacy of détournement of Western technology by non-whites or by ironically retelling of the history of the adulatory embrace of technology by non-Western elites before and after colonialism. These efforts are favorably read as counternarratives to the primitivist and folkloric tendencies of cultural nationalism and populism, and they are also interpreted as fundamentally accepting of the "emancipatory" script that links technology with liberation. This approach reminds me of the kind of genuflecting that people of color were compelled to engage in the pre-Civil Rights era, when their acceptance into white society hinged on their proving themselves to be good candidates for assimilation. It bears keeping in mind that the digital art explosion comes on the heels of the backlash against multiculturalism and identity politics, in a revamped cultural milieu in which white artists and institutions are newly armed with means of eliciting silence on the subject of race and power in exchange for acceptance.
A second approach focuses on the substantive content of internet exchange, science fiction, and video games to analyze the significance of racialized images in virtual reality. Instead of assuming that cyberspace is "beyond race", these analyses examine how race is "contained" by being designated as anti-social or dehistoricized by being rendered as purely physical. For example, "passing" for non-raced (i.e. white), is more often than not a rule of "good conduct" in mixed-company in chatrooms, at least in the US. Theorist Beth Kolko notes in her study of the popular Multiple User Domain LambdaMoo that it allows users to set properties for their age, hometown, timezone, webpage, friends, gender, online home, feature objects, and email address, but not their race. [1]
On the other hand, colonialist imagery and perspectives dominate simulated landscapes. As Lisa Nakamura points out in her brilliant analysis of the exotic imagery used in high-tech advertising, diversity is displayed as the sign of what the internet will eradicate, while at the same time the picturesque landscapes visualize cyber surfing as an extension of imperialist adventurism. [2] A good deal of work in this area addresses the significance of representations of cyborgs as mixed-race women, and explores why the "miscegenation" generated by morphing and math games that produces honey-colored cyber girls such as Time magazine's SymEve elicits a similar libidinal response to the colonial trope it invokes as its biological and historical predecessor. [3]
Despite the claims that cyberspace is "raceless", it is difficult to avoid concluding that scientists, web designers, and other digital artists are appropriating black cultural tropes to represent psychic freedom in cyberspace (references to Bush Spirits and Sojourner Truth for example) in the same way that modernists turned to Africa to represent irrationality. These observations confirm that image-makers, regardless of their tools, continue to borrow from the already known to imagine what they cannot see.
[...]
[1] Beth E. Kolko, "Erasing @race: Going White in the (Inter)face", in Race and Cyberspace, ed. Beth E. Kolko, Lisa Nakamura, and Gilbert Rodman (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 216.
[2] Lisa Nakamura, "Where Do You Want to Go Today? Cybernetic Tourism, the Internet and Transnationality", in Race and Cyberspace, pp. 15-26.
[3] Jennifer Gonzalez, "Envisioning Cyborg Bodies: Notes from Current Research", in Chris Hables Gray (ed.), The Cyborg Handbook (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 267-280 .