| In this dissertation I examine selected examples of the minoritarian cultural work in the U.S. and England that seeks to draw critical focus to issues and concerns related to the cultural politics of cybercultures. Cybercultures are defined here as cultural formations centering on the use of new media technologies within the context of computer mediated communication. The analysis is devoted to elucidating the ways that this cultural work contributes to reframing and reconceptualizing prevailing understandings of how racial and cultural identity intersects with and plays out through particular sites of information technology located on the Internet. The particular cultural workers whose productions are addressed are the performance and installation artists Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Roberto Sifuentes, the new media arts collective Mongrel, the conceptual artist and composer Keith Obadike, and the multimedia artist Keith Piper. My thesis is that through their projects of engaging with particular information technologies and technologics attached to the Internet from minoritarian perspectives, these cultural workers succeed in demonstrating the degree to which the social functionings of these technologies are imbricated with racial politics in ways that often go unacknowledged by the participants in and commentators on cybercultures. In this regard, I will focus on three points in particular: first, that cybercultural discourses and practices sometimes depend on the tacit understanding that the 'color-blind' contexts for social interaction that cyberspace anonymity provides are actually to remain within the compass of presumptive whiteness; second, that the related notion that cybercultures somehow possess the power, by enabling the formation of relatively novel forms of social collectivity, to displace historical race and ethnicity with a newly fabricated "virtual ethnicity" is an erroneous one; and third, that tropes employed to explain the social and cultural impact of Internet-related phenomena are in certain instances racializing in their effect. Throughout the course of the dissertation, there will be an attempt to show that the cultural workers discussed here address points of intersection between various kinds of technologic undergirding the operation of ICTs and issues liable to be of especial importance to minoritarian subjects in the U.S. and Europe. |
