The New Dawn: Black Agency in Cyberspace

New Media and Its Uses in Transnational Black Studies

No other medium or information technology developed during the twentieth century mirrors the transnationalism of the black world much like the Internet. Broadcast media have limited reach—broadcasts can only reach people within the boundaries of airwaves and frequencies. Telephones and fax machines, although they enable people to communicate virtually anywhere in the world, are narrowcasting media that connect only a few people at a time. But it is Internet technology's transnational character—globally networked, media-rich computers unfettered by national or geographic boundaries—that allows for multiple users in multiple locations to communicate, organize, and access data and transcend time and space by meeting in cyberspace. The increasingly broader use of the Internet comes at a time when scholars studying Africa and the African diaspora have called for research that transcends the constructed nation-state boundaries of the twentieth century as well as similar boundaries constructed by academe and that recognizes the interconnectedness of the black world. A historian who studies the historic, transnational links between Afro-Cubans and African Americans during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Lisa Brock, for example, asserts that "there are and always have been solid ties between [Africa-descended] peoples and enough comparative 'transnational processes or recurring conditions' to make black world studies data rich and analytically fertile." ¹ Furthermore, within the black world, there exists the consciousness, which took its form in the late nineteenth century, that Africa-descended populations had and have a shared source of "their displacement and oppression: a matrix of white supremacy, colonialism and apartheid created and re-generated by the dominant powers of the modern West." ² This consciousness motivated and defined black political agency in the twentieth (and twenty-first?) century, what W. E. B. Du Bois called the "double-consciousness" of being black in the modern world. ³ From the first Pan-African Congress held in 1900 in Paris to the black consciousness movement of South Africa, all have been organized around building a supranational state or "ethnoscape" mobilized to change the multiple oppressions black people face as a transnational community. ⁴

So as this article's title proposes, we are facing a new dawn: the beginning of a new century, a new millennium, a new age of information technology, and a new era of examining black culture, politics, history, and societies transnationally. An exploration of black transnationalism on the Internet therefore seems appropriate here. Although much has been written on questions of race and identityin cyberspace, more systematic and exhaustive analyses still need to be made by scholars studying the connections between cyberculture, Africa-descended populations, black political agency, and the uses of the Internet by transnational black communities. ⁵

Questions of Access

No proper discussion of transnational black studies in cyberspace can overlook the ongoing debates about the global digital divide. Lest readers think that this article provides a utopian vision of cyberspace, it must provide a brief examination about issues of access to the Internet and other networked technologies, or lack thereof, for African and Africa-descended populations.

The digital divide is the fissure between people who have honed computer-mediated communication skills and access to digital technology, primarily the Internet, and those who do not have either the skills in or the access to new media technology. As might be expected, these gaps generally fall along the global fault lines of inequity between the developed and the developing world, as well as along race and class lines. In 2001, there were approximately 429 million Internet users in the world, or 6 percent of the globe's total population. North America dominates Internet usage figures, claiming 41 percent of total global usage, leaving the rest of the world, and certainly African and diasporic communities, in the dust. ⁶

Presently, there is one Internet user for every 750 people in Africa, compared to one in three in the United States. Africa represents less...