Racial Mediums

Perhaps the most striking common thread running through the books under review here, which take on a diverse array of historical and theoretical problems concerning the relationship of race, technology, and media in both national and transnational contexts, is that they replace a familiar question from the 1990s about what race is with one about what race does. Instead of focusing on the parameters of race as a social construct naturalized by media representations, they look to the reciprocating gesture in which the idea of race serves as the cultural ligature holding together the technological and conceptual apparatus of modern media. The move puts the race concept as it developed in the US in the twentieth century into circulation as an actant in a transnational relational field. The significance of this move, it seems to me, is that it has the effect of changing the traditional emphases of ideology critique in three ways. First, and perhaps least surprisingly, these books highlight the fact that media technologies are demonstrably not neutral machines of dissemination, but are subject, even at the level of scientific innovation, to the same ideological formations as the material they record and retransmit. Second, they suggest that reading highly racialized media productions demands careful recognition of the intentionality and participation of nonwhite actors in the historical processes of constructing, conserving, distributing, and archiving this material. And third, once put into circulation, racialized media productions quickly move beyond their field of origin, where they become available for appropriation and remediation in new and often unexpected ways. Local and national racial politics in the US refract differently when articulated and redirected by transnational circulation. It is not just the cultural products that circulate, but also ideas about the media forms, and the media technologies themselves. The archaeology of media technologies explored in these books shows how racial ideology is not merely a subtext of cultural history; racial ideology has been built into the technics of its reproduction.

These books attest to the convergence of disciplines grouped within American studies, Asian American studies, and film and media studies. The significance of the joint project is also marked by at least four special issues in academic journals, notably the Spring 2009 issue of Camera Obscura on “Race and/as Technology,” with articles linking privacy law, face recognition technologies, and post-cyberpunk science fiction to media and race; the Spring 2010 issue of Social Text on “The Politics of Recorded Sound” that included Gustavus Stadler’s remarkable study of commercial audio recordings from the 1890s of lynching reenactments; the September 2011 special issue of American Quarterly on sound technology that devoted a section to “Sounding Race, Ethnicity, and Gender,” with articles on drama, country music, opera, and radio; and the 2015 forum in J19 on “Race and Visuality” that included essays on architecture, performance, literature, ethnology, advertising, billboards, sheet music, and dance.

At its most interesting, as in Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s introduction to the Camera Obscura special number, “Race and/as Technology; or How to Do Things with Race,” this work focuses on race in ethical, not ontological, terms. The difference is subtle and involves more than anything else a shift in the direction of attention—not how the social constructs race, but how race constructs the social. The project is not, as it had been in seminal work from the 1990s upon which these new works directly draw—for instance Donna Haraway’s Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science (1990) or Fatimah Tobing Rony’s The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle (1996)—one of defanging racism by revealing the hidden biases of cultural production. Instead, the attention shifts to the ways that racial ideology shaped the very concept of modern media technologies upon which cultural production depended. If Rony’s focus was on critiquing “the pervasive form of objectification of indigenous peoples,” the emphasis now expands to include the burgeoning fields of media theory and communication studies, such that one of R. John Williams’s chapters in The Buddha in the Machine: Art, Technology, and the Meeting of East and West looks not only...