Racialized Cybertypes in Cyberspace

1
Racialized Cybertypes in Cyberspace

• Identity, power,
• and race in a virtual (turtle) world.

2
Is that really you?

• How is other constructed in cyberspace. How is
  authenticity enacted on a fluid plane?
  (Iseke-Barnes, 173,177)
• How is the body (color, hair, bone) configured in
  the post human in new media, if the locus for
  knowledge production (criticism) is primarily
  theoretical? (Nakumara, 7)
• What are virtual resources, who owns them, and
  how are they amassed, stored, and expended?
• The Indian-Indian or the German-Indianer,
  cultural performance, hybridity, or economies of
  scale? (which turtle lies beneath which turtle?)
  (Iseke-Barnes, 178)

3
Consider this

• What racial utopianism is promised by technology
  and cyberspace? Why are we fascinated by the
  possibilities?
• In cyberspace, is everything simulacra?
  Imitation, flattery, appropriation the politics
  of exchange.
• Is virtual agency an oxymoron? What assumptions
  construct virtual space as culturally authentic?
  (what kind of shell, what kind of body, what kind
  of turtle?)

4
The People

• Is the notion of id/entity an image, and
  ethnicity an afterimage? What traces are imbedded
  in this historicity what movement of race?
  (Nakamura, 11)
• Why is the Internet dominated by discourses that
  are reductive and essentalizing? How is
  entitlement achieved, in a performative space
  such as racialized chat rooms, to share the
  knowledge resources of a culture sacred
  knowledge, rituals, customs?
• Spiritual practices of native people are not
  public but private matters. (Iseke-Barnes,178)
  What happens to individual and community concepts
  of responsibility for a cultures knowledge
  production (a First Nations communal value) in
  public, virtual platforms of negotiated space.

5
the plastics (alt.native, Iseke-Barnes, 185)

• What is a person of custom in terms of culture,
  authenticity, and ethnicity today, and how is
  habituation configured in cyber-culture. What
  customary practices in cyberspace enable
  cybertyping (form influences content and visa
  versa)? (Iseke-Barnes, 185)
• Engaging in ongoing dialogue in bearing witness
  to history is not possible in institutions As
  a corporate/dominate institution where history is
  constantly undergoing revision, what capacity
  does the internet have to enable resistance
  against a mutable history? What are its
  implications for aboriginal peoples, for the
  concept of ethnicity and for how race is
  quantified.

6
alt.native

• Chat groups sharing, exchange, or forum for
  power play?
• Dividing lines who is inside/outside?
• Otherness changes depending on who is speaking.

I'm giving a presentation about the issue of
new-agers and fakeshaman appopriation of Indian
spirituality, with special detail to the question
"what's really the harm?", but I need a clever,
catchy title. (click to go to site or right
click open hyperlink)
7
Transcoding alt.native mini-discourse analysis

• What sort of social practice is involved in
  Internet Chatrooms such as alt.native?
• How is textual dialogue in terms of language use
  (rather than user) implicated in cultural
  knowledge production. Whose knowledge production
  is being disabled / enabled by who. How are the
  conversations on alt.native the semiotics of
  establishing a national self?
• Try thisTrial Discourse Analysis

8
Transcoding alt.native mini-discourse analysis

• Common TropesNorth American Aboriginal either
  traditionalists or non-conformist, redeemed
  alcoholics, grandmother /fathers /elders as
  legendary figures, ordinary individuals presented
  on pedestals, victims of racism, mixed-blood
  outcasts (Cook-Lynn).Binaries inside/outside,
  knowledgeable/ignorant, us/them,
  authentic/inauthentic, male/female, old/young,
  Aboriginal/non-aboriginal, traditional/urban,
  literate/illiterate,
• Semiotics See Trial Mini Discourse Exercise

9
Afterthoughts Future

• Ironically, while the term itself
  post-colonial strives to escape to find new
  centers, it remains, in the end, a hostage to
  nationalism. Thomas King, Godzilla vs.
  Post-Colonial
• the fashion of post-colonialism has become a
  strategy for re-inscribing or reauthorizing the
  privileges of non-indigenous academics because
  the field of post colonial discourse has been
  defined in ways which can still leave out
  indigenous peoples, our ways of knowing and our
  current concerns. Smith, Decolonizing
  Methodologies Research and Indigenous Peoples
• Is Cyberspace a colonizing force, a post-colonial
  entity, or a utopia in the making? What will
  determine who decides? What kinds of discourses
  will emerge and will they solidify outcomes?