Scholarship in Focus
Citation:
Anna Everett, Digital Diaspora: A Race for Cyberspace. Albany: Suny Press, 2009.
https://sunypress.edu/Books/D/Digital-Diaspora2
Annotation:
Anna Everett was one of the first voices to directly make Black identity, culture, and media relevant to the early discussions on the digital humanities, new media production, internet culture, and video games. Everett’s now seminal Digital Diaspora: A Race for Cyberspace (2009) not only first introduced a vital critical digital vocabulary to a cadre of younger Black media scholars, the work also anticipated major themes and disciplinary challenges that have framed the cultural shifts from Netscape to Netflix, from the Gameboy Advance to PlayStation VR. Chapter Four, “Serious Play: Playing with Race in Contemporary Gaming Culture,” takes a long look at video game representations across texts, manuals, gaming magazines, and strategy guides. The rest of the book addresses media and technology in general, making Digital Diaspora a foundational text for the ways in which it presciently explicates still central questions, including: how to interrogate assumptions about racialized “digital divides” (both in terms of access and production); how and why to focus on Black women’s civic interventions, both on- and off-line; and where to locate Black digital public spheres in spite of the virality of new regimes of supremacy. Everett’s scholarship and legacy remain instrumental to the critical spaces where games, technology, and Black culture intersect.
Abstract:
“Deftly interweaving history, culture, and critical theory, Anna Everett traces the rise of black participation in cyberspace, particularly during the early years of the Internet. She challenges the problematic historical view of black people as quintessential information-age outsiders or poster children for the digital divide by uncovering their early technolust and repositioning them as eager technology adopters and consumers, and thus as co-constituent elements in the information technology revolution. She offers several case studies that include lessons learned from early adoption of the Internet by the Association of Nigerians Living Abroad and their Niajanet virtual community, the grassroots organizing efforts that led to the phenomenally successful Million Woman March, the migration of several historic black presses online, and an interventionist critique of race in contemporary video games. Ultimately, Digital Diaspora shows how African Americans and African diasporic peoples developed the necessary technomastery to ride in the front of the bus on the information superhighway.”—from the publisher
Games and aspects of video game history referenced and discussed in this article :
DOOM (1993); QUAKE (1996); Tekken Tag Tournament (1996); Conquest of the New World (1996); Tomb Raider (1996); Imperialism (1997); Daikatana (2000); Ready to Rumble: Round 2 (2000); Might and Magic VIII: Day of the Destroyer (2000); Ethnic Cleansing (2002)