Racial Virtuality - Danielle Wong

Reveals how Asianness emerges as a dynamic media materiality shaped by measurement, circulation, and calibration, amid shifting labor relations under contemporary capitalismRacial Virtuality contends that racialization not only occurs through representation in media, but also through our very interactions with media technologies and their unseen operations. The racialization of Asians, who appeared to embody the model minority success story in the first decade of social media, is now implicated more in the racial logics of algorithms, interfaces, gestures, circulations, and affects, rather than individual representations of Asianness.Racial Virtuality intervenes in existing new media discourses to approach race as virtual relation, following a rich methodology of Asian American materialist critique to investigate gendered, racial form and mediated life. Danielle Wong theorizes "racial virtuality" as the suggestive materiality of non-representational new media processes and argues that these non-figurative images, affects, textures, sounds, and gestures constitute racializing calibrations within the context of information capitalism. Extending the archive of Asianness into everyday interactions with the virtual, such as Instagram skincare stories, memes of sleeping Asians, and algorithmic choreography on TikTok, Wong considers race as a capacity for labor and capital and argues that Asianness is a specific racial form of informational capital and a mode of relational critique.
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