About the Book
Reveals how Asianness emerges as a dynamic media materiality shaped by measurement, circulation, and calibration, amid shifting labor relations under contemporary capitalism
Racial 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. She reveals the ways in which Asianness moves beyond a politics of recuperation and recognition to yield modes of fugitivity, illicit knowledge, and resistance, all of which threaten existing relationships between capital, labor and information that govern human capital.
By putting memes, social media apps, and digital platforms in conversation with more traditional cultural productions like film, literature, and theatre, Racial Virtuality broadens our understanding of racialization in the digital age and challenges traditional notions of cultural production and subject formation. In doing so, it demonstrates how Asianness circulates as a new media form in a digital marketplace of commodified affects, senses, gestures, and tastes.
About the Author :
Danielle Wong is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia
Review :
"Danielle Wong's stunning analysis delivers one revelatory insight after another. Racial Virtuality takes the reader on an exhilarating journey across the terrain of racial algorithms, digital interfaces, and social media assemblages to examine the unfixed ontology of Asianness. Through a firmly materialist critique of racial capitalism, the book demonstrates how Asianness circulates as a new media form in a digital marketplace of commodified affects, gestures, and tastes. Offering a powerful intervention into Asian American studies, Wong's study foregrounds the way Asian virtuality opens up new ways of apprehending the political." – Iyko Day, author of Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism
"An exceptionally well-grounded critical intervention into the study of race and emerging media, Racial Virtuality mobilizes an expansive archive of everyday and experimental digital forms. Danielle Wong persuasively demonstrates how racialization unfolds at non-representational scales, illuminating both the 'memetic' capture of Asian difference and the resistant potentials that persist within an Orientalized virtuality." – Tara Fickle, author The Race Card: From Gaming Technologies to Model Minorities
"Brilliantly analyzes how race shapes contemporary information technologies and new media. Racial Virtuality is at the cutting edge of attempts by scholars of race to understand how race shapes our material realities in digital worlds that are too often mistaken as fleeting, unreal, and ephemeral. In the process, Danielle Wong makes clear that while the pervasive techno-Orientalism of contemporary media reflects intensified exploitation and surveillance, racial virtuality also opens sites of gesture, performance, and pleasure that help us envision new forms of collective resistance." – Neel Ahuja, author of Planetary Specters: Race, Migration, and Climate Change in the Twenty-First Century
"Why are Asians always associated with technology – from sci-fi robots to geeks? Danielle Wong answers this question in through a dazzling, original, and theoretically sophisticated analysis that reveals how Asianness both gives form to information capital and disrupts it by fostering unlikely connections. Moving deftly from Tiktok to live performances, from K-beauty videos to Sleeping Asian memes, Wong argues that Asianness embodies racial virtuality. In the era of new media, race is not simply a category, it is, she contends, but rather a non-representational logic and process that calibrates, calculates and predicts. To understand what is happening, we therefore must move away from simply insisting on concrete identities and experiences to embracing the ways that virtuality can also subvert and connect. A must read for anyone interested in understanding why and how new media and race click." – Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Digital Democracies Institute
