Visualizing Race and embodiment in CyberspaceDigitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet. By Lisa Nakamura . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. $19.50 (paper)

When the esteemed Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was arrested in his own home by Cambridge police in July 2009, many people were outraged and logged on to the Internet to find more information. Among the “information” that Web users could find were multiple written accounts and visual images of the incident. There was a photo—taken by a neighbor—of Gates handcuffed on his own front porch and visibly, understandably, angry. There were the grainy mug shots—released by Cambridge police—of Gates looking humiliated and resigned. And there were photos of Sergeant James Crowley, the arresting officer, looking defiant (he refused to apologize). During the days in late July when this story first broke, one primary source of information was TheRoot.com, a Web site of multiple blogs about African American life and culture created by Gates himself (now owned by the Washington Post). Gates should never have been arrested, and the charges against him were dropped the next day, but the importance of the Internet and in particular the circulation of visual images via the Internet are why I begin with this incident. These visual cultures of the Internet, in which images are part of the information we seek online, and the emergence and immense popularity of racially themed Web sites created by, for, and about people of color, such as TheRoot.com, are the main focus of Lisa Nakamura’s latest book. For some, the text-only Internet seemed to hold the promise of an escape from embodiment, and along with it the mirage of escape from gender and racial identity; there is an oft-referenced television commercial from the Internet’s early days, in which the viewer is invited to imagine the online world as a place “where there is no gender, no race” (which Nakamura discusses in her earlier work). Yet, as Nakamura demonstrates in this volume, the Internet’s visual cultures—from Facebook to YouTube to avatars to video games—insist on visual representations of the embodied, gendered, and racialized self online.