2011 Graduate Humanities Forum Conference Keynote

“Griefing” or online harassment has been around as long as the Internet itself. Trolls, flamers, and other cyber-irritants have become ubiquitous, operating as veritable online subcultures. Lisa Nakamura, a leading voice in Asian American studies, will consider attitudes toward race expressed in these new, virtual subcultures—particularly the troubling rise of what she calls enlightened racism.

Lisa Nakamura is the author or coeditor of four books, including Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (University of Minnesota Press, 2007) and Race After the Internet (with Peter Chow-White, Routledge, forthcoming 2011). She is currently working on a new monograph tentatively entitled Workers Without Bodies: Towards a Theory of Race and Digital Labor in Virtual Worlds. Nakamura is the Director of the Asian American Studies Program, Professor in the Institute of Communication Research and Media Studies Program, and Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she teaches courses on Asian Americans and media as well as introductory and advanced courses on new media criticism, history, and theory.