Lisa Nakamura is an American professor of media and cinema studies, Asian American studies, as well as gender & women’s studies. She teaches at a University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she is also the Coordinator of Digital Studies and the Gwendolyn Calvert Baker Collegiate Professor in the Department of American Cultures.
Nakamura is the author of Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet 2008[1], Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet 2013 and is co-editor of Race in Cyberspace 2013. She has also published articles in Critical Studies in Media Communication, Cinema Journal, The Women’s Review of Books, Camera Obscura, and the Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies. Nakamura is workings on a new monograph on Massively Multiplayer Online Role playing games, the transnational racialized labor, and avatarial capital in a “postracial” world.
Nakamura's number one book, Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet, discusses the visual cultures of the Internet and the type of information we seek online. She is interested in the emergence and immense popularity of racially themed websites that are created by for and approximately people of color. She is interested in what she terms the “racio-visual system of logic of the internet.” Jessie Daniels of Hunter College, City University of New York argues that the book's central insight is that the Internet is a “visual technology, a protocol for seeing that is interfaced and networked in ways that name a specific breed of racial formations.” From Facebook to YouTube to avatars to video games, visual representations online incorporate the embodied, gendered, and racialized self online.
Doris Witt of the University of Iowa reviews the book, Race in Cyberspace edited by Beth E. Kolko, Lisa Nakamura, and Gilbert B. Rodman. In an try to open up a “space where a larger, more extended, and more inclusive conversation approximately bracket and cyberspace can create place,” Witt discusses how the book discusses the processes through which race is performed online by privileged consumers of cyberspace rather than the way in which cyberspace has been exposed by and has helped reproduce a racialized global division of labor.
As reviewed by Samantha Blackmon from Purdue University, Nakamura’s third book, Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet, aims to interrogate how the internet shapes and reshapes our perceptions of race, ethnicity, and identity. Blackmon states that Nakamura label the images of racial identity online that shape the specific perceptions of cybertypes, and how these cybertypes are often determined and defined by the racial and ethnic stereotypes that are already setting in our current society.
This book was first published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company, which aims to interrogate how the internet shapes and reshapes our perceptions of race, ethnicity, and identity. Blackmon states that Nakamura title the images of racial identity online that shape the particular perceptions of cybertypes, and how these cybertypes are often determined and defined by the racial and ethnic stereotypes that are already defining in our current society.