These two new monographs have recently contributed to a growing body of scholarship that argues for the centrality of race and racialization to both the social organization of our digitalized societies and the technical apparatuses of computation. This is a welcome development since for decades critical digital studies has developed a robust tradition of analyzing digitality and computational culture from the perspective of a critique of capital and power, but a rather poorer one when it comes to considering the centrality of race.
Black feminist theory has blazed a trail in digital scholarship, increasingly eschewing the question of how certain systems reproduce or “ratchet” existing racist harms in favor of a much more profound challenge that sees racial capitalism, coloniality, and white supremacy as the conditions of possibility for calculative and computational media writ large. Sylvia Wynter’s work on genres of the human, the racial basis for Western science, the...
