Social Science

This article examines the relationship of information technology to communities of color. In recent decades, American microelectronics firms have shifted production facilities to offshore sites while prototypic and short-term projects, research, and development have remained in places such as Silicon Valley. Assembly work that fuels the industry there, done mostly by immigrant women, closely resembles the “low tech” labor of their overseas counterparts. Despite these attachments by people of color at the level of labor and high-tech production, the same people are largely isolated from the technology on the levels of use, consumption, and content development. Some attempts have been made by marginalized communities, however, to “stake a claim in cyberspace.” Examining what anthropologist David Hess termed the social and cultural “reconstruction of technology,” we argue that attempts to claim information technologies happen on two levels: the “virtual” and the “real.” We explore questions of how community is conjured or imagined by people of color using icons and language and how images and language mark insiders and outsiders, we examine the inconsistencies in “global village” metaphors and whether communities of color betray similar inconsistencies, and we conclude that we are both critical of and optimistic about the communicative possibilities of information technology.

I examine the theoretical foundations underlying the incomplete contracts literature. A common justification for the assumption that contracts are not fully contingent on the state of nature is to point out that some aspects of the state may be unforeseen or indescribable to the contracting partners at the time the contract is written. I argue, however, that as long as risk-averse parties can foresee the probabilities of their possible payoffs, then the fact that they cannot describe the possible physical states does not matter; even with renegotiation, the parties can attain the same welfare as when full description is possible.

The cultural theorist and novelist Albert Murray once remarked that the mandate of the black intellectual was to provide “technology” to the black community. By technology, Murray didn't mean mechanics, new media, or the Internet. Rather, he defined it as those novel analytic approaches he believed necessary to understanding black life “on a higher level of abstraction.” For Murray, this process was one of distillation and complication. He advocated theories of African American existence that, like a blueprint, would be sufficiently robust to reveal the larger patterns of society and do justice to its intricacies and complexities. By Murray's definition, the artist Laylah Ali is a technologist of the highest order. In spite of their striking clarity, her gouache images reflect the contradictions of the human condition. Ali's work explores the tragic lives of the Greenheads, her hypercephalic, thin-limbed, brown-skinned creations. Using a limited palette, she composes provocative visual fields noticeably lacking in scenery, save the humanoid figures that inhabit them. A master at sleight of hand, she uses bright comic-strip colors in a way that recalls the Sunday funnies; but these images have more in common with sardonic political cartoons, for the figures she depicts inflict all manner of insult and injury on one other. Although Ali provides no script for her images, their despair and anger is unmistakable. But there is no violent haste in her brush stroke; the images are controlled—eerily exact. As befits the work of a technician, these tortured lives are rendered with the sharpest precision.

This text explores the relationship between race and technology. From Indian H-1B workers and Detroit techno music to karaoke and the Chicano interneta, this book uses case studies to document the use of technology - rupturing stereotypes such as Asian whizz kids and black technophobes. The cultural impact of new information and communication technologies has been a constant topic of debate, but questions of race and ethnicity remain a critical absence. TechniColor fills this gap by exploring the relationship between race and technology.From Indian H-1B Workers and Detroit techno music to karaoke and the Chicano interneta, TechniColor's specific case studies document the ways in which people of color actually use technology. The results rupture such racial stereotypes as Asian whiz-kids and Black and Latino techno-phobes, while fundamentally challenging many widely-held theoretical and political assumptions. Incorporating a broader definition of technology and technological practices--to include not only those technologies thought to create "revolutions" (computer hardware and software) but also cars, cellular phones, and other everyday technologies--TechniColor reflects the larger history of technology use by people of color. Contributors: Vivek Bald, Ben Chappell, Beth Coleman, McLean Greaves, Logan Hill, Alicia Headlam Hines, Karen Hossfeld, Amitava Kumar, Casey Man Kong Lum, Alondra Nelson, Mimi Nguyen, Guillermo Goméz-Peña, Tricia Rose, Andrew Ross, Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu, and Ben Williams.

Challenging mainstream technocultural assumptions of a raceless future, Afrofuturism explores culturally distinct approaches to technology. This special issue addresses the intersection between African diasporic culture and technology through literature, poetry, science fiction and speculative fiction, music, visual art, and the Internet and maintains that racial identity fundamentally influences technocultural practices. The collection includes a reflection on the ideologies of race created by cultural critics in their analyses of change wrought by the information age; an interview with Nalo Hopkinson, the award-winning novelist and author of speculative fiction novels Midnight Robber and Brown Girl in the Ring, who fuses futuristic thinking with Caribbean traditions; an essay on how contemporary R&B music presents African American reflections on the technologies of everyday life; and an article examining early interventions by the black community to carve out a distinct niche in cyberspace.

We show that simple majority rule satisfies four standard< and attractive properties—the Pareto property, anonymity, neutrality, and (generic) transitivity—on a bigger class of preference domains than (essentially) any other voting rule. Hence, in this sense, it is the most robust voting rule. If we replace neutrality in the above list of properties with the weaker property, independence of irrelevant alternatives, then the corresponding robustness conclusion holds for unanimity rule (rule by consensus).

Does fiscal decentralization lead to more efficient governance, better public goods, and higher economic growth? This paper tests Riker's [Riker, W. (1964) “Federalism: Origins, Operation, Significance,” Little, Brown and Co, Boston, MA.] theory that the results of fiscal decentralization depend on the level of countries' political centralization. We analyze cross-section and panel data from up to 75 developing and transition countries for 25 years. Two of Riker's predictions about the role of political institutions in disciplining fiscally-autonomous local politicians are confirmed by the data. 1) Strength of national political parties significantly improves outcomes of fiscal decentralization such as economic growth, quality of government, and public goods provision. 2) In contrast, administrative subordination (i.e., appointing local politicians rather than electing them) does not improve the results of fiscal decentralization.

How does regulatory capture affect growth? We construct measures of the political power of firms and regional regulatory capture using microlevel data on the preferential treatment of firms through regional laws and regulations in Russia during the period 1992-2000. Using these measures, we find that: (1) politically powerful firms perform better on average; (2) a high level of regulatory capture hurts the performance of firms that have no political connections and boosts the performance of politically connected firms; (3) capture adversely affects small-business growth and the tax capacity of the state; and (4) there is no evidence that capture affects aggregate growth.

Jean-Jacques Laffont, economist extraordinaire and visionary founder of the Institut d'Économie Industrielle ( IDEI ) in Toulouse, died at his home in Colomiers on May 1 after a valiant battle against cancer. He was fifty-seven years old.

During the 1960s and 1970s, a cadre of poets, playwrights, visual artists, musicians, and other visionaries came together to create a renaissance in African American literature and art. This charged chapter in the history of African American culture-which came to be known as the Black Arts Movement-has remained largely neglected by subsequent generations of critics. New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement includes essays that reexamine well-known figures such as Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sonia Sanchez, Betye Saar, Jeff Donaldson, and Haki Madhubuti. In addition, the anthology expands the scope of the movement by offering essays that explore the racial and sexual politics of the era, links with other period cultural movements, the arts in prison, the role of Black colleges and universities, gender politics and the rise of feminism, color fetishism, photography, music, and more. An invigorating look at a movement that has long begged for reexamination, this collection lucidly interprets the complex debates that surround this tumultuous era and demonstrates that the celebration of this movement need not be separated from its critique.

Commercially available tests of genetic ancestry have significant scientific limitations, but are serious matters for many test-takers.

This paper considers the extent to which the geneticization of 'race' and ethnicity is the prevailing outcome of genetic testing for genealogical purposes. The decoding of the human genome precipitated a change of paradigms in genetics research, from an emphasis on genetic similarity to a focus on molecular-level differences among individuals and groups. This shift from lumping to splitting spurred ongoing disagreements among scholars about the significance of 'race' and ethnicity in the genetics era. I characterize these divergent perspectives as 'pragmatism' and 'naturalism'. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, I argue that neither position fully accounts for how understandings of 'race' and ethnicity are being transformed with genetic genealogy testing. While there is some acquiescence to genetic thinking about ancestry, and by implication, 'race', among African-American and black British consumers of genetic genealogy testing, test-takers also adjudicate between sources of genealogical information and from these construct meaningful biographical narratives. Consumers engage in highly situated 'objective' and 'affiliative' self-fashioning, interpreting genetic test results in the context of their 'genealogical aspirations'. I conclude that issues of site, scale, and subjectification must be attended to if scholars are to understand whether and to what extent social identities are being transformed by recent developments in genetic science.

Alondra Nelson revisits “The New Right and Media,” an article from Social Text's inaugural issue that explored how “media politics” and forms of mediated, networked communication were used by conservative countermovements to advance their ideological agendas. The idea of “social textronics” is taken up from this article, revised and expanded in order to suggest how new technologies and mediated communication are—borrowing from Fredric Jameson—“a symbolic vehicle” for, and an object of, progressive critique.