Introduction: Race and/as Technology; or, How to Do Things to Race

This special issue poses the questions: to what degree are race and technology intertwined?Can race be considered a technology or a form of media -that is, not only a mechanism, but also a practical or industrial art?Could race be not simply an object of representation and portrayal, of knowledge or truth, but also a technique that one uses, even as one is used by it -a carefully crafted, historically inflected system of tools, mediation, or enframing that builds history and identity?"Race and/as technology" is a strange, and hopefully estranging, formulation, but its peculiarity does not stem from its conjoining of race and technology.There already exists an important body of scholarship that simply addresses race and technology in science and technology, media and visual culture, and African American and ethnic studies, ranging, just to give some examples, from analyses documenting the resurgence of race as a valid scientific category to those tracing the historically intersecting truth claims of phrenology and photography, from investigations uncovering the