REVIEW-ESSAY
Tamara C. Ho
Articulating Asia in SF
David S. Roh, Betsy Huang, and Greta A. Niu, eds. Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2015. 272 pp. $90 hc, $34.95 pbk.
Techno-Orientalism is a welcome mapping of a conceptual terrain where technology and race intersect. As the first book project to offer a sustained analysis of techno-Orientalism as an ideological process, the collection addresses areas of scholarly neglect in sf studies, using the “theoretical toolboxes” of Asian American studies (10). Fifteen essays, an introduction, and a conclusion explore how imagined and real figures of the Orient and Asia have circulated in variegated speculations of futurity. Building on Edward Said’s formulation in Orientalism (1978), the book examines the articulation of Asian bodies and signifiers of exotic Otherness in sf, popular narratives, nonfiction discourses, and news coverage of Asia.
Going beyond a critique of yellow peril stereotyping and Western hegemony, Techno-Orientalism highlights the “often contradictory spectrum of images constructed by East and West alike” (3). Editors Roh, Huang, and Niu offer readers a critical chronology and introduction to techno-Orientalism across genres.While Orientalism is well known in literary and cultural studies as a “strategy of representational containment” that fixes exotic Others in opposition to Euro-American modernity and liberal humanism, techno-Orientalism is much more “expansive and bidirectional” (3), although “generally ignored” in academic spheres (7). Building from a panel at the 2011 Association of Asian American Studies conference and recent Asian American scholarship, Roh, Huang, and Niu’s collection investigates “the phenomenon of imagining Asia and Asians in hypo- or hyper-technological terms in cultural productions and political discourse” (2). On the one hand, Orientalism buttresses Western supremacy by rendering Asia as traditional and premodern; on the other, since early industrialization and the building of the transcontinental railroad Asian bodies have functioned in the US imagination as “a form of
Critical groundwork for techno-Orientalism as a field of inquiry emerged in the mid-1990s. Kevin Morley and David Robins (1995) first defined the concept as a cultural logic, while Toshiya Ueno (2002) identified techno-Orientalism as a discursive phenomenon of post-Fordist globalization and information capitalism.1 Roh, Huang, and Niu’s introduction provides a concise review of the literature, crediting Takayuki Tatsumi’s historiography of Japanese sf in SFS (2000), Kumiko Sato’s comparative intersectional analysis of cyberpunk (2004), and a handful of publications and scholars for laying the foundation for studies of techno-Orientalism. The contributor essays carry forward and enrich this examination through an array of reference points: from Sax Rohmer’s Dr. Fu Manchu (1913) and William Gibson’s oeuvre to the Star Wars movies (1977+) and the Whedonverse to the work of transnational artists of Asian descent such as Nam June Paik, Larissa Lai, and Sonny Liew.
The book is divided into two sections, primarily organized in chronological order by subject. Part 1, “Iterations & Instantiations,” documents Western techno-Orientalism “over time and across genres” (16). Focusing on wartime rhetoric, radio, literature, film, television, and video gaming, the initial chapters track how techno-Orientalism manages Occidental aspirations and fears by relying on stereotypes of Asia or Asians as morally depraved or tied to technology and in need of Western consciousness-raising. The volume’s second section, “Reappropriations and Recuperation,” illuminates examples of counterdialogue “via ironic, self-referential, and recuperative narrative strategies” (17). The chapters in Part II unpack how techno-Orientalism can serve alternative ends when critics and cultural producers mobilize it as a tool to critique neoliberal restructuring, imperialism, racism, sexism, and heteronormativity. Many of the essays offer fresh insights and productive interventions. Some contributors privilege a mode of historical documentation and ethnographic description, while others offer cogent, theoretically informed analyses of their objects of study and technologies of representation.
Part I opens with Kenneth Hough’s exegesis of wartime rhetoric in the early twentieth century (1904-41) and how new communication technologies gave rise to the “Japanese invasion sublime” (24). His chapter traces the discursive effects of the Russo-Japanese war in the techno-Orientalism of H.G. Wells’s novel The War in the Air (1908) and Jack London’s short story “The Unparalleled Invasion” (1907/1910) while asserting its longevity and afterlife in World War II. Jason Crum examines the role of Golden Age radio broadcasting (1920s-1940s) in constructing a threat of “a technologically and culturally inferior Asian Other” (41). Various fictionalized serials, Orson Welles’s Mercury Theater Company (1937-1939), government-sponsored broadcasts, and radio writers’ manuals produced “enabling fictions” (42) that consolidated US imperialist subjectivity and technological prowess by justifying the domination of essentialized and racialized Others at home and abroad. Victor Bascara analyzes literary and cinematic visions of technological futures. Focusing on the trope of time travel, the problem of labor, and the management of Asian difference, Bascara’s comparison of Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel Looking Backward 2000-1888 (1887) and Ridley Scott’s dystopian film Blade Runner (1982) makes legible the relationship of class exploitation and gendered racialization in contrasting narratives. Warren Liu asserts that temporality might be “understood as a technology” (68) and reads William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s steampunk novel The Difference Engine (1990) as an example of the “racialization of time” (66). Liu’s “queer excavations” of race and temporality aim “to explore if and how techno-Orientalist discourse might be produced ... and circulated within and across texts that seem, at first glance, not much concerned with Asia or Asians at all” (66).
Seo-Young Chu applies Masahiro Mori’s theory of the “uncanny valley” to yellow peril stereotypes found in Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu stories (1913-1959), World War II propaganda, and James Bond films (1962+). Abigail de Kosniak’s essay focuses on techno-Orientalist cinema as “an ‘mnemotechnics,’ or ‘memory technology’ of US-Asian relations” (89). Her chapter highlights three films as representations of international relations and military conflicts in Asia. While The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932) encodes yellow peril xenophobia and anxieties about Japanese imperialism, Son of Sinbad (1955) references World War II, the Korean War, and the Cold War. Linking Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977) to these older Orientalist representations, de Kosniak asserts that George Lucas’s “parable about the Vietnam War” (98) and 1960s counterculture “established techno-Orientalism as a style of visual representation and storytelling that would become common in sci-fi/fantasy films in subsequent years” (97). Jinny Huh focuses on television to explore intersections of race and biotechnology in the series Battlestar Galactica (2003-2009). The final two chapters of this section turn to video gaming. Steve Choe and Se Young Kim investigate the popular real-time strategy (RTS) game StarCraft (released in 1998), the phenomenon of gamer death starting in 2002, and the racialized rhetoric of work and “fair play” that differentiates Western and Asian players. Concluding the first section, Dylan Yeats unpacks the “polymorphous Orientalism” (127) in the first-person shooter (FPS) video game Homefront (released in 2011) and the movie Red Dawn (2012). He illustrates how both perpetuate techno-Orientalist militarism and American war play by providing “Oriental villains who upset the fantasy of Western technological supremacy” (126).
The chapters in Part II emphasize the multivalence of techno-Orientalism in more recent narratives and speculative imaginaries. Julia Ha Tran argues that William Gibson’s Bridge Trilogy (1993-1999) offers a “self-aware dialectic in conceptions of posthuman subjectivity” and “reflects techno-Orientalist discourse back onto itself as a bidirectional force” (17). Tran asserts that Gibson’s Walled City and characters challenge readers to consider the slippery permeability of virtual and real; his self-conscious cross-pollination of “Western and Asian portraitures” destabilizes the binary oppositions that undergird techno-Orientalist discourses (140). Kathryn Allan situates Tricia Sullivan’s Maul (2003) and Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl (2002) as examples of “feminist post-cyberpunk”: revisionist works that take “the most intriguing parts of cyberpunk” while rejecting white heteropatriarchal monopoly on the subject and technology (152-53). Both novels represent the fragmentation of racialized female bodies and “give voice to a competent female agent” (161). Sullivan’s narrative, however, recuperates racist stereotypes by ultimately replicating the techno-Orientalist containment of Asian bodies while Lai’s narrative foregrounds the creative agency of Asian females through cyborg resistance, unruly bodies, and asexual reproduction.
Aimee Bahng focuses on “the production of a global neoliberal subject in contemporary Singapore” (165). Her essay reads Sonny Liew’s graphic collection Malinky Robot (2011) via Lauren Berlant’s theorization of “cruel optimism” and Eve Sedgwick’s “reparative practices” (165). Set in the near future of 2024 Tokyo, Liew’s five short stories reject individualism and neoliberal promises “in favor of cultivating extended practices of care and more inclusive notions of family and collective responsibility” (173). Bahng’s incisive analysis of Liew’s motley “assemblage of human, alien, and robot” celebrates their “queer exuberance” within conditions of precarity and the communal speculation that enables them to imagine otherwise (178). Douglas Ishii deftly unpacks racial triangulation in Joss Whedon’s television series Firefly (2002-2003), feature film Serenity (2005), and Dollhouse (2009-2010). Complicating the assumption that inclusion remediates racism, Ishii intervenes in the field of Whedon studies by naming race as an “inhuman remainder” of the structural violence of liberal humanism (182). He defines “palimpsestic Orientalisms” as “a techno-Oriental future laid onto a past-turning Oriental yesterday” (181). The racialized geographies, language, and aesthetics of Firefly and Serenity reify the moral boundary between the oppressive Oriental Other and the Western self, embodied by underdog hero Captain Malcolm “Mal” Reynolds (played by Nathan Fillion). Ishii further explores the relationship of Blackness to Mal’s “authentic” white masculinity and deconstructs Asian difference in Dollhouse.
The chapter by Tzarina T. Prater and Catherine Fung revisits Blade Runner and the work of Larissa Lai but situates the movie’s secondary male characters and female cyborgs within overlapping American and British Orientalist discourses of “Asianness” and “blackness” (194). Lai’s short story “Rachel” (2004) and her long poem “rachel” (2009) recode Scott’s Rachael (played by Sean Young), an abject replicant who has been read as a mulatto and symbolically “black” (193) by various cultural critics. Lai rewrites the female cyborg as biracial (Chinese/White) and complicates her genealogy in order to highlight the film’s Orientalism and to critique “the modes through which race is identified and constructed” (194). The final chapter analyzes the life and work of Nam June Paik (1932-2006), a transnational artist of Korean descent who is celebrated as “the inventor of video art” (209). Charles Park situates Paik as a cosmopolitan “poor man from a poor country,” highlighting his multiple cultural modalities (influenced by Korea, Japan, Germany, and the United States) and his border-straddling artwork. While the essay focuses primarily on Paik’s most popular piece TV-Buddha (first displayed in 1974), Park also explains how the contrasting reception to Paik’s subsequent work TV-Rodin (1976-1978) fails to recognize the dynamism of intercultural encounters and “reveal[s] an inherent Western bias to art and technology” (219).
Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media is a timely and valuable resource for teaching and studying science fiction. The collection offers an accessible exegesis of Orientalism’s productivity in managing anxieties about geopolitical conflict and economic power in a technological age and makes an important contribution to studies of techno-Orientalism. At the moment of writing, debates about representation and race proliferate on social media. Recent releases that either rely on Orientalist aesthetics or Asian source material—e.g., Netflix’s web series Iron Fist (2017) and Hollywood movies Doctor Strange (2016), The Great Wall (2016), and Ghost in the Shell (2017)—have been criticized for centering EuroAmerican agency through whitewashing, yellowface, and plots that valorize the white savior complex. Techno-Orientalist influence is likely to remain strong in various discursive arenas with the intensification of xenophobic tensions in the United States and Europe. As a logic and discourse that is “supple and elastic,” techno-Orientalism may also function multivalently in sites and systems that have yet to be thoroughly explored (225). For example, although the editors’ introduction and conclusion mention India as ranking among the “chief threats to the US service and labor sectors” (4) and Singapore as a site of “hypercapitalist frenzy,” (225), the book provides little analysis of South or Southeast Asian examples with the exception of Bahng’s essay. Nevertheless, its ambitious range of subjects and varied critical and interpretive approaches offer new insights on well-known and less familiar examples of techno-Orientalism and broaden the fields of comparative cultural studies and speculative fiction studies.
NOTE
1. David Morley and Kevin Robins introduced the neologism “techno-orientalism” in their 1992 article “Techno-Orientalism: Futures, Foreigners and Phobias.” After the publication of their collection Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries (1995), other scholars further popularized this term. See also Toshiya Ueno.
WORKS CITED
Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2011.
Mori, Masahiro. “The Uncanny Valley.” Trans. Karl F. MacDorman and Takashi Minato. Energy 7.4 (1970): 33-35.
Morley, David, and Kevin Robins. “Techno-Orientalism: Futures, Foreigners and Phobias.” New Formations 16 (1992): 136–56.
─────. “Techno-Orientalism: Japan Panic.” Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries. Ed. David Morley and Kevin Robins. London: Routledge, 1995. 147-73.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. London: Penguin, 1978.
Sato, Kumiko. “How Information Technology Has (Not) Changed Feminism and Japanism: Cyberpunk in the Japanese Context.” Comparative Literature Studies 41.3 (2004): 335-55.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay is About You.” Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2003. 123-51.
Tatsumi, Takayuki. “Generations and Controversies: An Overview of Japanese Science Fiction, 1957-1997.” SFS 27.1 (2000): 105-14.
Ueno, Toshiya. “Japanimation and Techno-Orientalism.” The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture. Ed. Bruce Grenville. Vancouver, BC: Arsenal, 2002. 223–31.
─────. “Techno-Orientalism and Media Tribalism.” Third Text 13 (1999): 95-106.
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