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Techno Orientalism Imagining

This document summarizes a book review of the collection "Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media". The review summarizes that the collection addresses how Western representations of Asia in technology and futuristic imaginings reproduce Orientalist tropes of Asian otherness and difference. It discusses how the essays examine this "techno-Orientalism" in various contexts like literature, film, television and video games. The review analyzes how the collection challenges and reappropriates common techno-Orientalist representations by granting Asian subjects agency and exploring alternative visions that disrupt Orientalist dichotomies.

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Santiago Reghin
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170 views4 pages

Techno Orientalism Imagining

This document summarizes a book review of the collection "Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media". The review summarizes that the collection addresses how Western representations of Asia in technology and futuristic imaginings reproduce Orientalist tropes of Asian otherness and difference. It discusses how the essays examine this "techno-Orientalism" in various contexts like literature, film, television and video games. The review analyzes how the collection challenges and reappropriates common techno-Orientalist representations by granting Asian subjects agency and exploring alternative visions that disrupt Orientalist dichotomies.

Uploaded by

Santiago Reghin
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
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Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction,

History, and Media ed. by David S. Roh, Betsy Huang, Greta


A. Niu (review)

Haerin Shin

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S., Volume 41, Number 3, Fall 2016,
pp. 217-219 (Review)

Published by Oxford University Press

For additional information about this article


https://muse.jhu.edu/article/631755

Access provided by Australian National University (7 Jul 2018 16:33 GMT)


Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History,
and Media. David S. Roh, Betsy Huang, and Greta A. Niu, eds. New
Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2015. x + 272 pages. $90.00 cloth; $34.95 paper.

Since its inception in David Morley and Kevin Robins’s book Spaces of Identity:
Global Media, Electronic Landscapes, and Cultural Boundaries (1995), techno-
Orientalism has been used to rewrite the legacy of Edward Said’s Orientalism
(1978), updating and expanding on but also inverting the temporal, geographical,
and conceptual reach of Said’s discursive framework. Whereas the imagined
“Orient” frames the present through the past by detaining the East in a timeless
limbo of stagnation in service to the West’s desire for self-identification, techno-
Orientalism sheds light on technology as the operational mechanism of
Orientalism. David S. Roh, Betsy Huang, and Greta A. Niu’s groundbreaking col-
lection, Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and
Media, shows how dazzling images of futurity and progress reproduce “represen-
tational containment” (3) through the alterity of Asian bodies.
Techno-Orientalism addresses a critical gap in the epistemology of alienation
by delivering essays that consider techno-Orientalism in various transnational
and cross-cultural contexts, covering a range of speculative imaginaries. The book
also maps out a metacognitive pathway that necessitates the implosion of the
Enlightenment vision. Mutating from Dr. Fu Manchu to the mechanical and sub-
human automatism of Asia’s industrial effectuality, technologized simulacra of
the Orient destabilize the ontological hierarchy of the East/West dichotomy by
exposing a new source of fear: the uncanny image of the East/West self in the alien
body of the Asian Other.
Assigning agency to the Asian subject by reinterpreting techno-Orientalism in light
of the global ascension to economic and political power of Japan, China, India, and
other Asian communities, the collection also trains a self-reflective lens on the haunt-
ing influences of the Western hegemony in the Eastern hemisphere’s drive toward
modernization. In so doing, the collection enriches an important area of critical dis-
course that, despite its “growing prevalence in the Western cultural consciousness,”
has been “generally ignored in academic and popular cultural spheres” (6).
The nine essays in part 1 excavate “instantiations of techno-Orientalism over
time and across genres” (16). Kenneth Hough anchors contemporary incarna-
tions of techno-Orientalist perspectives in the technophobic rhetoric of the
Japanese invasion. While Hough accentuates the fear-mongering portraits of

......................................................................................................
Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United
States 2016. This work is written by a US Government employee and is in the public domain in the United States.
DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlw018
MELUS  Volume 41  Number 3  (Fall 2016) 217
Reviews

imperial Japan’s westbound threat through exaggerated accounts of masculinity


and militarism, Jason Crum examines the formulation of mystic, incomprehen-
sible, and primitive images of Asian subjectivity, exploring physically and intel-
lectually emasculated Asian Others in popular US radio serials around the time of
World War II. Such strategic deployments of cognitive erasure, Victor Bascara
claims, extend from the racially sterilized futures of Edward Bellamy’s nine-
teenth-century novel Looking Backward 2000-1887 (1888) to Ridley Scott’s twen-
tieth-century film Blade Runner (1982). Whether entirely absent or simply lacking
agency, the cyphered body of the racialized Other demonstrates how the
Orientalist metrics of normalcy rely on denaturalization. Warren Liu attends to
this point by directing our attention to the “queer” temporality transposed on
the technologically retro-fashioned Japanese in William Gibson and Bruce
Sterling’s steampunk novel The Difference Engine (1990). Seo-Young Chu, mean-
while, likens stereotyping to dehumanization in its infringement on the racialized
subject’s ontological integrity by reading the Yellow Peril trope through Japanese
roboticist Mori Masahiro’s theory of the uncanny valley (almost but not quite
humanlike). Abigail De Kosnik devises the term memory technology to identify
a pattern of instillation that renders such uncanny moments of cognitive
estrangement into systematized hostility in her critique of The Mask of Fu
Manchu (1932), Son of Sinbad (1955), and Star Wars IV: A New Hope (1977).
In “Racial Speculations,” Jinny Huh returns to the Asian body and its objec-
tification, asserting that the critically acclaimed television series Battlestar
Galactica (2004-2009) masks the deep-set anxiety of miscegenation in its post-
racial politics by placing the ancestral womb of a posthuman race in the doubly
liminal body of an Asian female android. Part 1 of the volume concludes with two
essays on video games, a medium that inscribes the paradoxical epistemology of
techno-Orientalism through immersive engagement. Using the video game
StarCraft, Steve Choe and Se Young Kim showcase the techno-Orientalist parallax
in the double vision of envy and disrespect directed toward the performative
excellence of Korean gamers. Dylan Yeats’s detailed historiography of the com-
bative video game genre exposes how the entertainment industry’s transmedia-
tion of enemy aliens, from the macropolitical framework of the Space Race to the
subliminal perspectivization of game narratives, promotes the fear of techno-
Orientalist militarism. Although grouped under the section title “Iterations and
Instantiations,” the essays in part 1 do far more than reiterate familiar ideas; they
dismantle the East/West binary by exposing the multidimensionality in preexist-
ing techno-Orientalist patterns.
Part 2, titled “Reappropriations and Recuperations,” presents alternative, or
inverted, visions of the techno-Orientalist trope that refract the Western gaze by
complicating the agential dynamics of alienation. Julie Ha Tran reinterprets
the Asian sceneries and subjects in William Gibson’s Bridge Trilogy (1993-1999)
as self-reflexive appropriations that disrupt long-standing dichotomies of
218
Reviews

virtual/actual, physical/immaterial, and subject/object. Kathryn Allan recuperates


the figure of the objectified female cyborg through readings of feminist science fic-
tion novels, such as Tricia Sullivan’s Maul (2003) and Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl
(2002). Granting agency, Allan points out, does not mean simply endowing the char-
acters with control over their own bodies and thoughts. Instead, the abject must be
granted access to the infrastructure of embodiment, a topic that extends to Aimee
Bahng’s reading of Sonny Liew’s Malinky Robot (2011). Bahng shatters the concept
of Asia as a mere object of exploitation or simply a passive receptor of Western
values by looking at the reign of neoliberalism in a Singaporean context.
Douglas Ishii brings the readers back to the United States by focusing on Joss
Whedon’s cult television series Firefly (2002) and Dollhouse (2009-2010). Ishii
reminds readers that, as in Battlestar Galactica, the posthuman angle of the shows
masks racial homogeneity. The shows’ liberal attitude remains contained in the
speculative realm, which ironically results in the execution, not condemnation, of
the dehumanizing practices it sets out to repair. Is it possible, he asks, to speak of
emancipating Asian or black subjects when they are either largely absent (due to
disembodiment) or no more than a token presence? Tzarina Prater and Catherine
Fung take up this challenge by contrasting Lai’s Automaton Biographies (2009) to
Scott’s Blade Runner. Observing how the subjugated bodies of the female android
are engineered to accommodate Asian and black stereotypes through the process
of visual encoding, the authors draw attention to the uneven seams that expose
the vulnerable subjects who lie beneath seemingly smooth surfaces. Charles Park
closes the volume with a revisionist reading of Nam June Paik’s media art piece
TV-Buddha (1974) in light of its cross-cultural themes and the ethno-racial bias
that loomed over the artist’s professional and personal profiles. He argues that
TV-Buddha was reduced to a racialized icon because the umbrella term “Asia”
failed to capture the multicultural exchanges nestled in the Buddha figure.
Through strategic employments of self-reflective analysis, the essays in the
collection take a proactive approach, reverse engineering the discourse and prac-
tice of techno-Orientalism and exposing the “codes” of its operational mecha-
nism. The volume successfully addresses our inability to see the extent to
which techno-Orientalism pervades our reality and besieges our senses through
varied conduits of mediation and distribution. A valuable addition to the rela-
tively scarce body of scholarship on the topic, Techno-Orientalism is a must-read
for scholars in Asian American studies, Asian studies, and race/ethnicity studies,
and is a rich source of fresh insight for academics in a range of other fields,
including cultural studies, literary criticism, media studies, posthuman theory,
speculative fiction studies, and postcolonial studies.

Haerin Shin
Vanderbilt University

219

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