Introduction: Alien/Asian: Imaging the Racialized Future

Abstract

Asian is no stranger to science, or for that matter, science fiction. Jack London's 1906 short story The Unparalleled Invasion, set in 1976, chronicles the emergence of China as a power coming out from the shadow of Japanese imperialism; due to its incredibly fecund citizens now numbering in the hundreds of millions, China threatens all modern civilizations. (1) To combat this reproductive menace, biological warfare is employed, thereby conveniently annihilating the Chinese population. Sax Rohmer's infamous creation of Dr. Fu Manchu in 1913 twined the figure of the Asian other intimately with the dark sciences as he came to be known as the devil doctor. Although set in London's Chinatown, Rohmer's Fu Manchu-centered series of novels nevertheless drew upon the immigration anxieties flourishing in the United States, where it became a bestselling series; the image was so popular, in fact, that Rohmer resurrected this infamous character time and again. While both Rohmer and London operate within early twentieth-century yellow fictions, their cultural representations did not emerge from a vacuum. (2) Sidney L. Gulick's foundational study, American Japanese Problem; a Study of the Racial Relations of the East and the West, published in the same year as The Unparalleled Invasion, explains that Japan's amazing victory over Russia has raised doubts among white nations. despised Asiatic, armed and drilled with Western weapons, is a power that must be reckoned with. In the not distant future Asia, armed, drilled, and united, will surpass in power, they aver, single white people, and it is accordingly a peril to the rest of the world (225). Here, Gulick refers to the 1905 conclusion of the Russo-Japanese War, which marked a sea change in international relations precisely because it was the first time an Asian nation had defeated a European power in modern warfare. However, Gulick's rhetorical descriptions illustrate how this moment required a reorientation and reconsideration of Asia more broadly as a location from which to mold futuristic representations and alternative temporalities. For instance, continued tensions over Chinese immigrant laborers resulted in a series of exclusion acts throughout the late nineteenth century that further cemented the status of the Asian as an alien subject, unfit for assimilation and integration into the United States. According to Urmila Seshagiri, the social context for Fu Manchu should also be situated transnationally in light of the fact that the Manchu dynasty had just concluded and Sun Yat-sen had begun a modernization campaign: Fu-Manchu and his hordes ... emblematize not only dynastic China's ideological opposition to the modern Christian West but also the emergent geopolitical ambitions of a post-1911 China determined to fashion itself as a nation unhindered by the imperial designs of Britain, Germany, France, Austria, Italy, Russia, or Japan (170). From this perspective, both London's short story and Rohmer's book series draw from multiple anxieties over Asia as pollutive geography, military menace, and economic competitor; these cultural productions interrogate what the attendant Alien/Asian might mean for any single white people. Both London and Rohmer imagine alternative temporalities where the Alien/ Asian is inextricably tied to science, the future, and technology. Although yellow-peril fictions and other such cultural forms first proliferated over a century ago, this special issue elucidates how the connection between the Asian American and the alien other still remains a force to draw upon to allegorize racial tension and exclusion. I further explore the discursive interventions made by both Laura Hyun Yi Kang and David Palumbo-Liu in employing the slash within the term Asian American, as I call attention to the ways in which Asia and America stand in an uneasy and unstable relationship with the other. (3) title of this special issue, Alien/Asian, also emphasizes how the binaristic formulation of Asian American might possess subcategories and intricacies routed through genre conventions that touch upon and intersect with fantasy, speculative fiction, science fiction, and other similar genres. …