Techno-orientalism: imagining Asia in speculative Fiction, History, and Media ed. by David s. Roh, Betsy Huang, and Greta A. Niu (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Techno-orientalism: imagining Asia in speculative Fiction, History, and Media ed. by David s. Roh, Betsy Huang, and Greta A. Niu John Cheng (bio) Techno-orientalism: imagining Asia in speculative Fiction, History, and Media, edited by David s. Roh, Betsy Huang, and Greta A. Niu. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2015. x + 260 pp. $34.95 paper. ISBN: 978-0-8135-7063-1. This anthology usefully introduces an emergent area of Asian American literary and cultural criticism that seeks to bridge what are often separate realms and discourses of analysis: Asian American studies and critical race studies on the one hand and speculative fiction studies and media studies on the other. Its editors explore aspects of what they, drawing from a 1995 David Morley and Kevin Robins essay, call techno-Orientalism: “the phenomenon of imagining Asia and Asians in hypo- or hypertechnological terms in cultural productions and political discourse” (2). This formulation extends Edward Said’s notion of Orientalism to the technological modern and how Asia, for the West, contains and configures its associated anxieties. While “Orientalism arrests Asia in traditional, and often premodern imagery,” the editors explain, “techno-Orientalism presents a broader, dynamic, and often contradictory spectrum of images, [End Page 382] constructed by the East and West alike, of an ‘Orient’ undergoing rapid economic and cultural transformations” (3). With its particular concern to imagine future possibility and temporal alternative, speculative fiction (or sf, as it is abbreviated) richly expresses these tensions in several media and forms; still, the editors argue, much of sf’s critical tradition has not applied Orientalism’s lens to technology’s sublime. This volume seeks to redress that critical vacuum. The collection’s two sections parallel the editors’ dual aims: “Iterations and Instantiations” charts examples and aspects of techno-Orientalism “over time and across genres” (16), while “Reappropriations and Recuperations” offers opportunities for “critical reappropriations in texts that self-referentially engage with Asian images” (7). With an introduction, conclusion, and fifteen contributor essays within two hundred twenty-five pages, most of its pieces are brief; consequently, some are largely descriptive. Many of the essays are, nevertheless, useful interventions. Several authors chart new, less obvious territory connecting the technological and the Asian/Orient. Aimee Bahng explores the “cruel optimism”—using Lauren Berlant’s notion—of Asian futures forecast through an economics founded on neoliberal financial speculation in Sonny Liew’s graphic novel Malinky Robot. Warren Liu counterposes the technological order of clocks and automata with the natural evolutionary order of geologic strata to excavate the “queer” futures and asynchronous dynamics that Asian racial traces reveal within the apparent temporal stability of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s foundational steampunk novel The Difference Engine. Other contributors recover historical examples of this same linkage: Kenneth Hough on the sublime combination of war, engines, and the modern in the formation of turn-of-the-twentieth-century fears of Japanese invasion; Jason Crum on authoritative knowledge about the Orient and its industrial production for mass audiences in late 1930s Mercury Theatre Company radio broadcasts. Still others examine Orientalist themes within emergent technological entertainment. Steve Choe and Se Young Kim consider their presence in discourses about video gaming and gamer culture, specifically the real-time strategy (RTS) game StarCraft, that connect Asian “gamer death” to broader assumptions about what constitutes “fair play”; Dylan Yeats delves into the militaristic link of Asian subjects/objects within Hollywood films, first-person shooter (FPS) video games, and actual military recruitment. While individual pieces assay the subject and concerns the editors introduce, as a whole the collection does not fully achieve their expressed aims. In actual geographic coverage, the “Asia” imagined from its subtitle defaults to East Asia. The editors mention India and South Asians in their introduction and conclusion, but none of the contributors take South or Southeast Asia—with the exception of Bahng and brief references to sites of American conflict—or authors from those regions as their subjects. How might they have considered [End Page 383] the reappropriately imagined Philippines, Viet Nam, and India in the sf of Charles Tan, Vu Kim Dung, or Amitav Ghosh, for instance? Similarly the essays might have more directly engaged scholarship in...