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Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media
Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media
Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media
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Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media

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What will the future look like? To judge from many speculative fiction films and books, from Blade Runner to Cloud Atlas, the future will be full of cities that resemble Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, and it will be populated mainly by cold, unfeeling citizens who act like robots. Techno-Orientalism investigates the phenomenon of imagining Asia and Asians in hypo- or hyper-technological terms in literary, cinematic, and new media representations, while critically examining the stereotype of Asians as both technologically advanced and intellectually primitive, in dire need of Western consciousness-raising. 
 
The collection’s fourteen original essays trace the discourse of techno-orientalism across a wide array of media, from radio serials to cyberpunk novels, from Sax Rohmer’s Dr. Fu Manchu to Firefly.  Applying a variety of theoretical, historical, and interpretive approaches, the contributors consider techno-orientalism a truly global phenomenon. In part, they tackle the key question of how these stereotypes serve to both express and assuage Western anxieties about Asia’s growing cultural influence and economic dominance. Yet the book also examines artists who have appropriated techno-orientalist tropes in order to critique racist and imperialist attitudes. 
 
Techno-Orientalism is the first collection to define and critically analyze a phenomenon that pervades both science fiction and real-world news coverage of Asia. With essays on subjects ranging from wartime rhetoric of race and technology to science fiction by contemporary Asian American writers to the cultural implications of Korean gamers, this volume offers innovative perspectives and broadens conventional discussions in Asian American Cultural studies. 
 
 
 
LanguageEnglish
Release dateApr 17, 2015
ISBN9780813575551
Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media

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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Collection of mostly short pieces, as it says on the tin, from periods starting from the Russo-Japanese war and Looking Backward (1882) and going up to the Battlestar Galactica reboot and Dollhouse. Abigail De Kosnik compares The Mask of Fu Manchu, Son of Sinbad, and Star Wars: A New Hope, finding continuities and reworkings of Orientalist tropes to fit then-current anxieties. My favorite piece was Seo-Young Chu’s “I, Stereotype: Detained in the Uncanny Valley,” about the similarities between Orientalist stereotypes and the concept of the uncanny valley—more human than human is not quite human. Among other things, Chu points out that it’s probably not accidental that a couple of white actors who played Fu Manchu also played monsters: Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee.

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Techno-Orientalism - David S. Roh

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