Abstract
If immigrant fiction and crime fiction have tended to lock the legibility of Asian Americans strictly within the severely limited paradigms of assimilationist virtues and racialized vices, what might a marginal, subcultural genre like science fiction offer to the representational vocabulary? Asians and Asian Americans, of course, are no strangers to science fiction; indeed, the history of U.S. relations with Asian countries is uncannily reflected in American science fiction’s long Orientalist history. American science fiction, as a genre preoccupied with speculations of the future, has been engaged in a parallel discourse about the roles Asia and Asians will play in Western conceptions of the future.1 It has long entertained this question in explicit and implicit ways through Orientalist figurations that cast Asian culture and people as either oppressively collectivist or singularly iniquitous.
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Notes
Iris Chang, The Chinese in America (New York: Penguin, 2003): 130.
Karel Capek, R.U.R. and The Insect Play (London: Oxford University Press, 1961).
Samuel R Delany, “Racism and Science Fiction,” New York Review of Science Fiction 120 (August 1998). http://www.nyrsf.com/racism-and-science-fiction-.html.
Many have laid the groundwork for a significant and growing body of scholarship and criticism on Orientalism and Asian American literary and cultural representations in science fiction and cultural discourses of science more generally. See, for instance, Lisa Nakamura, Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet (New York: Routledge, 2002); David Morley and Kevin Robins, “Techno-Orientalism: Japan Panic,” Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes, and Cultural Boundaries (London: Routledge, 1995): 147–173; Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “Orienting Orientalism, or How to Map Cyberspace,” Asian America.Net: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Cyberculture, ed. Rachel C. Lee and Sau-ling Cynthia Wong (New York: Routledge, 2003): 3–36; Chun, “Othering Cyberspace,” The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (New York: Routledge, 1998): 243–254; Kumiko Sato, “How Information Technology Has (Not) Changed Feminism and Japanism: Cyberpunk in the Japanese Context,” Comparative Literature Studies 41.3 (2004): 335–355; Toshiya Ueno, “Japanimation: Techno-Orientalism, Media Tribes, and Rave Culture,” Aliens R Us: The Other in Science Fiction Cinema, ed. Ziauddin Sardar and Sean Cubitt (Sterline: Pluto, 2002): 94–110; and the entire volume of the special “Alien/Asian” issue of MELUS 33.4 (Winter 2008), particularly guest editor Stephen Hong Sohn’s introduction, “Alien/Asian: Imagining the Racialized Future.”
David Morley and Kevin Robins, “Techno-Orientalism: Japan Panic,” Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes, and Cultural Boundaries (London: Routledge, 1995): 147–173
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “Orienting Orientalism, or How to Map Cyberspace,” Asian America.Net: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Cyberculture, ed. Rachel C. Lee and Sau-ling Cynthia Wong (New York: Routledge, 2003): 3–36
Chun, “Othering Cyberspace,” The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (New York: Routledge, 1998): 243–254
Kumiko Sato, “How Information Technology Has (Not) Changed Feminism and Japanism: Cyberpunk in the Japanese Context,” Comparative Literature Studies 41.3 (2004): 335–355
Toshiya Ueno, “Japanimation: Techno-Orientalism, Media Tribes, and Rave Culture,” Aliens R Us: The Other in Science Fiction Cinema, ed. Ziauddin Sardar and Sean Cubitt (Sterline: Pluto, 2002): 94–110; and the entire volume of the special “Alien/Asian” issue of MELUS 33.4 (Winter 2008), particularly guest editor Stephen Hong Sohn’s introduction, “Alien/Asian: Imagining the Racialized Future.”
Sven Birkerts, “Oryx and Crake: Present at the Re-Creation,” New York Times, May 18, 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/18/books/review/l8BIRKERT.html
Marleen S. Barr and Carl Freedman, PMLA: Special Topic Issue: Science Fiction and Literary Studies: The Next Millenium, 119.3 (May 2004); Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn, The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn, The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Marleen S. Barr, “Introduction: Textism—An Emancipation Proclamation,” PMLA 119.3 (May 2004): 429–441.
Scott McCracken, Pulp: Reading Popular Fiction (Manchester University Press, 1998): 102.
Adam Roberts, Science Fiction: The New Critical Idiom (London: Routledge, 2006): 17–18.
Damien Broderick, Reading by Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction (London: Routledge, 1995): 51.
John Huntington, “Science Fiction and the Future,” Science Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Mark Rose (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1976): 161.
Robert Scholes, “The Roots of Science Fiction,” Science Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Mark Rose (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1976): 47.
Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979).
Darko Suvin, “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre,” Science Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Mark Rose (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1976): 57–71.
Bertolt Brecht, “Kleines Organon fur das Theater (“Short Organon for the Theatre”),” Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. John Willett (1948; New York: Hill and Wang, 1977): 192.
Wai Chee Dimock, “Introduction: Genres as Fields of Knowledge,” PMLA 122.5 (October, 2007): 1378.
Paul Raven, “Book Review: ‘Stories of Your Life and Others,’” Velcro City, July 15, 2009. [URL]
Ted Chiang, “Story of Your Life,” in Stories of Tour Life and Others (New York: Tor, 2002).
E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (1927; New York: Harcourt, 1955).
Jeremy Smith, “The Absense of God: An Interview With Ted Chiang,” Infinityplus, http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/inttchiang.htm, August 18, 2009.
Robot Stories, DVD, directed by Greg Pak (2003; Kino Video, 2005). Quoted dialogue and page citations are from the published shooting script, Robot Stories and More Screenplays (San Francisco: Immedium, 2005).
Jeremy Smith, “The Absense of God: An Interview With Ted Chiang,” Infinityplus, http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/inttchiang.htm, August 18, 2009.
Karel Capek, R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots (1920; Penguin, 2004); Isaac Asimov, I, Robot (1950; Spectra, 1991).
Vivian Sobchack, Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987): 237.
N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999): 85.
Also see Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991): 149–181.
Lisa Nakamura, Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet (New York: Routledge, 2002): 61.
Cynthia Kadohata, In the Heart of the Valley of Love (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
Philip K. Dick, “Pessimism in Science Fiction,” The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings, ed. Lawrence Sutin (New York: Vintage, 1996): 54.
Min Hyoung Song, Stranße Future: Pessimism and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005): 63. Song also provides in the first chapter of Strange Future, “Racial Geography of Southern California,” a persuasive account of the confluence of environmental degradation and racial and class divisions that precipitated the 1992 L.A. riots and the plethora of pessimistic fictional and nonfictional speculations of the future.
Lyman Tower Sargent, “US Eutopias in the 1980s and 1990s: Self-Fashioning in a World of Multiple Identitie,” Utopianism/Literary Utopias and National Cultural Identities: A Comparative Perspective, ed. Paola Spinozzi (Bologna: University of Bologna, 2001): 221–232.
Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan, “Introduction: Dystopia and Histories,” Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination (New York: Routledge, 2003): 7.
Constance Penley, “Time Travel, Primal Scene, and the Critical Dystopia,” Liquid Metal: The Science Fiction Film Reader, ed. Sean Redmond (London: Wallflower Press, 2004): 126–135.
John Fiske, Power Plays, Power Works (London: Verso, 1993).
See Hsiu-Chuan Lee’s interview with Kadohata for Kadohata’s discussion of the social implications of the 1990 Census projections. Hsiu-chuan Lee, “Interview with Cynthia Kadohata,” MELUS 32.2 (Summer 2007): 165–186.
Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Duke University Press, 1996): 69.
Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. J. Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990): 401.
Tom Moylan, Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia (New York: Westview Press, 2000): 188.
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© 2010 Betsy Huang
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Huang, B. (2010). Reorientations. In: Contesting Genres in Contemporary Asian American Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230117327_4
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