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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, 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"...