What will the future look like? To judge from many speculative fiction films and books the future will be full of cities that resemble Tokyo and Shanghai, and it will be populated 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.

Acknowledgments
 

Technologizing Orientalism: An Introduction

Part I   Iterations & Instantiations
 

Chapter 1   Demon Courage and Dread Engines: America’s Reaction to the Russo-Japanese War and the Genesis of the Japanese Invasion Sublime

Chapter 2   “Out of the Glamorous, Mystic East”: Techno-Orientalism in Early Twentieth-Century United States Radio Broadcasting

Chapter 3   Looking Backward from 2019 to 1882: Reading the Dystopias of Future Multiculturalism in the Utopias of Asian Exclusion

Chapter 4   Queer Excavations: Technology, Temporality, Race

Chapter 5   I, Stereotype: Detained in the Uncanny Valley

Chapter 6   The Mask of Fu Manchu, Son of Sinbad, and Star Wars IV: A New Hope: Techno-Orientalist Cinema as an Mnemotechnics of 20th Century U.S.-Asian Conflicts

Chapter 7   Racial Speculations: (Bio)Technology, Battlestar Galactica, and Mixed-Race Imagining

Chapter 8   “Never Stop Playing”: StarCraft and Asian Gamer Death

Chapter 9   “Home Is Where the War Is”: Remaking Techno-Orientalist Militarism on the Homefront

Part II   Reappropriations & Recuperations
 

Chapter 10   Thinking about Bodies, Souls, and Race in Gibson’s Bridge Trilogy

Chapter 11   Re-imagining Asian Women in Feminist Post-Cyberpunk Science Fiction

Chapter 12   The Cruel Optimism of Asian Futurity and the Reparative Practices of Sonny Liew’s Malinky Robot

Chapter 13   Palimpsestic Orientalisms and Antiblackness: Or, Joss Whedon’s “grand vision of an Asian/American tomorrow”

Chapter 14   “How Does It Not Know What It Is?”: The Techno-Orientalized Body in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and Larissa Lai’s Automaton Biographies

Chapter 15   “A Poor Man from a Poor Country”: Nam June Paik, TV-Buddha, and the Techno-Orientalist Lens

Desiring Machines, Repellant Subjects: A Conclusion

Bibliography 
 

Notes on Contributors
 

Index

DAVID S. ROH is an assistant professor of American literature and digital humanities at Old Dominion University. He is the author of Illegal Literature: Toward a Disruptive Creativity.

BETSY HUANG is an associate professor of English and chief officer of Diversity and Inclusion at Clark University. She is the author of Contesting Genres in Contemporary Asian American Fiction. 

GRETA A. NIU earned her Ph.D. in English from Duke University and has taught at SUNY Brockport, University of Rochester, and St. John Fisher College.