Kaede Ashizawa
York University
kaedeca@yorku.ca
ABSTRACT: How do we envision Asian futurism? How does the West, the historically domineering face of global modernity and speculative futures, ontologically and epistemologically trame Asian modernity? These questions are explored in techno-Orientalism, a branch of Edward Said s Onentalism, initially coined in 19/8. The concept of techno-Unentalism emerged trom cultural geographers David Morley and Kevin Robins in 1995 in addressing how Western powers interpreted and then responded to the rise of Asian global technological and media advancement and influence in the late 20th century. For much of the term’s existence, techno-Orientalism had been primarily discussed to critique works of fiction and representation of Asiatic influence and characters in speculative and science fiction genres (Roh et al., 2015). However, this paper is particularly invested in uncovering how techno-Orientalism has psycho-socially manifested from myth to reality, driving representational and socio-political hegemonic power over Asian people and their modernity. Following this, I consider how these ideologies reproduce this power through the West’s affective responses of fear, anxiety, and paranoia in the collectiveconsciousness. Further, I suggest that under the techno-Orientalist gaze, Asian people become ‘technologized’ (Roh et al., 2015) as an uncanny dystopia (Chun, 2009; Chu, 2015), personified as an inhuman, unflinching threat to Western modernity. By exploring the socio-politcally mediated emergence, imagination, integration, practice, and distribution of techno-Orientalism, I attempt to argue that the West aligns closely with tenets of techno-Orientalism to alienate Asia’s futurity as a threat. Through this exploration, I contemplate the impact of this ideology in contemporary politics surrounding Asian people and technological innovations.
Keywords: techno-Orientalism, Asian futurism, speculative futures, ideological hegemony, collective consciousness, modernity, technicity, mediation
Introduction
How does the world envision Asian futurism? What modes of human-technological advancement signal Asian influence in the accelerating geopolitical economy? Finally, how does the West, the historically domineering figure of global modernity, utilize these modes to ontologically and epistemologically frame projects of Asian modernity? These questions are explored in techno-Orientalism, a fragment of Orientalism that Edward Said coined in 1978. Seven years later, the term techno-Orientalism was first developed by cultural geographers David Morley and Kevin Robins in 1995 to address how Western powers interpreted and then acted upon the rise of Asian technological advancement and influence throughout the late 20th century.
For much of the term’s contemporary existence, techno-Orientalism had been primarily discussed to critique the representation of Asiatic influence and characters in speculative and science fiction genres (Roh et al., 2015). However, this paper is particularly invested in uncovering how techno-Orientalism has been grounded in reality and manifested in the West’s institutional and geopolitical conceptualizations of technological modernity, and its implications in framing contemporary Asian diasporic subjectivity. In this attempt, I guide my investigation through the following questions: (1) How does techno-Orientalism depart from Saidian Orientalism? (2) What historical becomings fed the emergence and integration of techno-Orientalist thought in the West? (3) What contradictions and duality belie its emergence and integration? (4) Through what theoretical and practical means do manifest and latent forms of techno-Orientalism become established? And finally (5) How do techno-Orientalist principles construct and ascribe the Asian subjectivity?
By establishing the principles of Saidian Orientalism as the foundation, I explore the constitutional tenets and origins of techno-Orientalism through a review of scholarly literature examining core historical events, mobilization of Asian people, materials, and imagery, as well as the manifest and latent forms of techno-Orientalist Asian futures. Following this, I consider contemporary discourse reflecting how ideologies penetrate collective consciousness, morality, and practice and how we associate and further reproduce the linkage between certain demographics and affective responses of abject and paranoia.
By shedding light on the emergence, imagination, integration, practice, and distribution of techno-Orientalism, first I attempt to position Asian futurism in relation to the West through a technological perspective. This particular view is reminiscent of roboticist Masahiro Mori’s aesthetical hypothesis of The Uncanny Valley (1970), abjecting the near-human object as a discomforting Other. Second, I consider geographers Banu Gökariksel, Christopher Neubert, and Sara Smith’s construction of the antagonized Other as a fragment of a “demographic fever dream” (2019). From this consolidation of work, I argue that the West employs tenets of techno-Orientalism, rooted in Saidian Orientalism, to alienate Asia’s technological projects of modernity based upon a foundation of fear and anxiety. Further, I suggest that under the techno-Orientalist gaze, the Orient becomes ‘technologized’ (Roh et al., 2015) as an uncanny fever dream (Chun, 2009; Chu, 2015; Gökariksel et al., 2019), personifying the technology that poses as a threat to Western monopoly of modernity.
Roots in Edward Said’s Orientalism:
The principles of techno-Orientalism cannot be discussed without first anatomizing the foundational tenets of Orientalism, as first coined by Said in his eponymous book from 1978. In this original text, while Said primarily discusses the Orient as situated in West Asia and North Africa, Saidian Orientalism has aided in conceptualizing Western hegemonic relationships with other Asian societies as well. Said crucially states that Orientalism is the West’s “created bod[ies] of theory and practice” (1978, p. 14) of the East, expanding beyond a merely imagined construction into deeply integrated systems of power, knowledge, and culture. One of the core tenets of Orientalism is that the West essentializes the East as underdeveloped, subaltern, and primitive, but also simultaneously as an alluring and exotic subject (Said, 1978). As Said explores Western conceptions of ventures and relationships with Asian societies in historical fiction and non-fiction text, the premise of Orientalism, or the Orientalizing discourse which it acts upon, puts forth the Western thought, imagery, and lexicography of the East as objective truth to clearly distinguish themselves in the hegemonic world order (Said, 1978).
Said cautions that the Orient, contrastingly to the West as the Occident, is not a mere creation or idea, but rather a discipline rooted in reality. As the origin of the world’s oldest civilizations, cultures, and languages, the Orient became an instrument of Western imperial and colonial power (Said, 1978). As the Occident’s counter-image, idea, personality, and experience, the Orient had been willingly maintained as an integral body, object, and location in the West’s campaign for imperial superiority in material civilization and culture (Said, 1978). This justification of the West manifests as the driving force of Orientalism, conserved and reproduced by institutions, literature, vocabulary, scholarship, national policy, media culture, doctrines, colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles.
Through these means, Orientalism embedded this dichotomous presence of Western power within the Western consciousness through vessels of academics, poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and imperial administrators who readily accepted this discourse (Said, 1978). Continuous acceptance and integration of Orientalizing discourse became the rationality to speak for, restructure, settle, and establish authority over Eastern societies and cultures (Said, 1978). Transgenerationally accepted by Western institutions under the guise as a systemic discipline of theory and practice, this rationality fulfilled the idea of Western superiority over the ‘backwards’ Orient, concretized not only through imagination but most importantly geographic distribution to upkeep this dichotomy as an inherent worldview, a manifest destiny, of the Occident upon the Orient (Said, 1978).
Yet, Said crucially emphasizes that “Orientalism stands forth and away from the Orient.” (Said, 1978, p. 30), meaning that Orientalist discourse does not centre the Orient but rather the Western techniques of representation and ‘revealing’ of the distant Orient. This distant observance and knowledge production of the Orient was acted upon through generational distribution and institutional maintenance in the West as an inherent revealing, of what Said calls Manifest Orientalism (Said, 1978). Said situates the roots of Orientalism in Western institutions that form this dichotomous dynamic as culture, policy, and objective knowledge. By the late 19th century, manifest Orientalism had firmly planted its presence in geopolitical practice (Said, 1978). Predominantly the development of Oriental studies experts in the British and French governments was deemed essential to the expansion of their Middle Eastern empires (Said, 1978). This was because Western political institutions not only believed, but broadly circulated that the Orient was essential and unchanging.
If manifest Orientalism is how the West acts upon Orientalizing the East, Said offers the second facet of Orientalism as Latent Orientalism, a set of implicit constitutions of the Orient that pervades its representation in the Western collective consciousness (Said, 1978). Latent Orientalism posits a unanimous and stable notion that the Orient is Other, eccentric, backwards, penetrable, malleable, isolated and in need of interpretation by the West (Said, 1978). Latent Orientalism reveals the Orient in tropes and imagery that permeate Western literature and media, reproducing this representation of the Orient within civil society and collective culture (Said, 1978). Particular gendered constructions are also expressed through latent Orientalism, framing the Oriental male as isolated from his superior Occidental counterparts, resembling the contempt and fear of the Orient, and the Oriental female as projections of Occidental fantasy, portraying the willingness, sensuality, and penetrability of the Orient (Said, 1978).
Intertwined, manifest and latent forces of the West construct the Orient frozen in time with finite probability of development, transformation, geographic movement, and isolation in antiquity. I now turn to how these core tenets of Saidian Orientalism facilitate the emergence of techno-Orientalism. As closely examined below, techno-Orientalism is a specific Western conception of the East in the context of speculative Asian futurism, technological innovation, and modernity.
Tracing the emergence of techno-Orientalist thought
The West’s willingly indoctrinated Orientalization of the East asserted the myth of a mystical, backward, and archaic Orient as a factual counterpart to the progressive Occident. Said particularly emphasizes the Western commitment toward this campaign through manifest and latent forms. From this idea, techno-Orientalism, first conceived by Morley and Robins in the 1995 book Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic, Landscapes, and Cultural Boundaries, reveals how the Orientalist view of Asia has been maintained surrounding technological politics, modernity, and speculative futures of Asia. If Saidian Orientalism established the Orient as a backwards, hypo-counterpart of the West, techno-Orientalism could be defined as a phenomenon that similarly constructs, imagines, and indoctrinates Asia as hyper-counterparts (Morley and Robins, 1995), shrouded in knowledge, innovation, and motives transcending the Euro-centric genealogy of modernity (Morley and Robins, 1995).
First and foremost, the intersection of technology and Orientalizing views of the East predates eras of Asian acceleration in the post-Cold War technological revolution and global entry as technological leaders (Morley and Robins, 1995; Gibson, 2001; Roh et al., 2015). Morley and Robins write that techno-Orientalism is a view of the Orient that resulted in the larger effect of globalization overall (Morley and Robins, 1995). Kenneth Hough, a professor of History at UC Santa Barbara particularly pinpoints the emergence of Asia’s technological advancement in Japan’s militaristic surge in large-scale global wars. Hough examines the rhetoric “Japanese Invasion Sublime”, indicated by the 1904 Russo-Japanese War as the first incident of the emergence of Yellow Peril, or fear of the East, in the Western world (Hough, 2014; Morley and Robins, 1995; Siu and Chun, 2020). This War was a historical turning point that instigated the forthcoming global influence of Asia’s military, social, economic, and political power. In an unprecedented turn of events in history, an Occidental nation, Russia, was overpowered by Japan, the historically Orient.
In the United States, images of unflinching Japanese soldiers mechanically charging in uniform toward Russian soldiers evoked a spectacle of fear, anxiety, and uncertainty (Roh et al, 2015). Characterized as superhuman, or robotic even, Hough discusses the “Japanese calm”, the seemingly emotionless and painless devotion to the War against a powerful Western nation (Hough, 2014). This latent robotic image of the Japanese military as an emerging non-Western power has been reiterated throughout Japan’s global characterization, as echoed by the shock of Admiral Halsey, commander of the US third fleet in World War 2 when he stated that Japanese kamikaze warship suicide bombers were “the only weapon [he] feared in War.” (Hough, 2014).
Japan’s unflinching fanaticism and near-automated devotion to global advancement evoked paranoia and fear in the West. Many researchers of techno-Orientalism thus mark Japan’s advancement as a global power in the early 20th century as the origin of “technologizing Orientalism”, as defined by David S. Roh, Betsy Huang, and Greta A. Niu (2015). Revisiting Said’s terms of Orientalism, the construction of the Orient as a subaltern form of the Occident is attributed to productions and discourse that frame the East in contrast to the West. Likewise, techno-Orientalism places its theoretical functions within the project of Western modernity under its predisposition as a universal modernity. For Western societies that traditionally monopolized modernity, secular and technological acceleration of the Other induced paranoia in losing the sophistication they had claimed for themselves (Morley and Robins, 1995; Roh et al., 2015).
Implications and Contradictions of Asian Modernity in the Western Context
The Western drive to establish themselves as the architects of modernity (Morley and Robins, 1995; Dussel, 1998), necessitated the configuration of the East as its very own technology, rather than as the creator of it (Eisenstadt, 2000; Roh et al., 2015). This particular technologization of the East aided in shaping a Eurocentric modernity campaign, developing techno-Orientalist ideas alongside the rise of Asian modernity (Roh et al, 2015) as a separate phenomenon from industrial advancements in the West (Cooper, 2005; Dussel, 1998). Neoliberal trade policies enabled exponential information flow and capital between the East and the West, leveraging techno-Orientalist speculations of Asian modernity as a form of Western control (Roh et al., 2015; Siu and Chun, 2020). While Orientalism strategically arrested Asia in a primordial container, techno-Orientalism posits a contradictory spectrum in which both the West and the East had to be distinguished under separate arenas of technological innovation and modernity (Said, 1978; Roh et al., 2015).
As the Eurocentric conception of modernity waned in reaction to Eastern competitors, technological seeds initially planted by the West in post-World War Two Asia expanded to unforeseen heights. Particularly in Japan in the late 20th century, their economic prosperity and unprecedented technological innovations began to mobilize to the Western arena through success in mass imports (Morley and Robins, 1995; Roh et al., 2015). Japan’s rise in technological and global media power from the late 1980s until the late 1990s in America led to further cultural paranoia of the Orient, following waves of Japanese cultural and material expansion by large corporations such as Sony, Toyota, Nintendo, and so forth (Morley and Robins, 1995; Clammer, 2000; Tatsumi, 2015). As Morley and Robins refer to as “stealing America’s soul”, post-war Japan harnessed technologies and knowledge as the new emergence of global technological power (1995). Through technological innovation in electronics, automobiles, and robotics, Japan rose to heights of global influence, replacing, or through Western eyes, stealing, historically safeguarded positions of the West as pinnacles of modernity (Clammer, 2000).
The feverish convulsions that ensued were violent and disorienting. The result of this absorption of modernity is what disturbs, yet fascinates the Western gaze. (Gibson, 2001). According to science fiction author William Gibson, the Japanese dominated pillars of global movement and technological advancement initially commanded by the West (2001). In other words, the contradiction of techno-Orientalism lies in Japan’s embracing and surpassing of Western technology (Morley and Robins, 1995; Clammer, 2001; Goh, 2013; Roh et al., 2015). Gibson comments on the tautological component of techno-Orientalism circularly: because of historical projects of Western colonial interventions of modernity in the East, Japan was seen as ‘biting the hand that feeds’ (2001). This Orientalist narrative depicts a hyper-futuristic Japan that the West had a role in creating. In this vision, Japan has now ironically become more Western than the West, posing a danger to the ‘fundamental’ Eurocentric future (Robins and Morley, 1995; Goh, 2013; Roh et al., 2015).
The anxiety about Japan’s new global presence shook the growing insecurity of Western modernity. Over time, the increase in Chinese takeovers of American factories and labour work, US-China trade wars, and North Korean military weapons on the horizon, challenged America’s global politico-economic dominance (Roh et al., 2015; Siu and Chun, 2020). This global expansion of Asia trickled into the Western consciousness in latent forms of conceptualizing the Orient as a threat. Following Said’s Orientalist principles, techno-Orientalism, grounded in the observable geo-political economy (Said, 1978), constructed the Orient as the harbinger of apocalyptic futures. Essentialized through their electronics, mechanical factory labour, mass global production, and technological innovation, the Orient was “defrosted” so to speak, from its crystallized, “backward” Orientalist perspective to post-human machines of the future. If Orientalism imagined Asia as arrested in the past, in need of saving from a more civilized, rational power, techno-Orientalism fashioned Asia into a future that the West had to protect themselves from.
Japan, or the so-called “Japan Panic” (Morley and Robins, 1995; Hough, 2014) is crucial to understand as a chronological and geographic marker in this techno-Orientalist narrative of modernity. Sociologist Jean Baudrillard compares Japan to an “orbiting satellite of the planet Earth” (Baudrillard, 1988, p. 79), of Western modernity. Baudrillard describes that while Japan assumed its position as a distant and non-central force in Western arenas of modernity, its society and culture are globally dispersed, nearly universal, in terms of its technological artifacts and economic presence (Baudrillard, 1988). If the future is synonymous with technological accumulation, the technology that drives this accumulation forward becomes personified by its creator (Morley and Robins, 19995; Gibson, 2001; Tatsumi, 2019). The speculation of the Japanese surpassing and replacing Western modernity Asianized the future, especially with China shortly entering as a key player (Roh et al., 2015; Siu and Chun, 2020).
China similarly became the object of techno-Orientalist invention when it was classified by the US as a newly industrialized country (NIC) as its impact on the global economy surged (Siu and Chun, 2020). Aligned with techno-Orientalist contradictions, China’s “rise” in the U.S. context has centred on constructing its people as a vast, subaltern-like labour force and a massive consumer market whose appetite for Western cultural products, if fostered, could secure U.S. global cultural and economic dominance (Roh et al., 2015; Siu and Chun, 2020). This resonated with the racist discourse surrounding Chinese labourers in America in the early 20th Century. In 1902, a book entitled Some Reasons for Chinese Exclusion: Meat vs. Rice, American Manhood Against Asiatic Coolieism: Which Shall Survive? published by the American Federation of Labour, stated that “the Chinese male body differed radically from the American male body[…] Chinese workers were able to endure physical hardships that Americans and European workers could not” (American Federation of Labour, 1902, as cited in Roh et al., 2015). This latent disposition that the Asian body biologically differs from the Euro-American male reduces the Asian people to a durable, inhuman entity.
China’s dual image as both neoliberal consumers and producers posed a representational challenge to the West. Whether China was a human factory or an economically capitalist society like the United States, its accelerating power of economies and technical advancement determined its power to become a major force in future global scapes. Under the techno-Orientalist gaze, Japan created the technology but China was the technology itself (Roh et al., 2015; Siu and Chun, 2019). The West saw both as essential engines that motor the future, Japan as the innovator and China as the manufacturer. Posed as a threat, Asian subjectivity as a whole became an overwhelmingly powerful image of modernity facing the West.
Techno-Orientalism Manifests
Techno-Orientalist tensions in the United States manifested in the murder of Vincent Chin, a 27-year-old Chinese American in Detroit, in 1982 by two Caucasian Americans Ronald Ebens and Michael Nitz (Hsu, 2022). The attackers were autoworkers in the United States, where the market share was being overtaken by Japanese vehicles (Hsu, 2022). Ebens and Nitz beat Chin to death with a baseball bat in a manner reminiscent of Americans smashing Japanese-made cars in protest to auto imports in the early 1970s. Despite the fact that Chin was not Japanese, nor that he did not work in the automotive industry, the murderers saw Chin as an embodiment of Japanese technological advancement that threatened their Western power (Hsu, 2022). This brutality of Chin’s murder signals more than racial prejudice: Chin not only served as a convenient symbol for Asian modernity but also personified its attributes of an efficient and alien technological system that fuelled Western paranoia (Roh et al., 2015; Siu and Chun, 2019)
By portraying Chin as a factory machine that had to be disassembled by Ebens and Nitz to restore their American personhood, subjectivity, and masculinity, the techno-Orientalist rhetoric underlined this dehumanization (Roh et al., 2015; Chu, 2015). Despite this, North America has been constructed upon the backs of the integral, yet, subaltern role of Othered labour. In the case of East Asian Labourers, Chinese labourers made up more than half of the workforce in 1869 during the construction of the transcontinental railroad due to their willingness to work for minimal wages and conditions undesirable to the Western labour force (Roh et al., 2015; Siu and Chun, 2019)). Yet the American populace protested against the use of “cheap labour” after realizing that their labour market was being shared with Othered bodies.
This irrational anxiety of the ethnically dominant and the resulting justification of outcasting the Other can be explained by what Gökariksel, Neubert, and Smith describe as a ‘demographic fever dream’ that settles within the consciousness of an ethnically hegemonic society. According to Gökariksel et al., these fever dreams haunt the increasingly potent role of demography in driving socio-politico-economic programs (2019). In the three case studies observed by Gökariksel et al., incoherent and emotionally provocative narratives that rationalized global right-wing populist movements are emphasized by fever dream-like visions, and subsequently acted upon as reality (2019). These fever dreams serve a political purpose to vividly carry the threat of the Other to the dominant power, embedding fictions of a homogenous dominant demographic to justify the aggressive expulsion of the Other (Gökariksel et al., 2019).
This unstable and hegemonized structure founded upon paranoia becomes self-justified and self-produced, and can dangerously lead to the weaponization of gendered and racialized national subjects (Gökariksel et al., 2019). Thus, demographic fever dreams are an effective technique that hijacks the body and mind and spins itself as the central narratives in animating political movements. Take for example the racialization of the COVID-19 Pandemic as a fever dream, and the anthropomorphization of Asian bodies as the virus manifesting in mass violence against the diasporic East Asian community and becoming the floodgate of the Yellow Peril in the twenty-first century (Siu and Chun, 2020).
Gökariksel et al. demonstrate four key aspects of demographic fever dreams. First is that specific vivid imaginaries of fever dreams animate strong, influential emotions by centralizing a particular figure or scene (Gökariksel et al., 2019). Second, narratives of these dreams fixate on demographic changes that merge the nation’s past and future (Gökariksel et al., 2019). Third, these narratives are also detached from demographic data, exhibiting their incoherence (Gökariksel et al., 2019). Finally, they contain a specifically gendered dimension that threatens and resurges particular masculinities and plays into gendered tropes that project infantilizing generalizations on women (Gökariksel et al., 2019).
These four modes upon which fever dreams enact their narratives mirror how both manifest and latent Orientalism saturate Western political, economic, cultural, and social worldviews. This extends to techno-Orientalism as well, as seen in the fever dreams of Asia “stealing America’s soul” (Morley and Robins, 1995), or as implied, stealing the West’s wielding power in modernity, technological innovation, and position in the Eurocentric world order. Thus, considering techno-Orientalism as Western modernity’s fever dream, its tenets strategically penetrate and become easily transplanted due to its powerful exhaustibility. Driven by this, the social, political, economic, and cultural construction of Asian bodies as expendable technology may have evolved, yet persisting. Labour equities have significantly been transformed in the 21st century, with Asian groups even endowing the “model minority” myth, albeit another fever dream, in the West today (Roh et al., 2015; Siu and Chun, 2019). The “model minority” myth says that Asian Americans have played within the rules of the American system to their own group benefit. The success of some groups of Asian American immigrants is often held as an example toward which other groups should strive. (Blackburn, 2019)
Nonetheless, there is no shortage of discourse in contemporary Western media and society that illustrates the fever dream of Asia as the world’s labour “machine.” Perhaps Western concerns about Asians stealing their employment are not mere economic concerns; but rather concerns of humanistic integrity regarding how they could allow a synthetic, technologically infused person to replace what would otherwise be their livelihood.
The Oriental Body as The Uncanny Valley
In “I, Stereotype,” literature scholar Seo-Young Chu connects the stereotyping of Asian bodies as synthetic, expendable technology to Mori’s hypothesis of “The Uncanny Valley” (1970) with communications scholar Wendy H. K. Chun’s technologization of race in “Race and/as Technology” (2009). Using these two theories, Chu likens the techno-Orientalist perceptions of the Asian body to uncanny, technologically sophisticated humanoid robots who have yet to reach verisimilitude or readily accepted humanness (Chu, 2015). Following this, the fabrication of Asia as an apocalyptic threat to the Western order of modernity alarmingly reduces entire populations to subhuman entities. Due to the existential discomfort spurred by the mere existence of an uncanny Orient, the Occident is reassured of their humanity. It justifies their will to defend their conceptions of modernity and the future.
As a fever dream, as the uncanny valley, as technology, and a projection of Occidental paranoia of the technological rise of the Orient, the myopic conception of Asian futurism places Asia in between the shackles of Orientalist arrest as a relic of the past, and techno-Orientalist suspension as threats to a Eurocentric future. In all forms of fiction, non-fiction, and lived experience, it is alarmingly evident that we can only bring forth liberation by de-Orientalizing Asia and Asian bodies in the present. Techno-Orientalist representations impact East Asian groups in Western diasporic imaginaries.
For example, the increase of anti-Asian hate during the COVID-19 pandemic has been considered a reinstatement of the harmful Yellow Peril (Dong et al., 2023) narrative of Asian bodies as a virus, as a harbinger of bio-apocalypse. This fear-mongering discourse directly led to violent action and messages that carried the same rage, contempt, and paranoia held towards projects of East Asian modernity throughout the 20th and 21st Centuries. The pandemic was only a reminder of this sentiment in the West, an alarming signal that things have not improved as much as the “model minority” myth has led us to believe. Fanghong Dong, Yeji Hwang, and Nancy A Hodgson’s research on Asian international graduate students during and after the COVID-19 pandemic revealed further alienation experienced by international students throughout and after their studies in the United States (2023). Not only portrayed as a visual symbol of a viral disease through Western media outlets, in recent years, Visa policies and immigration procedures have become heavily guarded against those of Chinese origins amidst increasing political tensions between China and NATO countries, particularly for international students perceived to be “stealing data and research” from American institutions (Kivelson, 2023, p. 2). This techno-Orientalist narrative has been bolstered by the pandemic, increasing Chinese technological and design innovations, and Western paranoia towards the TikTok (owned by Chinese parent company Douyin) boom in the United States (Gray, 2021), to name a few. The powerful fever dreams coloured by techno-Orientalist narratives have been revealed to impact policies, systems of immigration, admissions of international students, and media portrayals that only go to show its direct harm to East Asian groups in the West.
Conclusion:
Upon establishing the fundamental tenets of Saidian Orientalism as the point of departure, I closely examined scholarly literature explicating the emergence, genesis, practice, and manifest and latent implementations of techno-Orientalism drawing from the fear and anxiety which Asia poses to Western modernity, and how its ideologies construct and frame Asian bodies within this worldview. As a result, I analyzed how ideologies shape Western morality, practice, and cognitive associations, and how they further reproduce the connection between Asian futurism and the affective response of fear, paranoia, abject, and fascination in contemporary stances towards Asian modernity.
The lens of diasporic futurism is a perspective that may be a worthwhile exploration of this topic. Futurist perspectives, particularly for East Asian communities are a crucial direction to consider, as Chinese diasporic scholar Zhang (2021) explores through concepts of ethno-futurism and ethno-pessimism. In a similar yet distinct way from its other ethno-futurist siblings, Zhang argues that Sino (Chinese) futurism, relevant to East Asian futurism in general, emerges as a critical self-negation of its influences from Western imaginations of the East (Zhang, 2021), as highlighted earlier by Chu (2015) describing East Asians in the West as “uncanny” entities. Simultaneously, ethno-pessimist perspectives question possible futures through spectres of colonialism embedded in solidarity, not as a negation of collective diasporic futures but to ground socio-political histories and realities in envisioning them (Zhang, 2021). Diasporic futurisms must not be monolithic but collective through self-acknowledgement of our histories and tension while rejecting techno-Orientalist frameworks.
This is more a reason for East Asian futurism to be participated in and created by and for its own community, rewriting Western spectacles and epistemologies of what diasporic collectivity and futurism could be. Looking forward, East Asian modernity beyond techno-Orientalist discourse reminds us to envision futures responsive to our communities’ nuances and complexities. With recent memories of anti-Asian hate during the COVID-19 pandemic, growing migration from East Asian countries in North America, and the increasing digitization of the diaspora in virtual spaces, this perspective becomes ever more relevant.
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