UCLA

In Future Asians: Orientalism and Posthumanism in Twenty-First Century U.S. Science Fiction, I investigate the representation of Asians and Asian Americans in contemporary American science fiction. There is broad scholarly consensus that American science fiction of the early to mid-twentieth century responded to fears over immigration and overpopulation with overtly racist portrayals of Asian characters. I argue that science fiction of the early twenty-first century responds to global economic and technological conflict with a more subtle – but nonetheless racially coded – portrayal of Asian bodies as no longer entirely human. By examining these iterations of Asian posthumanism, my project contends with American science fiction’s persistent Orientalist discourse; ultimately, I assert that this seemingly fantastical genre reveals pressing U.S. anxieties about rising Asia and its competitive impact on both global trade and technological innovation.

Working at the intersection of science fiction studies, Asian American studies, and critical race studies, Future Asians aims to illuminate larger questions of race and futurity. Specifically, my dissertation examines the notion of the technological and biotechnological posthuman, which I define as mechanical imitations of the human (robots, artificial intelligence) and forms of the human that still rely on incorporating normal biological functioning of the human (clones, cyborgs). While these posthuman forms are often considered non-raced entities, I argue that science-fictional portrayals of the posthuman are not non-raced at all, but rather directly contend with contemporary racial biases and injustices. By examining three major tropes of Asian posthuman representation – the virtual avatar, the non-singular self, and the android – Future Asians investigates how contemporary U.S. science fiction employs the image of the posthuman either to reinscribe negative racial histories and stereotypes or to counter these histories. As the posthuman becomes a widespread theoretical concept across the humanities and social sciences, my study poses a critical intervention, contributing to a more nuanced understanding of the posthuman that applies across the subfields of Latinx futurism, Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism, and Indigenous futurism. The first chapter, “Ready Player One and the Reassertion of United States Economic & Technological Supremacy” interrogates the posthuman trope of the virtual avatar. I argue that, by reducing the novel’s Japanese characters to pre-modern Japanese tropes via their choice of samurai as their avatars, Ernest Cline portrays Japan as an economic and technological threat that has been contained, thus modeling a future in which American individualism wins out over Asian collectivism and reasserting U.S. supremacy.

The second chapter, “Genre and the Generic Human in How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe,” examines the posthuman trope of the non-singular self, represented in the novel through the science-fictional concept of the time-travel double. I argue that it is the very act of giving up the commitment to the Western notion of the individual self – through interacting with his time-travel double – that allows the protagonist to break free of the model minority myth and the pressures of assimilation for Asian immigrants to the U.S. Additionally, I argue that the novel’s generic ambiguity challenges both the tropes of science fiction and the tropes of the immigrant narrative, formally underlining the novel’s argument against assimilation by refusing to assimilate to either genre.

The third chapter, “‘In the future, no one is completely human’: Posthuman Poetics in Sun Yung Shin’s Unbearable Splendor and Franny Choi’s Soft Science” looks at the posthuman trope of the android in two recent poetry collections. I argue that Shin and Choi subvert the tropes of the Asian posthuman through linguistic play, ultimately demonstrating a flexible notion of selfhood that not only transcends racial boundaries but also species boundaries and boundaries between the human and the mechanical.

Finally, three interspersed interludes – Nuclear, Crispr, and Sex – consider contemporary – rather than science-fictional – technologies. In looking at nuclear technology, gene-editing technology, and sex doll/sex robot technology, I demonstrate that the posthuman is not purely a science-fictional concept, but rather is already ingrained in these contemporary technologies’ relationship to the Asian body. By drawing on archival material, cultural criticism, and personal reflection, each of the three interludes grounding this project’s concerns with the posthuman in the present – showing how the posthuman is not only relevant to our shared future, but to our current moment.