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Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media ed. by David S. Roh, Betsy Huang, Greta A. Niu (review)

Since its inception in David Morley and Kevin Robins’s book Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes, and Cultural Boundaries (1995), technoOrientalism has been used to rewrite the legacy of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), updating and expanding on but also inverting the temporal, geographical, and conceptual reach of Said’s discursive framework. Whereas the imagined “Orient” frames the present through the past by detaining the East in a timeless limbo of stagnation in service to the West’s desire for self-identification, technoOrientalism sheds light on technology as the operational mechanism of Orientalism. David S. Roh, Betsy Huang, and Greta A. Niu’s groundbreaking collection, Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media, shows how dazzling images of futurity and progress reproduce “representational containment” (3) through the alterity of Asian bodies. Techno-Orientalism addresses a critical gap in the epistemology of alienation by delivering essays that consider techno-Orientalism in various transnational and cross-cultural contexts, covering a range of speculative imaginaries. The book also maps out a metacognitive pathway that necessitates the implosion of the Enlightenment vision. Mutating from Dr. Fu Manchu to the mechanical and subhuman automatism of Asia’s industrial effectuality, technologized simulacra of the Orient destabilize the ontological hierarchy of the East/West dichotomy by exposing a new source of fear: the uncanny image of the East/West self in the alien body of the Asian Other. Assigning agency to the Asian subject by reinterpreting techno-Orientalism in light of the global ascension to economic and political power of Japan, China, India, and other Asian communities, the collection also trains a self-reflective lens on the haunting influences of the Western hegemony in the Eastern hemisphere’s drive toward modernization. In so doing, the collection enriches an important area of critical discourse that, despite its “growing prevalence in the Western cultural consciousness,” has been “generally ignored in academic and popular cultural spheres” (6). The nine essays in part 1 excavate “instantiations of techno-Orientalism over time and across genres” (16). Kenneth Hough anchors contemporary incarnations of techno-Orientalist perspectives in the technophobic rhetoric of the Japanese invasion. While Hough accentuates the fear-mongering portraits of