Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  The limits of specifically locating a Western-centric hegemony within techno-Orientalism become apparent when we consider Japanese approaches to cyberpunk. Jane Chi Hyun Park frames this issue elegantly by asking, “[W]hat happens to the gendered and racialized power dynamics of techno-Orientalism when the object becomes the subject, when Japan ‘looks back’ at the United States using the same ideological frame that has been used to render it ‘other’?” (62). In a similar vein, Chun elucidates that techno-Orientalism is not unidirectional, citing the specific example of Japanese versions of cyberpunk in which one Asian ethnic group can potentially orientalize another. Anime films such as Ghost in the Shell (1995), for example, insist on the Japanese characters as signifiers of progress and displace “primitiveness” onto the Chinese culture (Control 196). The rubric that constructs Asia as a monolithic technological threat becomes fractured and redirected by techno-Orientalism’s appropriation by Asian cultural producers, writers, and artists. Chun’s critique of Ghost in the Shell demonstrates how high-tech Orientalism functions by locating a future dystopia in Hong Kong’s urban metropolis, obscuring Japan’s primacy in futuristic representations. Kumiko Sato further posits the importance of Japanese cyberpunk “as a new locus of the old Japanism with the pretentious look of advanced technology. The epistemological innovativeness that American cyberpunk carried in itself easily merged with this old mission of Japan’s modernization . . .” (353). American cyberpunk is reappropriated to enable Japan to recover a terrain once considered lost and destroyed in the wake of World War II.7

  Thus far, I have discussed American Orientalisms in which the desire to conceptualize the East through a technocratic framework within cultural production leads to a rearticulation and reemergence of the yellow peril. In response to these orientalized futures, Japanese cyberpunk and self-circumscribed techno-Orientalism employ genre conventions to consider different sociopolitical contexts and anxieties. Asian American cultural productions must also be considered as forming an important corollary to versions of cyberpunk and techno-Orientalist futures. This intervention is energized by Colleen Lye’s provocative question placing American Orientalist studies8 in conversation with Asian Americanist critique9:

  For critics of empire the concern is with American incorporations of Asia, while for Asian Americanists the concern is with Asian exclusion from U.S. civil society. Instead of using one as the political template for the other, how can we come to a better understanding of the nature of U.S. global power and the modernity of race relations by theorizing them in relation to each other? (1–2)

  No question could be better suited to Asian Americanist approaches to the future, precisely because techno-Orientalism cannot be situated solely within American Orientalism or its counterpart that has emerged most forcefully through Japanese cyberpunk. A reading practice that attends to Asian American cultural producers offers more venues in which to engage techno-Orientalist cultural productions and how the future, technology, and associated issues can be imagined within fictional worlds. It is simplistic to call all Asian American cultural productions that invoke techno-Orientalist tropes oppositional, yet these works often operate from activist frameworks and illuminate obscured voices and histories.

  Most critical conceptions of techno-Orientalism posit a binary between East and West, while eliding the possibility that other Orientalisms might exist concurrently within the United States. For instance, Perry Miyake’s novel 21st Century Manzanar (2002) imagines a future in which Japanese Americans are embroiled in the development of another World War. Derived from the cyberpunk social context of Japan as economic predator, the novel imagines that “World War III became the Economic War with Japan. If the economy went down the toilet, the terrorists would have won. If World War II was the battle to save Western Civilization from the Nazi party and the Japanese race, World War III—the Economic War—became the ultimate battle to save the very soul of America: its pocketbook” (13).10 While techno-Orientalism clearly posits Asia as the geographical site of anxiety, Miyake’s novel considers how Asian American subjects can be conflated with their Asian counterparts, thus creating the space to consider U.S. racial formation in the construction of East/West dynamics. Whether or not the premise of Miyake’s novel is plausible, 21st Century Manzanar investigates the continued preoccupation with the Alien/Asian as part of a futuristic world filled with tension and conflict.

  The novel engages its speculative arc as individuals of Japanese ancestry are rounded up during ReVac (for “reevacuation”). Mirroring World War II, Japanese Americans are placed in internment camps, but the novel clarifies that such racial anxieties concerning the Alien/Asian do not appear out of a sociohistorical vacuum. At one point, a Japanese American character states about her reevacuation to Manzanar, “At least in here, they don’t have to worry about terrorists. No tall buildings to plow an airplane into. No crowded sporting events to bomb. If a group of overzealous patriots wanted to pull a drive-by, they’d have to drive a couple of hours into the desert” (30). This passage compares the Japanese American internment to the post–9/11 milieu and suggests a heightened awareness of larger-scale racial, ethnic, and religious tensions in the twenty-first century. The Japanese American internment experience grants the novel one way to enter into conversations about contemporary ethnic and racial politics. Even as the novel purports that the war on terror is “over,” it also gives the sense that racial anxiety never dissipates; it only moves onto other bodies who are deemed a thread to nation-state integrity and security. In this new future, Japanese Americans are subjected to what is called “The Plan,” in which all males are sterilized. In controlling the reproductive capacity of Japanese Americans, the nation-state deploys biopower as a way to subdue the oncoming generations, one ethnic “strain” of yellow peril having finally been eradicated.11 We are reminded again of London’s “The Unparalleled Invasion,” as the reproductive menace of the Alien/Asian might be terminated. However, Miyake’s 21st Century Manzanar does not simply evoke the trope of the Asian American as the oppressed minority or radically resistant activist. Indeed, the murkiness of the plot shows how various Japanese American characters face the pressures of relocation, whether by passing for different Asian ethnicities, becoming docile internment camp residents, or working as informants for the relocation camp’s director. Miyake’s novel gestures to the ways in which those constructed as the Alien/Asian might find ways to harm and damage others rather than work together to eradicate systemic social inequality and prejudice.

  Novels such as 21st Century Manzanar move techno-Orientalism firmly back into America’s national boundaries, locating the future within the geographical confines of the California deserts rather than over the Pacific and into the East. Within this geographical terrain, 21st Century Manzanar also posits how the Alien/Asian is configured alongside other racial minorities and associated lineages. Some of the regular visitors to the Japanese American internment camps are local Native American tribe members. The novel’s main character, David Takeda, thinks that “every time they came, he thought he saw someone he knew. Someone in the Tribe who looked Nisei” (136). David’s perception of the physical similarities between Japanese Americans and indigenous characters acts as a harbinger for the novel’s conclusion. A group of Navajo Indians ultimately enables Takeda and his family to escape from Manzanar, invoking the connected histories of the forced resettlement of both Native Americans and Japanese Americans. In this respect, even as there is a concerted effort to depict the Alien/Asian in what might be called a techno-Orientalist frame, Miyake’s novel draws back into the past by linking racial groups within domestic geographies.12 In particular, large sections of Japanese American internment camps existed on, overlapped with, or bordered Native American reservations. Such spatial proximities and intimacies become a constant reminder that marginalization necessarily twines together politically charged physical locations with undesirable racial subjects. 21st Century Manzanar thus discloses an orientalized future,
but also questions how Asian American spatial subjectivities are placed in a comparative scope. The novel leaves the now-fugitive Japanese Americans living on a tribal reservation, which has become a pan-Native location. As the narrator notes, “[David] had found refuge in a land of exile and discard that had been reclaimed by its original inhabitants” (381).

  Another cultural production that examines other orientalized futures is the television episode “Detained,” which first aired on April 24, 2002, as part of the Star Trek: Enterprise series (2001–2005). The episode revolves around the rescue of Captain Jonathan Archer (played by Scott Bakula) and Helmsman Travis Mayweather (played by Anthony Montgomery) from an unknown detention facility in which they awaken mysteriously. They are being held with a humanoid alien species known as the Suliban, who may or may not possess the ability to shapeshift. In their original form, their rough, rock-like skin exudes a lime green glow, while their eyes appear yellowish. The Cabal, members of a Suliban sect, are among the primary alien antagonists for the Enterprise crew in their travels. Thus, the crew’s suspicion of their fellow Suliban inmates is not surprising. Archer and Mayweather are soon interrogated by Colonel Grat, a Tandaran, a different humanoid species similar to humans in physiology except for a distinct nasal bridge. Like the Enterprise crew, the Tandarans have suffered at the hands of the Cabal, and yet there are a number of Suliban still living in Tandaran territories. Under the auspices of protecting those Suliban who live in Tandaran boundaries, these Suliban are relocated to these holding facilities, but Archer and Mayweather learn that these Suliban are not part of the Cabal and are being held against their will in an internment camp. Indeed, what Archer and Mayweather discover is that not all Suliban are members of the Cabal. Befriending two of the prisoners, Archer makes the historically informed connection that the Suliban are being treated just like Japanese Americans living on the West Coast of the United States during World War II.

  In and of itself, the analogic connection between the Japanese America internees and imprisoned aliens renders a striking parallel. One could make the case that the Suliban’s skin color literalizes the yellow peril as an alien race, replete with yellowish skin and eyes. That is, the Suliban is the literalization of the metaphor: they are the Alien/Asian. Determined not to leave them behind, Archer and Mayweather enable the Sulibans’ escape, even though it risks their chance of being rescued by the Enterprise. Like 21st Century Manzanar, the politically progressive politics of the episode are more apparent in the relation to the post–9/11 milieu. Rick Berman, one of the co-executive producers of Star Trek: Enterprise, affirmed that the name “Suliban” drew inspiration from the Taliban; his decision to include references to the Taliban occurred after his visit to Afghanistan.13 The violation of civil liberties after 9/11, especially for Arab Americans, Muslim Americans, South Asian Americans, or anyone suspected of potentially being a “terrorist,” has generated numerous comparisons to the experiences of Japanese Americans after the attacks on Pearl Harbor.14 Since this Star Trek episode was written four months prior to 9/11, the eerie prescience of Berman’s vision serves as an indicator that part of science fiction’s appeal is its ability to predict the future. Nevertheless, this episode cannot be considered only from an intergalactic, techno-Orientalist, transnational, or global lens because the dialogue refers to the Japanese American internment, comparing literalized alien abjection on another planet with a racially motivated and racist historical event that occurred within the domestic confines of the United States. Interestingly, one of the major Enterprise characters and regular cast members, Japanese American linguist and communications officer Hoshi Sato (played by Korean American actress Linda Park), takes no part in the major storyline related to the Suliban internees. While the character’s ethnicity should not necessarily require her to function as an extension of the Suliban storyline, the narrative of liberation upholds the heroism of Captain Archer, as he is ultimately the one who mobilizes the Suliban to escape. Archer resists his own marginalized status and helps lead the Suliban detainees to their freedom. Although the Suliban leave the oppressive confines of the internment camp, the episode’s conclusion remains focused on Archer, as he contemplates whether they will flourish now that they are not imprisoned.

  One might therefore posit that the Japanese American internment narrative and the ensuing Suliban escape plan in “Detained” are other examples of the visually overdetermined symbolic potency of the white male hero, who signifies morality, value, and liberation. The Federation, in this case represented so gallantly by the square-jawed, handsome, and perennially plucky Archer, can be prevented from committing racially motivated mistakes again. History is invoked to promote the Federation’s enlightenment and moral superiority. Hoshi Sato’s marginalization from the storyline makes more evident the Federation’s postracial politics in which its multicultural and racially integrated cast demonstrates how certain social inequalities have become a thing of the past. For all we know, Sato may not even identify with her ethnic or racial background in this apparently more integrated future. However, Sato’s or, for that matter, Mayweather’s role in “Detained” is minimized to the extent that heroism is embodied most effectively by Archer, the white male lead. Indeed, as Allen Kwan points out, Sato’s and Mayweather’s roles are marginal throughout the entire series, suggesting that the show’s content must be illuminated from the dissonance created when comparing the show’s speculative future with contemporary race politics (67). Racism’s literal displacement onto the alien body consequently veils the ways in which the show operates to reproduce what David Golumbia has called “the white ideology of Star Trek” (87), in which minority cast members, while plentiful, do not receive as much screen time or as powerful positions within the Federation.15

  My reading imagines a racialized future beyond the dualism that posits the West against the East and, even more specifically, destabilizes Asia as the primary site for projected future anxieties. 21st Century Manzanar reminds us that Asian American cultural production provides important interventions into considering racialized futures, ones that intersect with other racial histories. Though I focus my analysis here on only a specific set of cultural productions, all Asian American cultural producers of speculative fiction remain woefully understudied. Miyake’s novel is only one of a tremendous archive in which Asian American writers imagine a future centrally involving minorities whose racial differences still impact how the techno-Orientalist fictional worlds must be read. I am thinking here of Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea, Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome, Malinda Lo’s Adaptation and follow-up Inheritance, Jacqueline Koyanagi’s Ascension, Cathy Park Hong’s Dance Dance Revolution, Peter Tieryas-Liu’s Bald New World, Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, Karen Bao’s Dove Arising (part of a young adult fiction trilogy still to be completed),16 Marie’s Lu’s Legend (and follow-ups Prodigy and Champion), Sangu Mandanna’s The Lost Girl, as just a few of the notable recent publications that imagine the Alien/Asian occupying a tomorrow in which social inequality embeds racial relations, however allegorically or inconspicuously, within the fabric of the fictional world.

  In the case of “Detained,” the alien Suliban internees act as visual markers that suggest not only the past, through their connection to World War II–era Japanese Americans, but the present and future as well, in the way that their treatment ominously foreshadows the civil rights milieu following the terrorist attacks of 9/11. “Detained” is but one example of how the Alien/Asian continually reappears as a convenient racialized metaphor, deployed by cultural producers to explore and invoke the complicated asymmetries of social difference and oppression. Like all powerful and apt artistic metaphors, “Alien/Asian” transforms in the ever-elastic boundaries of the fictional world but continues to impact how we understand the social dynamics of our everyday lived realities.

  Acknowledgment

  I would like to thank Gayle K. Sato, who provided late-stage revision suggestions
.

  Notes

  1. A number of recent critical studies have emerged in relation to the figure of Fu Manchu. Chan traces a genealogy of Asian American male figures that have emerged in popular culture, specifically devoting his second chapter to an analysis of the “devil doctor.” Seshagiri investigates the figure of Fu Manchu within a British context. Kim’s third chapter draws out the emasculated Asian American teleology against which Frank Chin would write. For more recent scholarly considerations of Fu Manchu, see also Chen; Christensen; Kingsbury; and Ling.