Techno-Orientalism 2.0
380 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
29 color and 8 B-W images
Hardcover
Release Date:15 Jul 2025
ISBN:9781978839229
Techno-Orientalism 2.0
New Intersections and Interventions
SERIES:
Asian American Studies Today
Rutgers University Press
Building on the groundbreaking Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media, published by Rutgers University Press in 2015, Techno-Orientalism 2.0: New Intersections and Interventions addresses the impact of a volatile post-pandemic present on speculative futures by and about Asians. The backdrop of this highly anticipated follow-up is a world that is radically different than in 2015: COVID-19, threats of a “new cold war” with China, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the reemergence of “strong man” politics around the world. An essential volume for this new critical juncture in Asian American history, Techno-Orientalism 2.0 catalogs intersectional dialogue with discourses such as Afrofuturism, Indigenous futurities, environmentalism, and disability studies. It also engages with recent high-profile and lesser-known works of Asian and Asian American speculative fiction, film, television, anime, art, music, journalism, architecture, state-sponsored policies and infrastructural projects, and the now-dominant China Panic.
How do we envision the so-called threat of an impending 'Asian Century'? And, as importantly, how do we feel about it? This extraordinary sequel gives us the critical insights and imaginative tools to understand a technologically driven future that is at once terrifying and desirable.
Whereas the original defined and limned the inner workings of an emerging mode of racial discourse, Techno-Orientalism 2.0 arrives at the apex of techno-orientalism, in a time when we are inundated with the images and imaginings of a techno-orientalist future that shape and structure our present. An electrified expansion into broader networks, this volume follows the proliferating mainstream discourse of techno-orientalism by broadening its scope, looking at our present through a sharp and unblemished lens, and venturing from the heights of our futuristic imaginations to the depths of our structured material world.
This dazzling project marks both the extraordinary success of the first edited collection in making legible techno-orientalism as a subfield of study and the critical importance of analyzing how the conditions—of emergence, of legibility, and of future possibility—animating this subfield continue to evolve given the latest geopolitical realignments between Asia and the West. By arguing that techno-orientalism has transcended its initial focus on speculative fiction and Asiatic signifiers to develop into a 'mode of revelation,' this volume generatively shifts critical attention from subjects to structures and productively demonstrates how Asian American studies has begun to think in more geographically and conceptually expansive ways about race, genre, form, and function.
DAVID S. ROH is a professor and chair of the Department of English at the University of Utah. He is the author of Minor Transpacific: Triangulating American, Japanese, and Korean Fictions and Illegal Literature: Toward a Disruptive Creativity , and coeditor of Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Science Fiction, History, and Media (Rutgers University Press, 2015).
BETSY HUANG is a professor of English at Clark University, Massachusetts. She is the author of Contesting Genres in Contemporary Asian American Fiction and coeditor of three essay collections: Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media (Rutgers University Press, 2015), Diversity and Inclusion in Higher Education and Societal Contexts, and Asian American Literature in Transition, 1996–2020.
GRETA AIYU NIU is an independent scholar based in Rochester, New York, and is coeditor of Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media (Rutgers University Press, 2015).
CHRISTOPHER T. FAN is an associate professor of English at the University of California Irvine. He is the author of Asian American Fiction After 1965: Transnational Fantasies of Economic Mobility.
BETSY HUANG is a professor of English at Clark University, Massachusetts. She is the author of Contesting Genres in Contemporary Asian American Fiction and coeditor of three essay collections: Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media (Rutgers University Press, 2015), Diversity and Inclusion in Higher Education and Societal Contexts, and Asian American Literature in Transition, 1996–2020.
GRETA AIYU NIU is an independent scholar based in Rochester, New York, and is coeditor of Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media (Rutgers University Press, 2015).
CHRISTOPHER T. FAN is an associate professor of English at the University of California Irvine. He is the author of Asian American Fiction After 1965: Transnational Fantasies of Economic Mobility.
