User:KLWan80/NewSandbox

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Lavender, Isiah, ed. (2017). Dis-orienting planets: racial representations of Asia in science fiction.


 * This is a collection of essays published by a university press that discusses Asia and Asians in science fiction literature, film, and fandom with particular attention paid to China, Japan, India, and Korea. - Added by Katie Wan

Fan, Christopher Tzechung (2016). "American Techno-Orientalism: Speculative Fiction and the Rise of China" (PDF).


 * A dissertation by a doctorate student at the University of California, Berkeley. "American Techno-Orientalism asks how Orientalism and literary form have responded to China’s post-socialist, post-1989 rise." - Added by Katie Wan

Since there is very little information in our section of the page, I would like to include some history of the genre and how Asians are represented or represent themselves, but possibly focusing specifically on Chinese representation. - Added by Katie Wan

Some notes:

Orientalist: past-facing; techno-orientalis: future-facing

""Asianfuturism" has yet to fully coalesce" (Edmond Chang ) - coalesce: come together to form one mass or whole

""Asianfuturism continues to be "mirrored, magnified, and distorted in the western world" complicated by an "already troubled construction of Asian American identity" (Edmond Chang)

The term "asianfuturism" hasn't caught on like "afrofuturism" - WHY?

"For many Asian Pacific Americans, science fiction addresses issues related to identity, immigration and race, technology, morality, and the human condition." What good is Asianfuturism for Asian people? (Edmond Chang)

Dissertation Fan, Christopher Tzechung (2016). "American Techno-Orientalism: Speculative Fiction and the Rise of China" (PDF).

pg 65-66

"This is a project in which Yu attempts to “register in the depths” a realism pertaining to characters like Charles and his father: Asian American model minorities who present as math and science nerds. I want to argue that this project entails developing a genre adequate to their experience, as well as what Yu claims was “a conscious decision to scrub away place names and particularities,” with race and ethnicity being perhaps the most conspicuous of these “particularities.”3 Charles’ surname is the only marker of Chinese identity in the novel; even though it is apparent that his parents emigrated from Taiwan, Taiwan is never explicitly named. What this “scrub[bing] away” of ethnic, racial, and national content signals is, at best, an uneasiness with Asian American literary fiction; at worst, a rejection."

pg 67 two cultures, model minority, "form the very conflict many of these writers (whether they write SF or literary fiction or anything in between) are forced to resolve in order to begin writing at all. I focus on Yu’s fiction, and How to Live Safely in particular, because its mediation of stereotypical Asian American aesthetic content (immigrant narrative, intergenerational conflict, racial dilemma, etc.) through a stereotypical Asian American sociological formation (the two cultures conflict) brings these variegated factors into sharp relief" My contribution:

My contribution:

While the term Afrofuturism is widely used and accepted to explain the mingling of the African American experience with technology, science, and the future, a similar term, "Asianfuturism," has yet to catch on. Popularity is growing for English translations of Chinese science fiction novels, but the number of Asian-American science fiction authors remains small and underrepresented.

One notable Asian American speculative fiction author is Ted Chiang, who is especially known for his short stories. His 1998 short story "Story of Your Life" is the basis for the 2016 film Arrival. He is the winner of numerous Hugo, Locus, and Nebula awards. He was born in Port Jefferson, New York, and his parents are immigrants from China.

Another Chinese American author, Ken Liu, was born in China but immigrated to the US at age 11, has not only translated numerous Chinese science fiction novels into English, (including Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin, which became the first Asian novel to with the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2015), but has also won the Hugo, Nebula, Locus and other awards for his short stories and novels.