Technology and ethnicity in American Studies

Text sample:Chapter 2. The Cyborg Body as a Metaphor for Ethnicity:In the American mainstream cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, which is set in the futuristic dystopian world, Asian cyborgs fulfill the role of oriental warriors that remind one of the premodern Japanese culture. Neuromancer applies a techno-Orientalist strategy in is narrative which means the interplay of "futuristic high-tech images of contemporary Japan and anachronistic images of feudal Japan" (Morley and Robins 169). The speculations on Japanese culture by depictions of the interplay of historical images of Japanese warriors and technology reveal how the American mainstream novel establishes the difference between East and West. American Orientalism emerged before the cyberpunk fiction of the eighties. For example, Betsy Huang suggests that in premodern Orientalist science fiction novels, such as Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle (1962) and Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven (1971), the "figurations of the Orient demonstrate a premodern form of technologizing the Orient that served as precursor for the postmodern techno-Orientalism of eighties cyberpunk and beyond" (25). She further explains how the Orient and technology are embedded in Western consciousness and imagined in literature:Time and again in the Western futuristic imaginary, the Orient is the cognitive estrangement device of choice. The emphasis is perpetually on Asia as technology rather than as designers and wielders of it. In American science fiction, the technologizing of Asia began with premodern orientalist figurations before they took the form of robots, androids, and other types of machinery. The 'Orient' is the path but rarely the destination, and the characters who embody it are tools for, but not the architects of, the West's construction of its future. (Huang 39).Stephen Hong Sohn explains that speculations on eastern tradition and culture in these science fictional novels reveal "the ambiguous nature of the West's