Technology and ethnicity in American Studies (PDF)

The technological imagery of twentieth century literature reveals that the profound fusion of technology with the human body altered the way people considered their bodies. In this period, a special attention was drawn to the representation of ethnic bodies, such as African Americans, Latino Americans or Asian Americans, through technology. The study of technology and ethnicity is relevant to American Studies because it highlights the nature of technology which can be gendered or racialized. Historically, mainstream American fiction can be identified as colorblind, because it has produced racial stereotypes of the ethnic others depicting them as inferior to the whites. For example, Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner (1982) or Larry and Andy Wachowski's the Matrix (1999) reveal how the ethnic bodies of African Americans or Asian Americans can be marginalized and objectified through technological means in fiction. Most of the analysis of ethnicity in this fiction has been done within postcolonial theory but less attention has been drawn to critical race theory. This paper intends to analyze the popular representation of Asians and Asian Americans as cyborgs and technological beings in William Gibson's cyberpunk novel Neuromancer (1984), Mamoru Oshii's cyberpunk film Ghost in the Shell (1995) and Larissa Lai's post-cyberpunk novel Salt Fish Girl (2002) within critical race theory. These speculative fictions represent images of Asians and Asian Americans as cyborgs and technological objects, at the same time questioning and challenging the issues of ethnicity, gender and ethnic identity representation in fiction. While Gibson, an American mainstream fiction writer, provides exotic images of Asian cyborgs, the Japanese writer Oshii and the ethnic writer Lai use cyborgs in their narratives to address the issues of white supremacy and marginalization of ethnic bodies.