the Cooper Union School of Art Interdisciplinary Seminar
Mar
1
Abigail De Kosnik
Techno-Orientalism: Why and How Asia Signifies the Hi-Tech Future in Hollywood Sci-Fi
6:30 pm | Rose Auditorium
From cinema’s earliest years, Hollywood sci-fi films have portrayed Asians and “the Orient” as inherently technological, and have used Asian imagery to signify the future. This lecture will examine several U.S. sci-fi movies, including The Mask of Fu Manchu, Star Wars, Blade Runner, The Matrix, as well as sci-fi television series such as Firefly, as examples of what can be called “Techno-Orientalism,” the application of (often racist) Orientalist stereotypes to depictions of advanced technologies in movies. We will suggest that the U.S.’ involvement in numerous wars in the Far East and the Middle East throughout the 20th and 21st centuries (in the Philippines, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq), as well as the influx of Asian immigrants to the U.S., have contributed to the enduring popularity of Techno-Orientalism in Hollywood’s futuristic fantasies. We will also examine Asian sci-fi films such as The Animatrix and Casshern, which revisit, revise, and rewrite the equivalence between “Asian” and “machine” so often seen in Techno-Orientalist U.S. cinema.
About Abigail De Kosnik
Abigail De Kosnik is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Berkeley in the Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM) and the Department of Theater, Dance & Performance Studies (TDPS). She is the co-editor, with Sam Ford and C. Lee Harrington, of The Survival of Soap Opera, forthcoming from the University Press of Mississippi. She specializes in issues of minority discourse and popular digital culture, particularly fan cultures. She is also a Consulting Researcher for MIT’s Convergence Culture Consortium.