In Future Asians: Orientalism and Posthumanism in Twenty-First Century U.S. Science Fiction, I investigate the representation of Asians and Asian Americans in contemporary American science fiction. There is broad scholarly consensus that American science fiction of the early to mid-twentieth century responded to fears over immigration and overpopulation with overtly racist portrayals of Asian characters. I argue that science fiction of the early twenty-first century responds to global economic and technological conflict with a more subtle – but nonetheless racially coded – portrayal of Asian bodies as no longer entirely human. By examining these iterations of Asian posthumanism, my project contends with American science fiction’s persistent Orientalist discourse; ultimately, I assert that this seemingly fantastical genre reveals pressing U.S. anxieties about rising Asia and its competitive impact on both global trade and technological innovation.

Working at the intersection of science fiction studies, Asian American studies, and critical race studies, Future Asians aims to illuminate larger questions of race and futurity. Specifically, my dissertation examines the notion of the technological and biotechnological posthuman, which I define as mechanical imitations of the human (robots, artificial intelligence) and forms of the human that still rely on incorporating normal biological functioning of the human (clones, cyborgs). While these posthuman forms are often considered non-raced entities, I argue that science-fictional portrayals of the posthuman are not non-raced at all, but rather directly contend with contemporary racial biases and injustices. By examining three major tropes of Asian posthuman representation – the virtual avatar, the non-singular self, and the android – Future Asians investigates how contemporary U.S. science fiction employs the image of the posthuman either to reinscribe negative racial histories and stereotypes or to counter these histories. As the posthuman becomes a widespread theoretical concept across the humanities and social sciences, my study poses a critical intervention, contributing to a more nuanced understanding of the posthuman that applies across the subfields of Latinx futurism, Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism, and Indigenous futurism. The first chapter, “Ready Player One and the Reassertion of United States Economic & Technological Supremacy” interrogates the posthuman trope of the virtual avatar. I argue that, by reducing the novel’s Japanese characters to pre-modern Japanese tropes via their choice of samurai as their avatars, Ernest Cline portrays Japan as an economic and technological threat that has been contained, thus modeling a future in which American individualism wins out over Asian collectivism and reasserting U.S. supremacy.

The second chapter, “Genre and the Generic Human in How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe,” examines the posthuman trope of the non-singular self, represented in the novel through the science-fictional concept of the time-travel double. I argue that it is the very act of giving up the commitment to the Western notion of the individual self – through interacting with his time-travel double – that allows the protagonist to break free of the model minority myth and the pressures of assimilation for Asian immigrants to the U.S. Additionally, I argue that the novel’s generic ambiguity challenges both the tropes of science fiction and the tropes of the immigrant narrative, formally underlining the novel’s argument against assimilation by refusing to assimilate to either genre.

The third chapter, “‘In the future, no one is completely human’: Posthuman Poetics in Sun Yung Shin’s Unbearable Splendor and Franny Choi’s Soft Science” looks at the posthuman trope of the android in two recent poetry collections. I argue that Shin and Choi subvert the tropes of the Asian posthuman through linguistic play, ultimately demonstrating a flexible notion of selfhood that not only transcends racial boundaries but also species boundaries and boundaries between the human and the mechanical.

Finally, three interspersed interludes – Nuclear, Crispr, and Sex – consider contemporary – rather than science-fictional – technologies. In looking at nuclear technology, gene-editing technology, and sex doll/sex robot technology, I demonstrate that the posthuman is not purely a science-fictional concept, but rather is already ingrained in these contemporary technologies’ relationship to the Asian body. By drawing on archival material, cultural criticism, and personal reflection, each of the three interludes grounding this project’s concerns with the posthuman in the present – showing how the posthuman is not only relevant to our shared future, but to our current moment.

Through the analysis of a selection of thrillers written and produced in the years immediately following World War II, this dissertation defines the threshold conditions of narrative suspense in the twentieth century—the pending disappearance of continuity, not just in techniques of storytelling but in longstanding assumptions about time, about how it is and how it ought to be organized. These works, for instance, seem in various ways to prefigure a more general attenuation of narrative retrospection—narrative retrospection as a grammatical convention of realist fiction but also as a form of belief, as fidelity to the qualitative density of human experience as it is transmitted through time. This period of aesthetic transition, marked by the iconoclasm of the avant-garde, is often seen as a terminal point in the history of storytelling after modernism, a time (though certainly not the only time) when the novel dies along with the systems of value that upheld it. Alternately, as more recent scholarship has shown, it can be seen as the moment when the present tense starts to gain traction as the dominant mode of fictionalizing time. But the works examined in the following pages—including the fiction of Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene and Raymond Chandler, as well as the postwar films of Carol Reed, among others—modify the constraints of genre and reshape the forms of suspense simply by extending the transmission, by perpetuating the same old message about time even when it becomes grotesque in its apparent asynchrony. The death of narrative is perpetually delayed; or, one might say, narrative is undead, and it remains so as it drags itself onward into the cold war era.

Representations of indigeneity are noticeably present in countercultural American literature and culture. In contemporary writings by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers seeking to combat oppressive mainstream American value systems like capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and white supremacy, what Jodi Byrd calls “ideas of the Indian and Indianness” are often tied to a desire to change how humans relate to each other and to lively presences beyond the human. World Ecology, Indigeneity, and Epistemology in Countercultural American Literature focuses specifically on post-1945 American texts that deploy popular representations of Indigenous people in connection with political-ecological imperatives. My methodology throughout the project lingers in the tensions that arise when artists and critics navigate decolonizing objectives and colonial traces in the same text. Placing Indigenous studies, ethnic studies, and posthumanism in conversation, I argue that Indigenous visions of world ecology could help constitute a large-scale transformation of how we conceive of coalition-building in the context of ecological struggle.

The drama Heroes and Saints and film Fresh Kill respond to local and global environmental justice issues and generate a corporeal cartography that maps the relationships between place and the body through embodied memory, desire, movement and machine. These bodily maps make environmental injustice visible and intervene to form an alternant future. The texts thus contribute to a canon of activist-oriented literature and participate in a conversation about the agential capacity of literature to expose injustice and activate an intervention. Heroes and Saints and Fresh Kill pose an interest in cartography and the body, and I draw on the theory of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to frame the body as a map of place-based relationships. Deleuzian theory posits the map as that which can form rhizomatic connections on a singular plane, and the body functions like a map. Queerness, gender and race shape embodied experience in my primary texts, and this positionality informs the bodily map. Corporeal cartography, then, builds connections and interruptions to generate becomings that can change the future.

Fossil Power: Energy Empire and Insurgent Life examines narratives of fossil fuel modernity from the nineteenth to twenty-first century to show how the history and culture of energy in the United States is a project of racial-capitalist empire. What I call fossil power names key social formations and worldmaking systems of energy empire: racial capitalism, globalization, slavery, border imperialism, and settler colonialism. The project offers a new look at the stories told about energy and modernity from below by analyzing Asian American, African American, Indigenous, and Latinx literatures that excavate US fossil fuel modernity’s contested racial histories and geographies of power. Reading the works of dg nanouk okpik, Simon J. Ortiz, Paisley Rekdal, Helena Mar�a Viramontes, Gerald Vizenor, Colson Whitehead, Karen Tei Yamashita, and C Pam Zhang, I examine how these environmental narratives envision insurgent forms of life that resist energy empire. Fossil Power offers two contributions to the environmental humanities and American literary and cultural studies. First, the project analyzes energy modernity through racial capitalism and empire. Second, it connects critical race and ethnic studies to energy studies by outlining an environmental justice framework that understands energy through abolition, anticapitalism, and decolonization. Literature, I argue, illuminates the cultural politics of energy by foregrounding the narrative tactics, tropes, and templates that shape both energy discourses and energy systems, and by showing how fossil power structures the everyday contexts, practices, and movements of social life.