[Sfts-students] Fwd: FW: CFP: Techno-Orientalism, Vol. II

[Sherryl Vint]

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---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: DAVID ROH <david.roh at utah.edu>
Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2022 at 09:19
Subject: FW: CFP: Techno-Orientalism, Vol. II
To: DAVID ROH <david.roh at utah.edu>


Please distribute widely amongst your local networks—thanks very much!



Edited Collection: Techno-Orientalism, Vol. II

Editors: David S. Roh, Betsy Huang, Greta Niu, and Christopher T. Fan



Deadline: August 8, 2022



So much has happened since the publication of Techno-Orientalism in 2015.
The field has evolved considerably from its focus on speculative fiction to
include disparate arenas ranging from gaming, political science, Asian
studies, religious studies, to a general cultural critique.
Techno-Orientalist discourse has emerged, for example, in discussions of
COVID-19, Asian/Asian American athletes’ roboticism at the Olympics, and
criticism of the K-Pop industry.  At the same time, there has been an
undeniable uptick—indeed, a boom—in the quantity of works of speculative
fiction (SF) by Asians and Asian Americans. In many of these works, it is
clear that techno-Orientalism itself has become a trope, a point of
self-ironization in films like After Yang and Advantageous, and novels like *On
Such a Full Sea* and *Severance.*  All of this has taken place against the
backdrop of a world that is radically different than the world of 2015:
COVID-19, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, threats of a “new cold war” with
China, and the re-emergence of “strong man” politics especially in Asia and
Southeast Asia. This volume by no means seeks to limit itself to a
post-2015 world, however.  On the contrary, it aims to reflect these
developments by further expanding the techno-Orientalism analytic both
historically and conceptually.



Why, for example, are so many AIs gendered as men, while androids are
gendered as Asian women? Furthermore, how does techno-Orientalist discourse
explain seemingly contradictory reports about the origin of COVID-19 from
both Chinese “wet markets” and Chinese laboratories, a confluence of
premodern and hypermodern biowarfare taking place at the same time and
from, sometimes, the same sources? How have anxieties about surveillance
and financial technologies coalesced around the figure of “China” and a
renewed global South willing to accept China’s vaccines, technology (5G,
infrastructure, etc.), and loans? What national and regional differences
can we discern regarding the uptake of SF and techno-Orientalism
(predominance in Northeast Asian/”flying geese” countries, popularity in
South Asia, emergence in Southeast Asia [especially the Philippines])? How
has SF participated in the envisioning of a post-globalization world of
“new cold war” spheres of influence and other orientalized geopolitical
formations (e.g., the ensemble casts of *Sense8, Invasion,* and *The
Matrix: Resurrections, *the Orientalization of Russia and China partnership
vis-a-vis Ukraine)? Has an anti-techno-Orientalist aesthetic emerged (such
as *After Yang,* and “neo-frontier” novels that take us into the past
rather than the future)?



The editors invite contributors to extend the scholarly discussion with
novel approaches to techno-Orientalism.  We seek submissions engaged with
understudied geographies such as South/Southeast Asia and the Pacific
Islands, along with burgeoning intersections such as technological
ecologies, global reproductive justice, and dialogues with Afrofuturism and
indigenous futurisms; mediums like graphic novels, podcasts, visual and
plastic art; genres like young adult fiction; moreover, given increasing
number of courses on the subject, we also welcome submissions on
pedagogical approaches.  Chapters might include discussions of films/TV
shows such as *Blade Runner 2049, Altered Carbon, The Expanse, Everything,
Everywhere, All at Once*; fiction such as* On Such a Full Sea, Anime Wong,
Dune*; games such as* Cyberpunk 2077,* *Warframe,* and* Mirror’s Edge*; as
well as critiques of discourses in popular journalism and the tech sectors,
including artificial intelligence and robotics.



General inquiries and abstracts (300-400 words), along with a 2-page C.V.,
should be submitted by August 8, 2022, to David Roh at david.roh at utah.edu,
while completed chapters (no more than 5,500 words) must be submitted by
January 17, 2023, following MLA formatting guidelines. We plan to select
abstracts and notify contributors by/around September 1st. The editors are
in conversation with Rutgers University Press, which published the first
volume, for publication.





David Roh

Associate Professor

Department of English

University of Utah
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