someone posted in leftbook today an article discussing how heavily integrated japanese imagery is in the new bladerunner movie and how there are like exactly zero asian people in it and it got me thinking about just how much asia has sculpted the western landscape of sci-fi while being systematically excluded from it. from bladerunner to firefly to star wars, white creators want everything about us except for us lol
It’s called Techno-Orientalism and people have been critiquing it since the first Blade Runner. There’s a book on it now:
https://www.amazon.com/Techno-Orientalism-Imagining-Speculative-Fiction-American/dp/0813570638
What will the future look like? To judge from many speculative fiction films and books, from Blade Runner to Cloud Atlas, the future will be full of cities that resemble Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, and it will be populated mainly by cold, unfeeling citizens who act like robots. Techno-Orientalism investigates the phenomenon of imagining Asia and Asians in hypo- or hyper-technological terms in literary, cinematic, and new media representations, while critically examining the stereotype of Asians as both technologically advanced and intellectually primitive, in dire need of Western consciousness-raising.
This Verge article, “Cyberpunk Cities Fetishize Asian Culture But Have No Asians”, is a succinct analysis and brief history of techno-orientalism as well. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mb7yqx/cyberpunk-cities-fetishize-asian-culture-but-have-no-asians-blade-runner
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