Inorganic Asian North American Lives: Virtual Dismemberments, Copies and Wellbeing

Abstract

This dissertation examines Asian North American rearticulations of the inorganic—a quality that has historically been assigned to Asians, rendering them counterfeit, abstract or not-quite-human—in new media, film and literature. By analyzing circulations of Asian North American disassembled body parts, “copies,” and gendered inter/faces, I argue that the excess, failures and ambivalence of Asian North American labour and performance constitute virtual modes of racialization that disrupt neoliberal, postracial temporalities in the Information Age.

Asian American studies has held in tension its critiques of the West’s monopoly of liberal humanism in techno-Orientalist narratives (David S. Roh, Betsy Huang and Greta A. Niu) and the oppositional strategies of reappropriating techno-Orientalist tropes. My project does not seek to recuperate the Asian North American subject from the dehumanizing processes of fragmentation, surplus reproduction or abstraction—an impulse described by Rachel C. Lee as returning the “extracted body part” to the racialized “whole” in order to resolve anxieties about subjective “incoherence” or cultural inauthenticity. Instead, I turn to modes of inorganic life that do not produce an agential, autonomous Asian North American subject, but engender racializing disassemblages that work out survival and wellbeing within the neoliberal, abstracting pulls of the Information Age.