Model Machines: The Asian as Automaton in Technocultural History

FAIN: FEL-281373-22

Long Thanh Bui
Regents of the University of California, Irvine (Irvine, CA 92617-3066)

Research and writing leading to a book on how Asians and Asian Americans have been construed in American culture as robotic machines.

Model Machines explores the ways Asians and Asian Americans have been construed as robotic machines in history, from the 19th century to the 21st century. As the first historical monograph on this topic, it mines the ideological work behind the trope of what I am calling the "model machine." This stereotype and myth, I argue, shaped public perceptions and policies, determining the treatment of Asians as objects or things to be exploited, excluded, or exterminated. By tracking this technocultural figure across time and space, I interrogate the operations of racial capitalism behind the Western gaze. The book offers case studies concerning the representation of Chinese coolies as "labor machines," Japanese soldiers as "war machines," Asian women as "sex machines," Asian new capitalists and migrants as "virtual machines" and Asian neoliberal workers as "global machines." I contend that the model machine helps understand how people are rendered as sub/human as a measure of US imperialism.

Associated Products

Model Machines: A History of the Asian as Automaton (Book)
Title: Model Machines: A History of the Asian as Automaton
Author: Long Bui
Abstract: n the contemporary Western imagination, Asian people are frequently described as automatons, which disavows their humanity. In Model Machines, Long Bui investigates what he calls Asian roboticism or the ways Asians embody the machine and are given robotic characteristics. Bui offers the first historical overview of the overlapping racialization of Asians and Asian Americans through their conflation with the robot-machine nexus. He puts forth the concept of the “model machine myth,” which holds specific queries about personhood, citizenship, labor, and rights in the transnational making of Asian/America. The case studies in Model Machines chart the representation of Chinese laborers, Japanese soldiers, Asian sex workers, and other examples to show how Asians are reimagined to be model machines as a product of globalization, racism, and colonialism. Moreover, it offers examples of how artists and everyday people resisted that stereotype to consider different ways of being human. Starting from the early nineteenth century, the book ends in the present with the new millennium, where the resurgence of China presages the “rise of the machines” and all the doomsday scenarios this might spell for global humanity at large.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://tupress.temple.edu/books/model-machines
Access Model: no, print and ebook for purchase
Publisher: Temple University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978143992
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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