Model Machines: A History of the Asian as Automaton

摘要

Long T. Bui's Model Machines: A History of the Asian as Automaton offers a timely and very welcome intervention into the ongoing scholarly conversations that link together discourses on technologies of human-machine interactions and the politics of the racial formation of Asian and Asian/American subjectivities that are taking place across multiple disciplines and fields of study, not only in global Asian studies and Asian/American studies but also in their intersections with science fiction studies, postcolonial theory, media studies, and posthumanist philosophy. He builds upon the foundations of an emerging body of work that includes Kalindi Vora and Neda Atanasoski's Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures (2019), Wendy Hui Kyong Chun's Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (2008), and David Roh, Betsy Huang, and Greta Niu's edited volume Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media (2015), among others, that all take up the intersections of race and technology. Bui's book proposes to map out a longer history of the racialization of Asian bodies by way of their conflation with the figure of the nonhuman automaton, tracking the origins and historical movements of these processes alongside the expansion of the American settler-colonial project, overseas empire, and post–Cold War hegemony. In Bui's words, this project is to “put forth ‘the model machine myth’ as an analytic to outline, follow, and trace the mutable forms that this social entity—the Asian automaton—has assumed in the expansive U.S. techno-imperial imaginary” (3).Model Machines certainly makes a compelling argument for the need for such a historical account. Writing on Asian racialization through the past decades has typically mobilized a range of disparate frameworks and concepts, from “model minority,” to “perpetual foreigner,” to “techno-orientalism,” to name a few. No doubt, each of these frameworks has their merits. However, they can also tend to be too tied to the specific historical and discursive conditions in which they emerged. For instance, both “model minority” and “perpetual foreigner” are arguably tightly intertwined within a specific American context for racial discourse, which can often obscure the linkages between the Asian diaspora and the American imperial presence in their countries of origin. Conversely, the notion of “techno-orientalism” emerged out of the particular dynamics of the US-Japan economic and cultural competition of the 1980s. While it has certainly been further developed and extended since its initial articulation, the circumstances of its coming into being as a concept arguably set some limits to how far it can be taken without losing coherence. Against this backdrop, what Bui's approach to this topic contributes is twofold. First, through the figure of the Asian automaton, he effectively brings to the foreground the larger structuring logic that brings into relation with one another all these disparate frameworks employed in the analysis of various facets of Asian and Asian/American cultural histories; it, in his words, functions as a “through-line that braids all those things together” (3). Second, by situating his account in the context of American imperial expansion, he also bridges an all-too-often persistent gap between historical narratives of the Asian region and its transnational diasporas.Bui opens Model Machines with an expansive introduction that first takes up the intellectual foundations of the figure of the automaton in European philosophy before addressing how this figure subsequently came to be racialized under the conditions of Europe's colonial expansion all over the world. Citing instances from Descartes, Hegel, Leibniz, and others, Bui catalogs examples of how mechanistic accounts of the “human” in early modern philosophy coincided with ideas about the racial ordering of the world between rational Europeans an