All Cyborgs are Asian: The Ethnic Implications of the Cyborg-topian Future in Karen Tei Yamashita's Anime Wong.

This paper participates in the contemporary discussion about literary texts that speculate on the future(s) of humanity with a view to commenting on the fears, anxieties, and drawbacks of the present. It looks at Karen Tei Yamashita's "Anime Wong" through the theoretical lenses of scholars debating the identity configuration model of a posthuman world in connection with the ethnoracial discourse. "Anime Wong" imagines a posthuman future inhabited by an exclusively Asian population of cyborgs and aliens. The mythological foundation of this Asian posthuman civilization draws on the cultural pillars of Western culture. Subtitled "A CyberAsian Odyssey," Yamashita's "Anime Wong" borrows the Homeric Odyssean pattern, filters it through the 'mythologies' of Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica, and mixes it with political comments and references to Western philosophy and popular culture. It then impregnates the result with distinctively Asian elements and uses the mixture as a figuration of an ethnocentric posthuman future, thus commenting both on the cultural implications of cybernetic technologies and on the ethnic clichés and stereotyping predispositions at work within contemporary culture. The aim of this paper is to look into how "Anime Wong" filters the Asian ethos through the cultural products of Western imagination to provide a critical ground for engaging the techno-orientalist discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]