Inorganic Asian North American Lives

INORGANIC ASIAN NORTH AMERICAN LIVES INORGANIC ASIAN NORTH AMERICAN LIVES: VIRTUAL DISMEMBERMENTS, COPIES AND WELLBEING By DANIELLE WONG, B.Journ., M.A. A Thesis Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy McMaster University © Copyright by Danielle Wong, May 2017 McMaster University DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (2017) Hamilton, Ontario (English and Cultural Studies) TITLE: Inorganic Asian North American Lives: Virtual Dismemberments, Copies and Wellbeing AUTHOR: Danielle Wong, B.Journ. (Ryerson University), M.A. (McMaster University) SUPERVISOR: Professor Donald Goellnicht NUMBER OF PAGES: viii, 255 ii Ph.D. Thesis – Danielle Wong; McMaster University – English and Cultural Studies LAY ABSTRACT This thesis examines historical and contemporary figurations of inorganic or “not quite” human Asian North Americans, including the Asian “coolie” and clone, and asks: What would it mean for Asian North Americans to rearticulate, embody, perform or cultivate inorganic life? In particular, my project analyzes (new) media productions and performances by Asians in North America to consider how online dismemberment, the Asian “copy,” and abstracting labour that is not typically seen as “real” work create muted resistances or “glitches” in the Information Age’s postracial, neoliberal progress. iii Ph.D. Thesis – Danielle Wong; McMaster University – English and Cultural Studies ABSTRACT This thesis 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. iv Ph.D. Thesis – Danielle Wong; McMaster University – English and Cultural Studies ACKNOWLEGEMENTS I would not have been able to complete this project without the mentorship, generosity and support of my supervisory committee. First and foremost, I must thank my supervisor Donald Goellnicht, who guided me through the Ph.D. process by always providing integral comments on my works-in-progress and by making himself available for meetings, emails, texts or phone calls whenever I doubted myself or my project. I also want to thank Nadine Attewell for her perceptive and brilliant insights on various versions of the dissertation. Our conversations helped me see my own work more clearly and shaped so much of this project. I am also very grateful to have worked with Eugenia Zuroski, whose ability to draw incisive connections across texts, histories and concepts in ways I never considered made this dissertation richer. I must also express immense gratitude for my external examiner, Stephen Hong Sohn, who generously offered his time, comments, questions and advice on this project. I would also like to thank Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, who gave me feedback on my developing thesis and welcomed me into the Modern Culture and Media community at Brown University for a term. This dissertation is a product of my family’s love and support. Many thanks to my sister Agatha, Uncle Barnabas, Auntie Linda and my cousin Conan for being my home. In particular, I want to express immense gratitude for my mother, Lydia Wong, whose strength, sharp humour and leadership in her community inspire my writing. Many thanks as well to my dear friends in Hamilton, Toronto and beyond who have cheered me on these past five years in the form of encouraging texts, funny cards, hugs, late-night drinks, delicious meals, prayers, dance parties, walks and tea dates. Finally, I want to thank Brett Klassen, whose patience, constant reassurance and unwavering support before I even began my doctoral studies made it possible for me to finish this project. I dedicate this project to the memory of my father, Victor Lung Long Wong, who shared his love of reading and writing with me. His unfinished dissertation reminds me what a privilege these past five years have been. v Ph.D. Thesis – Danielle Wong; McMaster University – English and Cultural Studies TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Mediation, Dis/Embodiment and Inorganic Life 1-20 Chapter 1: Racializing Disassemblages 21-98 Chapter 2: Inorganic Asian Copies 99-163 Chapter 3: Mediated Wellbeing and the Half-Lives of Asian Rest 164-225 (In)Conclusion: Inorganic Solidarity After Representation 226-235 Works Cited 236-255 vi Ph.D. Thesis – Danielle Wong; McMaster University – English and Cultural Studies LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. Kyoko removes her skin in front of Caleb Screenshot of a scene from Ex Machina 52 Figure 2. Caleb’s nightmare flashbacks to Kyoko’s “revealed” face Screenshot of a scene from Ex Machina 53 Figure 3. Jade and Ava share a glance Screenshot of a scene from Ex Machina 56 Figure 4. Veerender Jubbal’s original selfie and the altered selfie Adapted images from Jubbal’s Twitter and La Razon’s image 75 Figure 5. Jus Reign’s March 2016 Snapchat story A screenshot from a YouTube video of Jus Reign’s Snapchat 78 Figure 6. Jus Reign’s “selfie-love” Snapchat video Screenshots taken from YouTube 83 Figure 7. Jus Reign’s “alternative facts” Snapchat story Screenshot taken from YouTube 94 Figure 8. The Asian Sleeping on Public Transit Tumblr Photo from the Asians Sleeping on Public Transit Tumblr page 166 Figure 9. A “hardsleeper” in China Image from Bernd Hagemann’s SleepingChinese.com 167 vii Ph.D. Thesis – Danielle Wong; McMaster University – English and Cultural Studies Figure 10. Gwen spends a night offline Screenshot of Jennifer Phang’s Advantageous 186 Figure 11. A slow dissolve in Advantageous Screenshot of Jennifer Phang’s Advantageous 188 Figure 12. Michelle Phan’s “Robot Chic” tutorial Screenshot of Michelle Phan’s YouTube video 208 Figure 13. Michelle Phan’s “Beauty Basic” tutorial Screenshot of Michelle Phan’s YouTube video 220 viii Ph.D. Thesis – Danielle Wong; McMaster University – English and Cultural Studies Introduction | Mediation, Dis/Embodiment and Inorganic Life In its 2017 adaptation of Puccini’s in/famous opera Madama Butterfly, Danish theatre company Hotel Pro Forma reimagines the character of Cio-Cio-San as a human- sized puppet. All the characters in this production, which was performed at La Monnaie in Brussels during the winter season of 2017, are played by actor-singers “in the flesh,” except for Cio-Cio-San and her son, who is initially represented by a doll and then by a larger-than-life balloon after Butterfly’s death in the final scene. As a team of puppeteers dressed in black brings Butterfly “to life,” the Japanese geisha’s ghost and voice— perhaps her soul—are disembodied and re-embodied by Greek soprano Alexia Voulgaridou, who narrates the tragedy as a white-haired phantom off to the side of the stage. For the production’s director, Kristen Dehlholm, the disembodiment of Cio-Cio- San’s voice and the puppet’s silence recuperate the tale from its Orientalist origins by, ironically, authenticating Butterfly’s story. Dehlholm’s approach to contemporizing Puccini’s geisha is to see her as a “symbolic victim of Western colonial behaviour,” and thus Dehlholm revisits the operatic classic from the perspective of Cio-Cio-San’s ghost, noting that the “concept of ghosts is very significant in Asian culture” (qtd. in Mergeay). The “life-sized” puppet of a geisha, which was apparently inspired by the Japanese puppet theatre tradition Bunraku and manufactured by the Amsterdam-based Ulrike Quade Company, is animated not only by Voulgaridou’s voice, but by a team of puppeteers and prop handlers dressed in black whom Dehlholm calls the “ninjas.” While 1 Ph.D. Thesis – Danielle Wong; McMaster University – English and Cultural Studies Voulgaridou carries the voice of Cio-Cio-San, Dehlholm says, the puppet “amplifies the emotion of the music through the simplicity and expressiveness of its mute gestures” (qtd. in Mergeay). While the marionette resurrects a long-critiqued, century-old Orientalist fantasy of docile, subservient Asian femininity, it also performs ambivalent functions as a racialized theatrical device that foregrounds how racialization itself is a mediation. On the one hand, the Cio-Cio-San puppet “frees” the theatrical production from a racist history of casting white sopranos in yellowface and from having to cast a “real” Japanese woman in a traditionally Orientalist role (which, arguably, would make Butterfly’s problematic role as suicidal victim even more apparent “in the flesh”). In this way, the inorganic actor presents a solution for authenticating—making more organic—a Western production that is now aware of its own colonial baggage. As a puppet meant to pay homage to a “real” Japanese theatre tradition, Hotel Pro Forma’s Cio-Cio-San is presented as a way to update an anachronistic Western cultural narrative by bringing “East and West together” (“Madama Butterfly”). On the other hand, the “modernized” Cio-Cio-San is a mediation—mediating and mediated by white performers’ embodied storytelling—that emphasizes the inorganic processes of racialization.

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