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{
    "pk": 42647,
    "title": "Techno-Orientalism with Chinese Characteristics: Maureen F. McHugh’s \nChina Mountain Zhang",
    "subtitle": null,
    "abstract": "Christopher T. Fan argues that McHugh’s award-winning 1992 science fiction novel perceives the twilight of the American Century by offering a “critical realism,” to use Georg Lukács’s phrase, of postsocialist US–China interdependency. In other words, it offers a form in which we perceive ourselves as subjects and objects of the twenty-first century world-system’s most important bilateral relationship. Moreover, as a novel about US–China \ninterdependency\n, it implicitly critiques the binary Orientalism that structures the rapidly growing body of work on “techno-Orientalist” formations. Fan's analysis thus extends arguments about American Orientalism’s non-Manichean formations (Christina Klein, Melani McAlister, Colleen Lye) into the postsocialist era.\nThe novel’s near-future, China-centric world analogizes McHugh’s personal crises of professional desire as a precarious laborer in New York City, with the massive reorientation of desires from Maoist politics to market-directed individuality that she witnessed among her students when she taught in China from 1987–1988. Chinese racial form plays a crucial mediating role in the novel because it reflects the revival of Confucian humanist discourse in reform-era China as a way to focus a national project of rapidly generating capitalist desire. Finally, by describing US–China interdependency, this article also generates a theory of US–China neoliberalism that corrects for universalist, Euro-American accounts of neoliberal subject formation (Lauren Berlant), as well as insufficiently subject-sensitive accounts (Aihwa Ong).",
    "language": "en",
    "license": null,
    "keywords": [
        {
            "word": "Orientalism"
        },
        {
            "word": "Maureen McHugh"
        },
        {
            "word": "China Mountain Zhang"
        },
        {
            "word": "Racial Form"
        },
        {
            "word": "racial formation"
        },
        {
            "word": "neoliberalism"
        },
        {
            "word": "Critical Realism"
        },
        {
            "word": "Georg Lukacs"
        }
    ],
    "section": "Articles",
    "is_remote": true,
    "remote_url": "https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8n70b1b6",
    "frozenauthors": [
        {
            "first_name": "Christopher",
            "middle_name": "T.",
            "last_name": "Fan",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "University of California, Berkeley",
            "department": "None"
        }
    ],
    "date_submitted": "2013-09-12T18:01:14+02:00",
    "date_accepted": "2013-09-12T18:01:14+02:00",
    "date_published": "2014-06-06T01:23:40+02:00",
    "render_galley": null,
    "galleys": [
        {
            "label": "",
            "type": "pdf",
            "path": "https://journalpub.escholarship.org/jtas/article/42647/galley/31830/download/"
        }
    ]
}