{"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":"2013-09-12T16:01:14Z","date_accepted":"2013-09-12T16:01:14Z","date_published":"2014-06-05T23:23:40Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/jtas/article/42647/galley/31830/download/"}]}