August 18, 2005
Lee, Rachel C., and Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, eds. Asian America.Net: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Cyberspace. New York: Routledge, 2003.
A book of collected essays, Asian America.Net seeks to address the question of how cybertechnologies complicate the tenuous space occupied by Asian Americans on issues of identity, transnationalism, and gender/sexual politics. If it is a truism, write Lee and Wong, that there was no such concept as “Asian American” prior to ethnic consciousness movement of the 1960s – the entire label being a construct – then the additional layer of technological virtuality only intensifies contestation of what it means to be Asian American. New forms of “orientalism” come into play with the historical and political conflating of Asians/Asian Americans with technology, first as Taylorist assembly line workers and then as cutting-edge users, producers, and paradigm shifters. The larger project of the book seeks to address the role of the Internet in further subjugating Asian Americans, and how Asian Americans can consciously utilize technology for counter-hegemonic purposes.
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Part 1: Cyberraces, Cyberplaces
1. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyuong. “Orienting Orientalism, of How to Map Cyberspace”
2. Kang, Jerry. “Cyber-Race”
Part 2: The Pixelated Asia/Pacific
3. Lieberman, Kim-An. “Virtually Vietnamese: Nationalism on the Internet”
4. Lal, Vinay. “North American Hindus, the Sense of History, and the Politics of Internet Diasporism”
5. Shu, Yuan. “Reimagining the Community: Information Technology and Web-based Chinese Language Networks in North America”
6. Ignacio, Emily Noelle. “Laughter in the Rain: Jokes as Membership and Resistance”
7. Kim, Aeju. “The Geography of Cyberliterature in Korea”
8. Chen, John, Chow, Karen Har-Yen, and Thoma, Pamel with Lee, Rachel C. “Intercollegiate Web Pedagogy: Possibilities and Limitations of Virtual Asian American Studies”
Part 3: Gender, Sexuality, and Kinship through the Integrated Circuit
9. Gonzalez, Vernadette V. and Rodriguez, Robyn Magalit. “Filipina.com: Wives, Workers, and Whores on the Cyberfrontier”
10. Varghese, Linta. “Will the Real Indian Woman Log-On? Diaspora, Gender, and Comportment”
11. Ow, Jeffery A. “The Revenge of the Yellowfaced Cyborg Terminator: The Rape of Digital Geishas and the Colonization of Cyber-Coolies in 3D Realms’ Shadow Warrior”
12. Nguyen Tu, Thuy Linh. “Good Politics, Great Porn: Untangling Race, Sex, and Technology in Asian American Cultural Productions
13. Nguyen, Mimi. “Queer Cyborgs and New Mutants: Race, Sexuality, and Prosthetic Sociality in Digital Space”