The technological imagery of twentieth century literature reveals that the profound fusion of
technology with the human body altered the way people considered their bodies. In this period
a special attention was drawn to the representation of ethnic bodies such as African Americans
Latino Americans or Asian Americans through technology. The study of technology and ethnicity
is relevant to American Studies because it highlights the nature of technology which can be
gendered or racialized. Historically mainstream American fiction can be identified as
colorblind because it has produced racial stereotypes of the ethnic others depicting them as
inferior to the whites. For example Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner (1982) or Larry and Andy
Wachowski's the Matrix (1999) reveal how the ethnic bodies of African Americans or Asian
Americans can be marginalized and objectified through technological means in fiction. Most of
the analysis of ethnicity in this fiction has been done within postcolonial theory but less
attention has been drawn to critical race theory. This paper intends to analyze the popular
representation of Asians and Asian Americans as cyborgs and technological beings in William
Gibson's cyberpunk novel Neuromancer (1984) Mamoru Oshii's cyberpunk film Ghost in the Shell
(1995) and Larissa Lai's post-cyberpunk novel Salt Fish Girl (2002) within critical race
theory. These speculative fictions represent images of Asians and Asian Americans as cyborgs
and technological objects at the same time questioning and challenging the issues of ethnicity
gender and ethnic identity representation in fiction. While Gibson an American mainstream
fiction writer provides exotic images of Asian cyborgs the Japanese writer Oshii and the
ethnic writer Lai use cyborgs in their narratives to address the issues of white supremacy and
marginalization of ethnic bodies.
