UC Berkeley

How We Became Human: Race, Robots, and the Asian American Body is a theoretical, cultural, and sociological study of race, robots, and the Asian American body in the context of the United States. In this dissertation, I relate major instances of the robot as racialized and the Asian American body as mechanized, in order to explain the intersections of race and/as emerging technology. Specifically, my dissertation addresses a key concern of our digital age--the human/machine analytic--through the lens of race, gender, and sexuality. It investigates discourses of mechanization and racialization, focusing on how technology and racialization intertwine, and examines the representational processes of making and unmaking human, machine, and animal demarcations within the context of U.S. empire. The contemporary moment, in its transformation of culture through technology, demands a transformation of our analysis of race through the lens of technology. Specifically, I examine the Asian American body, and I show how industry and race have intersected in their development, and informed one another to shape what I call the Asian and/as Automaton discourse--the racialization of Asian Americans as robot.

Prompted by comparative questions surrounding race and the demarcations between human/machine/animal, I focus on the particularities of Asian American racialization and the human/machine analytic. In particular, the Asian American body offers a story in which objecthood and racial denigration can be understood through the key concerns of labor, aesthetics, and exclusion. I investigate discourses of mechanization and Asian American racialization during three periods of technological transformation: the mid-nineteenth century, the 1960s, and the contemporary moment, focusing on how technology and racialization intertwine. These three periods demarcate convergences of technological innovation and Asian migration to the United States. One of the interventions of this dissertation is to place the two "emerging technologies," race and information/industrial technology, in analytic conversation with one another. I argue that although our understanding of the automaton is largely without personhood, the automaton has in fact, historically, been deeply racialized. Specifically, while the affordances of posthumanity may be available to particular bodies, racialization has rendered Asian American bodies as falling within the analytic of "machine." I demonstrate that the robot in particular is a primary locus of racialization for Asian Americans, and I trace how technology figures in the Asian American story--a narrative that is transnational and historical in its genealogy.

This dissertation's inquiry into the intersections of the Asian American and the automaton begins with the industrial period of early Asian migration. In Chapter One, I analyze nineteenth-century industrialization and early Chinese labor to show how industry and race have intersected in their development and informed one another to shape what I call the Asian and/as Automaton discourse. While the steam engine can be considered an industrial emerging technology, social formations such as race and gender have not been placed within the analytic. Through a sociohistorical analysis of nineteenth-century editorial cartoons and literature, I argue that we can understand race not only as a social construction but also as an emerging technology. I illuminate how the racialization of Chinese laborers in the nineteenth century was contingent upon what I call technological tropes that mechanized the Chinese as "machine" through repetitive stories. These technological tropes reshaped and naturalized the boundaries of the human/machine analytic.

In Chapter Two, I further examine the Asian and/as Automaton discourse through Nam June Paik's robotic art of the 1960s. Celebrated as the first video artist, Paik used technology in an innovative way that transcends binary opposition and embraces hybridity. Based on an analysis of primary sources from the Paik archive at the Smithsonian, I argue that while Asian Americans are denigrated as "robotic," Paik and other Asian new media artists and writers have engaged in racial recalibration--a racial formation that occurs through aesthetic tinkering, hacking, and recreating with emergent technologies. Paik offers a peculiarly interesting case study, as his robotic art has historically not been positioned as racial resistance within art history or Asian American studies. Yet, through an analysis of Paik's writings and visual culture, we learn that the robot is not only central to his racialization as "it," but that he utilizes the robot as resistance. In this chapter, I also highlight the importance of labor; with an attempt to understand how labor connects to the ways Asian and/as Automata discourse has been constructed.

Finally, in Chapter Three, I examine the politics of contemporary Asian American cultural representation through digital theory. Specifically, I theorize the digital as drag by tracing the politics of "the real" and "the fake" in Asian American literature, digital documentary, and queer theory. This chapter rereads computer scientist Alan Turing's test for artificial intelligence and questions of the virtual through the lens of gender, race, and sexuality. Specifically, I theorize the digital as drag by tracing the politics of "the real" and "the fake" through the figure of the digitized Asian American drag king. I argue that our notions of inauthenticity have changed and that they must do so in a time of technological transformation.

The cultural intersections of the Asian American and the robot shed light on the concept of belonging in our national imaginary, insofar as the robot has been utilized as a trope for the "second class citizen," and it is with the question, how (did) we became (become) human and posthuman, that I hope to further our investigation of humans, machines, and animals. I demonstrate that Asian American ethnoracialization became and becomes dialectically entwined with the machine and robot. By doing so, analysis of the Asian American as robot helps us to become more specific about racializations and intersectionality, and it tells us how the robot, machine, and the digital is all at once, also always imbued with categories of difference.