Orientalized Imagery in Posthuman Science-Fiction Cities: From the Explosive Chinatown to the Generic Metropolis

as the fictional marco polo in Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities explains, “cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears” (44). Urban spaces, both real and imaginary, are projections of cultural fantasies and anxieties. Henri Lefebvre points out that “space is political and ideological. It is a product literally filled with ideologies” (171). Steve Pile contends that “underlying the production of cities are the hidden workings of desire and fear, cities are desire and fear made concrete, but in deceitful, disguised, displaced ways” (“Sleepwalking” 76). Cinema has been a prime site in the representation of the city. Cinematic cities project and interact with real urban geography, providing a rich avenue for the exploration of modern life. Perhaps no other film genres express the dreamlike and fantastic features of the city better than science fiction. Sci-fi cityscapes restructure current experiences in a defamiliarized juxtaposition of the past, the present, and the future and, as Barbara Mennel argues, function as a cultural domain for “the negotiation of utopian and dystopian visions” (131) of an increasingly technology-driven society. Hollywood sci-fi films frequently feature Orientalized imagery in the depictions of the future city, particularly through images of the hybrid Chinatown and the generic metropolis. Such cultural imaginary reinforces stereotypes of the East as a place of both exoticism and technological excess and constitutes a site of negotiation for the shifting social discourses of the real world.Since the 1990s, posthuman discourse has been exerting a powerful influence on the spatial and temporal imagination of sci-fi future cities. Robert Pepperell argues that technologies such as robotics, communications, and genetic engineering destabilize humanist categories and bring about “the end of a ‘man-centred’ universe” (20). With breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and biotechnology, boundaries that define identities—human/machine, self/other, mind/body—are becoming increasingly blurred. Posthumanism signals the collapse of the ontology of liberal humanism and its “long-held belief in the infallibility of human power and the arrogant belief in our superiority and uniqueness” (Pepperell 20). Technology not only penetrates the human body but also invades the mind and, by extension, the interactive space of humans and the environment, epitomized in the image of the modern city. According to Pile, cities are “intensifying grids for simultaneously social and psychic meanings, produced in the mobile, conflictual fusion of power, desire and disgust” (The Body 177). The posthuman city is a site of continuous dataflow, the blurring of the body/mind boundary, and the breaking down of linear time, generating an uncertainty of memory, history, and identity. Such a predicament of the fragmented self is represented in the figure of the replicant—“automaton-like artificial life-forms conscripted into slave labor,” per Homay King (8)—in Ridley Scott's 1982 cyberpunk classic Blade Runner.Blade Runner represents a dystopic Los Angeles in 2019. The city seems perpetually rain-soaked, the crowded streets are littered with postindustrial debris, and flying vehicles navigate through a cluster of glass and concrete skyscrapers. The juxtaposition of the neon-lit futurescape with the grimy streets and dilapidated buildings suggests a world deteriorating under the weight of its own technological advancements. The future is built atop the remains of the past, reflecting the anxieties of the present. As Michel Foucault proposes, “we are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed” (22). Spatial, instead of temporal, experience dominates human lives. Blade Runner's future Los Angeles is not just a physical locale, but an extension of the posthuman condition, an entanglement of multiple, sometimes conflicting temporalities in a spatial pastiche of different styles, indicating the power imaginary of the real world.Blade Runner demonstrates how the posthuman cinematic cityscape can serve as a mediating ground where utopian and dystopian visions of the future converge and interact. It represents a visual backdrop for exploring the potentials and perils of advanced technology and societal transmutations. Posthuman cinematic cityscapes are not just spectacles for public entertainment: they also address the concerns of urban realities through the representation of technology's invasion and its hold on the living environment—the city. The cities in Minority Report (Steven Spielberg, 2002) and Anon (Andrew Niccol, 2018) are commentaries on American fears about privacy invasion and the potential loss of personal freedom in a world of surveillance and predictive policing, while the polarized cities in Elysium (Neil Blomkamp, 2013) and Alita: Battle Angel (Robert Rodriguez, 2019) portray a defamiliarized and uncanny picture of the fractal cityscape that has been spreading for several decades. In these films, the possibilities and possible benefits of advanced technology are juxtaposed with the dark sides of progress—surveillance, social division, and environmental degradation. The posthuman city depicts the tension between these contrasting visions. It also reflects people's sense of being lost in a maze of representations. Cinematic posthuman cityscapes allow audiences to explore the promises, challenges, and moral implications of the posthuman condition and contemplate the trajectories of a technology-saturated society.The mediating role that posthuman cityscapes play in social and political discourses is not neutral but instead marked by specific dynamics of the mediation. Among the visual elements that make up the posthuman cinematic city, Oriental tropes figure prominently as exotic elements and a special negotiating ground for conflicting discourses. Exotic landscapes in Western literary and cinematic traditions often serve as a canvas for cultural imagination. The otherness of the exotic space creates a mechanism for reinforcing the narrative subject's cultural identity and superiority. Noting that “Oriental tropes are central to the construction of modernist urban space,” Timothy Yu argues that visions of East Asia play a prominent role in imaginings of the postmodern city (46). As he points out, “Western conceptions of postmodernity are built upon continuing fantasies of—and anxieties about—the Orient” (46). Indeed, a careful textual reading of classics such as Blade Runner and The Matrix trilogy (Lilly and Lana Wachowski, 1999, 2003), as well as more recent science fiction such as Looper (Rian Johnson, 2012) and Her (Spike Jonze, 2013), confirms that Oriental urban features appear among images of the chaotic Chinatown, the liberating heterotopia, and the generic techno-metropolis, functioning as mediating agents in the posthuman futurescape. An analysis of these films offers a clearer vision of the inner logic of posthuman cinematic imaginary and sheds light on the transmutation of the power dynamics behind the Oriental imaginary in Hollywood science fiction.Blade Runner's dystopic Los Angeles is undoubtedly a seminal visual text for the imaginary of posthuman future. The city's high-tech and low-life futurescape is interspersed with a variety of Oriental elements: exotic decaying alleyways, traditional Chinese shop signs, chaotic Chinese graffiti, occasional Cantonese dialogue. The fusion of Western and Eastern cultural elements suggests a world in which globalization has led to the meshing of different cultures, culminating in a “city speech” of language pastiche—a hybrid of Japanese, Spanish, German, and so on.Hollywood has a long tradition of capitalizing on the image of the exotic Orient in romance, comedy, and action films. The imagined East serves as a backdrop to stories of love, betrayal, adventure, or espionage. While this narrative convention reflects Edward Said's description of “Orientalism”—perpetuating racial stereotypes and reinforcing Western hegemony (3)—the visualization of the East in the posthuman cityscape hides more complex and nuanced power dynamics. On the one hand, the stereotype of the exotic backward other is still a haunting presence in future urban imaginary. To note a few examples, in the future Los Angeles street scene depicted in Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace (Farhad Mann, 1996), the image of a rickshaw-pulling Chinese man appears in the background from time to time. Similarly, in The Fifth Element (Luc Besson, 1997), the flying cart of a Cantonese roast-goose peddler travels around amid a cluster of skyscrapers. These premodern images reinforce the stereotypical Orient even in visions of the posthuman future. On the other hand, the posthuman cityscape is also sensitive to the change of power dynamics in the real world. In her seminal essay “Ramble City: Postmodernism and Blade Runner,” Giuliana Bruno describes the ambivalence of the urban imaginary in the film: The city is a large market; an intrigue of underground networks pervades all relations. The explosive Orient dominates, the Orient of yesterday incorporating the Orient of today. Overlooking the city is the “Japanese simulacrum,” the huge advertisement which alternates a seductive Japanese face and a Coca-Cola sign. In the postindustrial city the explosion of urbanization, melting the futuristic high-tech look into an intercultural scenario, recreates the third world inside the first. One travels almost without moving, for the Orient occupies the next block. The Los Angeles of Blade Runner is China(in)town. 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