Asian American literary and cultural studies have long proceeded from the premise that the absence of Asians in American media requires corrective representation. This dissertation, “Generic Asians,” asks what it means to think about Asianness at a contemporary moment when Asian cultural productions have been spectacularly successful, and claims to under-representation are increasingly implausible. Reading a range of internationally successful texts—from Kazuo Ishiguro’s, Ruth Ozeki’s, and Charles Yu’s novels to Ang Lee’s films—I show how Asians have permeated Anglophone popular culture by mobilizing every genre of Oriental stereotype. The globalization of contemporary Asian Anglophone mass culture during the current era of U.S. decline has unfolded through a process of uncanny remediations by both Asian American and Asian diasporic artists working primarily in English. In adapting imperial genres, new Asian artists transform what I call the “generic Asian”—the Oriental stereotypes of British and American imperialisms—into the sensational surplus of contemporary culture. The rise of Asia has occurred not through the representation of Asian bodies, but through the mass dissemination of generic forms.

“Generic Asians” presents an account of contemporary Asian Anglophone cultural production that locates its aesthetic origins in British imperial dreamscapes. It links the heterogeneous oeuvres of popular Asian Anglophone writers and filmmakers by revealing their shared repurposing of British genre fiction ranging from historical romances and melodrama to detective novels and science fiction. As Victorian and postcolonial scholars have shown us, mid-nineteenth-century British writers disseminated these popular genres, with their Orientalizing characters, to fuel imperial expansion. More recently, Asian American scholars have demonstrated how twentieth-century U.S. writers and filmmakers marshaled the same genres to popularize tropes of Asian alterity—from “yellow peril” to “model minority”—in negotiating American power. This dissertation argues that, in our post-1970s era of U.S. economic stagnation and the accumulation of capital in a so-called “rising East Asia,” emerging Asian Anglophone artists recapture these same imperial genres to imagine new forms of Asian subjecthood and subjection. I unfold this process as itself a story of inscrutability: Asians pervade contemporary cultural production not only by representing typical Asian bodies and characters, but by adapting canonical Anglophone literary genres. Even as Anglophone culture remains the stage upon which hegemonic transition is performed, I show how the rise of Asian Anglophone cultural production proliferates generic Asianness both as stereotypical character and as literary genres.

As new technologies secure the progressive globalization of popular media, “Generic Asians” analyzes how emergent East Asian powers recirculate hegemonic cultural forms to reconceive who—and what—now constitutes the “Anglophone.” I re-evaluate Orientalist discourse through the genre of the East Asian Anglophone—an underexamined category despite how our sense of global futurity now hinges on China’s economic rise. The postcolonial paradigm in global Anglophone studies must be adapted, however, for places like Japan and China who are not only subjugated by Anglo-American powers, but are themselves imperial and colonializing nations. in being imperial and colonizing powers themselves. By focusing on ethnically Japanese and Chinese Anglophone artists, my dissertation reframes East Asian tropes with centuries-long Orientalist archives. I look specifically at internationally successful Asian artists—the Nobel-winning Ishiguro and the Oscar-winning Lee—to examine how the transaction between economic, cultural, and racial capital is negotiated on the world market. These auteurs’ globality, I argue, often appears to precede or even eclipse their Asianness. As with capital itself, the language of flexibility surrounding generic Asians and genres of Asian diaspora reconceives ethnic identity in our current moment—away from an older discourse of U.S. assimilation, and toward one that emphasizes the heterogeneity of Asian racialization in a more global context.

Far from a deadened typology, generic Asianness is constituted by its labile categorical flexibility, transforming in the work of Ishiguro, Lee, and others into a racial trope that now exceeds its initial reification. By remediating older Anglophone genres, new Asian artists further pervert them by flaunting not only the genericness of their Eurocentric narratives, but also the genericness of their racial stereotypes. Alongside its more obvious economic threat, Asia’s aesthetic production has begun to loom large on the cultural map, torquing and undoing Anglophone genres from inside out. While my chapters examine increasingly speculative and multi-mediated representations of Asian racialization, these examples are not simply decontextualized rejections of Victorian realism, but, I argue, a series of contemporary iterations that tests the genre’s initial Eurocentrism by using the logic and tropes immanent to realism’s form.