Asian American Science Fiction: Linking Heritage with Futurity

Science fiction is one of the fastest-growing subfields of Asian American literature, and it is largely imagined as predicting or exploring the future. But might it also be about re-considering cultural and linguistic heritage, what one might call vestiges of one’s past? We’ll explore how sci-fi’s focus on science and technology highlights key tensions in Asian American racialization, and teaches us about how language and culture can be technologies of self-creation themselves.

Bio: L. Maria Bo teaches classes in Asian American literature and literary theory in the Stanford English department. She studies translation, multilingualism, and issues of cultural and linguistic heritage in 20th/21st century diasporic Asian communities in the Americas. Her first book focuses on English-Chinese literary translations during the Cold War to illuminate a methodology for studying multilingual diasporic literature. More recently, she has also begun to write on Asian/American science fictions.