The Racial Interface: Asian Alterity, Digital Dreams
In the 1940s, information and communication sciences foregrounded a perceptual view of the world as calculable data that could then be captured, visualized, and modeled. The Racial Interface details how the history of informatics surprisingly shaped cultural understandings of race, no longer fixed to the individuated body but envisioned to be dynamic and malleable because data could be a proxy for manipulation and control. Historicizing scientific ideas within its social milieu of race relations, the project reveals the informatic life of race through an analysis of Asian American literature, art, and media that lays bare these epistemic questions in aesthetic form and technique. Drawing from canonical and lesser-known literary texts and artworks as well as scientific writings and digital cultural discourse, this book project develops an interdisciplinary reading practice that shows how literature and art can diagnose the modern abstractions we call “race” and “digitality,” as historically aligned and materially constructed ideas derived from racial capitalism and its global expansion.
Exploring key moments of Asian racialization alongside developments in informatics and digital capitalism, this book project reveals that histories of race and technology cannot be reduced to accounts of dehumanization and nightmares of alienation. It argues that to understand the full extent of digital capitalism’s racial character requires addressing the inverse: the dreams of disembodied freedom that represent the “inhuman” world of data in racial form. This abstraction counterintuitively allowed Asian American writers and artists to express the human stakes of technological innovation in the information age.
Image: Blueprint rendering of Isamu Noguchi’s Sculpture to Be Seen From Mars (1947)
My newer research looks at games / gaming to explore the linkages between Asian racialization and technology. For instance, I am writing about:
the racialization of cheating / hacking, especially as it manifests in global multiplayer video games
Web3 imaginaries in Asian American literature, art, and games
the racial logics of the NPC (non-playable character)
Image: Artwork for Axie Infinity
I am also an author of a co-written book, titled Technoskepticism: Between Possibility and Refusal, with the DISCO Network (Stanford University Press, Feb 2025). The DISCO Network is an intergenerational collective of scholars and artists, working together to press the most urgent issues regarding race, gender, and disability in digital cultures. Technoskepticism is a collaborative book on how Black, Asian, disabled, and queer people have creatively carved out a space in the ever-shifting digital world, despite never being the default users or beneficiaries of digital technologies writ large.