Model Machines

Western culture has long pictured people of Asian descent as mechanical beings, a portrayal that treats them as less than fully human. Long T. Bui uses the term Asian roboticism to describe the many ways Asians are linked to machinery and given robotic traits in the popular imagination.

Bui traces how Asians and Asian Americans have been racialized through their association with robots and machines, and he presents this as the first historical survey of that process. He introduces the "model machine myth," a framework for asking hard questions about personhood, citizenship, labor, and rights as Asian America took shape across national borders.

The case studies cover Chinese laborers, Japanese soldiers, Asian sex workers, and other figures, showing how globalization, racism, and colonialism helped cast Asians as ideal machines. The book also highlights artists and ordinary people who pushed back against this stereotype and imagined other ways of being human.

The narrative begins in the early nineteenth century and runs up to the new millennium. Bui ends with China's rise, which he connects to fears of a "rise of the machines" and the doomsday outcomes such fears might bring for humanity as a whole.