Next Event

 

The 20th & 21st Century Cultures Workshop is pleased to welcome:

Tien-Tien Jong Zhang

PhD Candidate, Department of Cinema and Media Studies, University of Chicago

Post-Human, Post-Asian: The Body Worlds of After Yang (Kogonada, 2021)

Mon, March 4, from 5:00-6:30 pm

Virtual Meeting on Zoom

with respondent

Dan Wang, Assistant Professor, Department of Music, University of Pittsburgh

Kogonada’s 2021 film After Yang borrows the narrative structures and epistemologies of the robot science-fiction genre to raise familiar questions about agency and social hierarchy. But the film’s added focus on Asian Americanness as a programmable trait poses novel questions about the relation of bodies to social identities, and the limits of these assumed interconnections. Among the significant changes Kogonada’s film made to its original source story, Alexander Weinstein’s 2016 “Saying Goodbye to Yang,” is the insertion of a subplot at the end of the film about what to do with Yang’s data after the robot’s breakdown. A museum exhibition on Artificial Intelligence gives Yang’s owners the option to donate the robot’s inanimate remains for public view. Yang’s afterlife is thus staged as having continued educational value for humanity—but of what exactly? is unclear.

This paper analyzes the curious museum subplot of After Yang in relation to a longer cultural legacy of extracting uncertain knowledge from the visual consumption of Asian bodies. A real-world analogy to the museum subplot in After Yang is Gunter von Hagens’s touring Body Worlds exhibit (1995-ongoing), in which plasticized and skinless human cadavers are displayed with the stated intention of “provid[ing]…insight into the anatomy and physiology of the human body.” Despite the exhibit’s universalizing and post-racial claims, the great majority of its body parts are sourced from one northeastern city in China, Dalian. For both the fictional exhibit in After Yang and the real-life Body Worlds, what would insisting on reading these bodies as specifically Chinese or Asian lead us to understand about their ideological infrastructures? Reading the museum subplot unique to Kogonada’s adaptation of this story alongside the discursive reality of the Body Worlds exhibit, this paper examines the uneasy dynamic between the representation of Asian bodies as machines for labor and science, and as pre-cut social identities incommensurable with personhood under techno-orientalism. By placing these two media texts in dialogue, this research project reveals the longevity and implications of fantasies about reading the (unmarked) Asian body.

The format of this workshop will be a 20-min. presentation adapted from a dissertation chapter, for the upcoming Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) conference. There will be no pre-circulated materials, but feedback on any aspects of the talk itself or of the presentation will be welcome & much appreciated!

Our meetings are open to the University of Chicago community and visitors who comply with University of Chicago vaccination requirements. We are committed to making our workshop fully accessible for people with disabilities. Please direct any questions and concerns to the workshop coordinators, Cassandra Lerer (crblerer@uchicago.edu) and Rhya Moffitt (rhya@uchicago.edu).