This article makes the case that the discourse around K-pop supergroup BTS and their fans—known as ARMY—marks an intersection between techno-Orientalism, the abstraction and demonization of Asian labor, and Korea in the US imperial imaginary. BTS exemplifies what I suggest is a contemporary form of Asian racialization that emphasizes the Asian figure as embodying a series of seeming contradictions between the synthetic/mechanistic and the undeveloped/primordial. BTS reveals the ways that these threads of racialization do not contradict but rather complement each other, explaining how narratives marveling at the group’s technical proficiency/synchronicity/productivity can exist side by side with suggestions that their musical output is the result of a labor that is denigrated because it is perceived as being mechanized, abstract, and devoid of the qualities of artistry and creativity exclusively associated with Western modernity.
Articles by Julia H. Lee
Julia H. Lee is professor and chair of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African and Asian American Literatures, 1896–1937 (New York University Press, 2011), Understanding Maxine Hong Kingston (University of South Carolina Press, 2018), and The Racial Railroad (New York University Press, 2022). She is co-editor of Asian American Literature in Transition, 1850–1930 (Cambridge University Press, 2021), which was a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2022.
Review of Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad by Manu Karuka (University of California Press)
Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad by Manu Karuka suggests that the Transcontinental Railroad is a useful lens through which to view issues relating continental imperialism, countersovereignty, and capitalist modes of production.