Species

This chapter addresses the species boundary underlying racial thinking by interrogating the connection between Asianness and alienness. The chapter first contextualizes the alien sea creatures of Jeffrey Yang’s An Aquarium (2008) alongside genealogies of natural history, the genre of bestiaries, and Pacific nuclear testing. It then turns to Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” (1998), unpacking the novella’s alien encounter narrative with regard to histories of Cold War intelligence and linguistic Orientalism. These two readings demonstrate how, even in the absence of readily identifiable human bodies, racial logics underwrite imperial science and military intelligence’s speciesist approaches to racial Others. The last section turns to Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s Oceanic (2018) and Brenda Shaughnessy’s The Octopus Museum (2019), two poetry collections that rescript affective stances toward the alien as desirous, playful, and ironic. The chapter rescripts Asianness/alienness from a quality that is categorically foreign to one produced by an epistemological relation to imperialism.