Do Androids Dream of Racialization?

In this article, I consider how just as techno-Orientalist discourse relies on analogizing Asians with technology, science fiction stories on androids, robots, and other embodied AI are themselves reliant on racial analogies for the coherency of their worldbuilding. I argue that the android imaginary draws its core tropes through a similar process of exclusion from the category of “human” that has long marked Orientalist and other dehumanizing discourses. To compare techno-Orientalist discourse and the android imaginary, I turn to the work of Philip K. Dick and analyze two of his seminal works, The Man in the High Castle (1962) and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968). I argue that we can read the Japanese in High Castle as precursors to the androids in Do Androids Dream and suggest that the android imaginary is itself structured by prior exclusionary frameworks such as Orientalism, which requires a re-examining of the genre’s assumptions about artificially intelligent beings.