Reading Response 2: Technology and Ethnic Otherness
Ghost in the Shell (1995) In his article “Technology and (Chinese) Ethnicity”, Darrell William Davis asks this question: why has Chinatown become an essential visual motif for dystopic future in cyberpunk classics such as Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell (1995)? A simple (yet valid) explanation would be Orientalism, or the use of the East as a signifier of “other”. To represent the mysterious and unknown future, a future that seems so “alien” to us, films have to employ the visual strategy of “otherness” to create a defamiliarizing effect. This otherness could be gendered, as there are
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