Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes the ironic role that imagined Japan and Japanese bodies play in the HBO series Westworld (2016-present) that features a supposedly post-racial world in which Western bodies define their identities through a process of the West's optimistic future-facing Orientalism.

Paper long abstract:

In HBO's Westworld (2016-present), humans and robots navigate mazes of both space-time and the mind to define Self and consciousness. The show highlights the transformative experiences of android Maeve who attempts to escape the titular "Old West" theme park. In her flight, Maeve discovers a futuristic control center where robots like her are made, abused, and controlled—each a body-object created to satisfy the dark pleasures of a dominant, colonizing power. Maeve encounters successive scenes of shock and horror in labyrinthine laboratories, but a truly exotic sight—Japanese samurai androids engaged in swordplay—causes her to utter the classic science-fiction line of unmoored astonishment: "What is this place?"

Westworld, the show explains, is "the answer to that question you've been asking yourself—who you really are." In the park, humans learn their "true natures" and androids transcend programming to develop consciousness. And yet, in the show's post-racial representation of black and white bodies coexisting in a reimagined Civil War West where slavery is deracialized as a battle between human and machine, not all are created equal. It is in neighboring "Shogun Land," an anachronistic recreation of Japan's Edo Period, where protagonist Maeve finds her true voice and conscious Self that will help her lead other prisoners of Westworld to their own Self awakenings. This paper analyzes the ironic role that imagined Japan and Japanese bodies play in a supposedly post-racial construct in which Western bodies define their identities through a process of the West's optimistic future-facing Orientalism.