The Violent World-Remaking of Anti-Colonial Asian North American Fantasy

Over the last decade, fantasy novels by Asian North American writers have consistently appeared on bestseller lists for both adult and YA fiction, won prestigious awards, and achieved their own fandom on social media.¹ The critical and commercial success of works by Ken Liu, Fonda Lee, and R. F. Kuang, timed with the explosion of the romantasy subgenre in the publishing market and the broadening viewership of K-dramas, C-dramas, and anime via streaming platforms, has opened the doors for the publication of a slew of Asian-inspired SFF (science fiction and fantasy) novels. This growing popularity in publishing parallels the increase of Asian-mythology inspired films and shows, from Marvel's Shang-Chi and Ms. Marvel to Disney+'s remake of American Born Chinese to, most recently, Netflix's runaway hit, K-Pop Demon Hunters. Thus, Asian-inspired fantasy, which I will shorthand as "Asian fantasy" to signal fictional works that are inspired by Asian cultures and produced by Asian-heritage writers, has become a major contributing factor to the emergence of Asian American mass culture.

However, has the increased representation of Asian cultures and histories, Asian-identified characters, and Asian American and diasporic authorship in SFF disrupted the status quo of publishing in any significant way, such as challenging the longstanding Orientalist stereotypes in fantasy and science fiction? Or does the nascent genre of Asian fantasy merely reinscribe the same tropes and ideological structures in order to further cater to the mass market? While these questions are important, I want to approach the question of Asian fantasy as mass culture more elliptically, pivoting away from the resistance vs. accommodation dichotomy to instead examine how Asian fantasy writers and their works are formed by and forming the genre, particularly in relation to race, gender, and colonialism.²

For this analysis, I focus on a very specific subset of Asian fantasy—historical or literary retellings featuring female anti-heroes by Chinese North American writers, which includes novels like Kuang's The Poppy Wars trilogy, Xiran Jay Zhao's Iron Widow duology, and S. L. Huang's The Water Outlaws.³ This subset of Asian fantasy brings together several trends in the publishing market and mass culture at large: the historical/literary retelling, the feminist retelling, the morally grey protagonist or anti-hero, and spectacular violence. While the convergence of these publishing trends almost certainly contributed to the popularity of these Chinese North American fantasy novels, a genre and fan studies approach also reveal these characteristics as racialized and gendered literary forms. Considered contextually and intertextually, the violence of these feminist retellings and their anti-hero protagonists refracts the Chinese diasporic subject's inheritance of both Western and Asian imperialism and patriarchy.

The Formation of a (Sub)Genre

First of all, I want to acknowledge the limitations and shortcomings of a term like "Asian fantasy" as a way to group a set of texts into a subgenre. Though I focus on texts that more or less fall under the generic conventions of fantasy, I also consider them within the wider genre of SFF, as many of these texts contain elements of both science fiction and fantasy. Asian fantasy authors themselves express much ambivalence about the term, "Asian fantasy." For Kuang, the term "doesn't really make a lot of sense," since the descriptor of "Asian" erases "the world of difference" that it contains. This sensibility recalls Kandice Chuh's concept of Asian American studies being a "subjectless discourse," a term created for institutional functionality rather than ontological coherence.⁴ Moreover, calling Asian-authored and culturally-inspired fantasies a "new" phenomenon is already a Western and Anglophone-centric perspective, as fantasy has been and remains a popular genre in Asia. The Chinese genres of wuxia (martial arts fantasy) and xianxia (immortals/cultivation fantasy) have dominated novels and TV serials across Asian countries for decades and draw upon a much longer literary heritage.

At the same time, approaching this set of popular fantasy novels by Chinese North American writers through the framework of genre helps us trace the currents and undercurrents of race, gender, and power throughout these works. Though Frederic Jameson considers genre as symptomatic of reification, which renders mass cultural works into commodities for mass consumption, Asian American scholars have shown how minority SFF writers also draw upon and subvert genre expectations to reimagine the world.⁵ Betsy Huang describes the "laws" of genre fiction as "a set of formal and social imperatives maintained and enforced by a confluence of genre history and market forces," which accordingly "exert tremendous disciplinary power over the narrative and representational choices of the author."⁶ However, this "disciplinary power" is not absolute. Mark Jerng, in response to the work of John Frow, explains that readers and texts also influence the construction of a genre, conceiving of genres as "practices of worldmaking" where meaning-making occurs through the interplay of "authors, readers, editors, and structures of information and everyday discourse."⁷ Drawing upon Colleen Lye's conception of "racial form," Jerng uses the term "racial worldmaking" to trace the "ways in which race works with genre in building, anticipating, and organizing the world," arguing that racial formation and genre formation are co-constitutive processes.⁸ In particular, Jerng's analysis of racial and colonialist ideologies in the yellow peril/future war subgenre and the sword and sorcery fantasy subgenre of the early and mid-twentieth century reminds us that contemporary Asian North American SFF writers are operating within a genre enmeshed in orientalism and colonialism.

Fandom and Rewriting Worlds

In addition to genre studies, fan studies provides a way to approach mass culture as more than just the commodification of art for mass consumption. Like genre studies' examination of the interplay of genre, readers, and texts, fan studies considers how contemporary fandom's "growing cultural currency" impacts the structures of every day communication, media consumption, and content production.⁹ Fan studies scholars have noted that fan culture both depends on and resists the mainstream media industry and vice versa, resulting in "a hybridization of fan identity and practice within a neoliberal media ecology," a dialogical interaction whereby fans are "always already situated between commercial concerns and resistant hegemonies."¹⁰ Fandoms have impacted the growing readership of Asian fantasy novels, where marketing often draws upon comparisons to popular anime and Chinese and Korean dramas, indicating the mainstreaming of these forms of Asian media for U.S. and other Anglophone audiences.

Fan culture has also directly influenced the creation of many popular works of Asian fantasy. Zhao has a "Bonus Summary for Weebs" on the Iron Widow page of their website that describes the novel in terms of numerous anime, including Neon Genesis Evangelion, Darling in the Franxx, Transformers, Attack on Titan, and Dragon Ball Z. The influence of Nickelodeon show Avatar: The Last Airbender can also be seen all over Asian fantasy with the prevalence of elemental magic.¹¹ In fact, on several occasions, Kuang has pitched The Poppy Wars as "if Azula was the main character and everyone was on drugs." Beyond serving as a way to trace influence, fan culture has also produced a form of popular writing that directly links to the genre of the historical/literary retelling — fan fiction. For racially minoritized, diasporic, female/non-binary, and queer writers, fan fiction has long served as a way to write themselves into worlds that they love but that has excluded, erased, or villainized those like them, practicing what Alicia Ostriker calls "revisionist mythmaking."¹² Stephen Hong Sohn extends Ostriker's framework to describe Asian American speculative fiction's impulse towards social justice as "revisionist imaginaries."¹³ For many Asian fantasy novels, their revisionist imaginaries have been formed within the dialogical relationship between fan culture and mass culture, the context in which many Asian fantasy writers first interacted with SFF and then wrote against the genre's dominant racial and gender stereotypes.

The Star Wars universe is a prime example of a mass cultural SFF text that appropriates Asian cultural influences and then represents these influences through orientalist tropes.¹⁴ Yet Huang talks about how Star Wars was her "first fandom," and Kuang describes how "the original Star Wars trilogy has imprinted itself on [her] storytelling bones."¹⁵ The narrative arc of the peasant girl—not boy, as in Star Wars—who arises out of obscurity, cultivates dormant powers, and takes on an empire forms the core in The Poppy Wars, Iron Widow, and The Water Outlaws. Kuang remarks on the generative contradictions of SFF fandom in her formative years: "There was a part of me that recognized, even as I projected myself into a story, that I didn't really belong there... It wasn't until a long time later that I realized if I couldn't find myself in those speculative worlds, I could at least create those worlds for others."¹⁶ Rewriting historical or literary narratives to center female, queer, oppressed, and minoritized characters and to center anti-colonial and anti-patriarchal themes and plotlines thus directly comes from participation and contestation within fan culture. Just as fan culture exists in dialogical relationship to mass culture, Asian fantasy both participates in and contests the influence of mass culture as it attempts not merely "worldmaking" but what I call "world-remaking" through its reimagining of historical events and literature.

Anti-Colonial World-Remaking

Despite centering Chinese history and mythology in their retellings, these novels critique both Western and Asian imperialisms in their historical and present-day modes. In The Poppy War trilogy, the protagonist Rin, a gender-bent version of Mao Zedong, channels the power of the Phoenix, a god of vengeance and fire, to fight against multiple oppressors: first, the invading Mugenese (modeled on Japanese imperialism); then, the dictatorial Empress of the Nikara Empire (modeled on the Qing dynasty); and, finally, the warlord Vaisra (basically Chiang Kai-Shek) and the allied foreign power of Hesperia (an amalgamation of Britain, the US, and other Western powers). However, the more Rin uses the Phoenix's power, the more she becomes consumed by vengeance and her own quest for domination, no matter the lives it will cost. Ultimately (spoiler alert), Rin chooses to sacrifice herself to end this cycle of violent conquest, diverging from the path of her historical alter ego. Rather than merely retell the turbulent history of twentieth century China, the novels' fantastical reimagining of this history highlights the uncontrollable nature of power, whether supernatural or political.

In the case of Iron Widow, a young adult SFF novel that blends elements of fantasy and science fiction, the novel makes its anti-colonial and anti-patriarchal critique not through direct allusions to modern history but by imagining a futuristic alt-China that still practices foot-binding while also sacrificing their daughters to fight giant metallic aliens. Hearkening to the yellow peril/future war genre, the invading hunduns, which literally means "primordial chaos" in Chinese mythology, are portrayed as a barbaric horde threatening to overwhelm one of the last bastions of civilization. In naming this alt-Chinese empire "Huaxia," which combines the Chinese term for China/Chinese, "Hua," with the word "xia," or "under," the novel imagines an alt-China that has reclaimed preeminence, seeming to directly flout the West's fears of China's ascendancy by embracing a Sinofuturistic setting and inverting the trope of the yellow peril.¹⁷ However (another spoiler alert!), the novel subverts any validation of modern China's geopolitical ambitions through hinting at and finally revealing at the end of the novel that the hunduns are actually indigenous to the planet, and it is the humans who are the colonizers. Thus, the novel averts a "celebratory or triumphalist" take on the so-called "Asian Century," a tendency that Aimee Bahng critiques in her analysis of speculative fiction.¹⁸ Kuang and Zhao's novels invert many of the tropes of the sword and sorcery and yellow peril/future war genres to destabilize conventional binaries of good vs. evil, hero vs. villain, and even victory vs. defeat as they question what it means to "win" and the costs of winning. Thus, despite operating within mass cultural models of popular writing, they wrestle against generic reification and refuse to repress the tensions of colonialism. Unlike the Star Wars franchise that convinces its viewers to root for the Rebellion without ever questioning their own positionality as docile subjects of empire, these works trouble the reader's sympathies in their unflinching displays of violence, which I argue functions as a gendered and racialized form.

Violence as Form

This subset of Asian fantasy novels also shares the commonality of spectacular violence, wrought by both imperial powers and the anti-hero female protagonists. I do not find it a coincidence that the most anti-colonial and anti-patriarchal Asian fantasy novels are also the ones with the highest body count.¹⁹ In these fantasy texts, violence functions as more than a theme, plot device, or even a "grimdark" aesthetic. Rather, the violence of the morally grey female protagonist manifests as a gendered and racialized form that reflects the fraught inheritance of both Western and Asian imperialisms and patriarchy within the Chinese diasporic subject.

For queer, female/nonbinary Chinese diasporic writers, this tension of being in the genealogy of multiple histories of oppression and domination results in the creation of complex characters and plot conflicts, where the line between the heroes and villains is unclear and often shifting. Huang explains why she wanted to write about a group of anti-hero bandits by drawing upon her own experiences as a multiple-minoritized subject:

There have always been a lot of demands on us. To be beyond reproach, so "they" have no excuse. To be loud, because being quiet is complicity. To be less angry; to be more angry. To prove ourselves this way or that way instead of just being able to live . . . . And sometimes, when put in hard places, we're capable of making bad decisions. Sometimes it's understandable. Sometimes it's because there are no good decisions. Sometimes it's impossible to tell what the good decision is.

This speaks to the cause for moral ambivalence in each of these novels: the protagonists are not inherently amoral or even moral relativists in their philosophies, but they become morally conflicted when the colonial and patriarchal structures they inhabit push them into amoral decisions and actions. Lin Chong in The Water Margins must kill some of the very soldiers she trained when she was a master arms instructor; Zetian in Iron Widow crushes an entire palace of people including her own family to overthrow an empire built on the disposability of teenage girls; Rin in The Poppy Wars annihilates a whole island of civilians to end a brutal war of conquest. These protagonists are not purely righteous rebels fighting against an evil empire, but in resisting their oppressors, they often become consumed by their own pursuit of power. The novels show that there are no easy paths out of the clutches of tyranny and empire.

The fantastical elements in these novels are the very means for amplifying the violence; Lin Chong's qigong powers, Zetian's piloting of the mechas, and Rin's possession by a fire god all enable victories through violence and destruction. Building off of Seo-Young Chu's insight that science fiction functions as mimesis of the aspects of reality that defy representation, I consider the fantastical and spectacular violence of these novels as the formal refraction of the Asian diasporic subject's volatile inheritance of the violence of empire.²⁰ Rather than manage or mollify social and political anxieties, as Jameson argues mass cultural works do, the implosive violence of these Asian fantasy novels heighten such tensions, including the fraught position of the writers themselves working both within and against the culture industry. To borrow from M.L. Wang's book title, these novels force a reckoning with the "blood over" our "bright haven," be it increased political influence, cultural representation, socioeconomic ascendancy, or geopolitical power.

Conclusion

By considering genre studies and fan studies through the context of gender and racialization, particularly in relation to the writers' own intersectional identities, we see that these popular Asian fantasy novels share the genre characteristics of the retelling novel with female rage and violent spectacle not merely because of genre-specific publishing trends. Instead, these genre characteristics are racialized and gendered aesthetic forms bound up in the novels' anti-patriarchal and anti-colonial projects through which the writers, as Chinese diasporic subjects, grapple with the destructive legacies of Western and Asian patriarchies and imperialisms and simultaneously critique present-day neocolonialism.

The publishing industry with its primary concerns of marketing legibility and instant readership will always push a trend towards homogenization while seeking just enough of a "new twist" to pique reader interest and forestall a sense of market saturation. Yet, at the same time, as we see with the novels in this essay, Asian American and diasporic writers will also influence the genre and the market. In "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture," Jameson makes the caveat that "authentic cultural production" is only possible when rooted in "the collective experience of marginal pockets of the social life of the world system."²¹ However, he immediately warns that "this production is possible only to the degree to which these forms of collective life or collective solidarity have not been fully penetrated by the market and by the commodity system."²² Asian fantasy as a publishing category may be fully enmeshed in the commodity system, but even within it, the texts strive to trouble easy resolutions while yearning for a more just world. Rather than debate whether Asian fantasy can still be considered "authentic cultural production" or if Asian fantasy can resist the ideological structures of mass culture, we can look to Asian fantasy to consider how Asian American mass culture holds worldmaking and world-remaking potential.

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Nancy Carranza (@nancyslitlounge) is assistant professor of English at Riverside City College. She obtained her PhD in English at the University of California, Riverside. She has published in MELUS and is a contributor to the edited collection, Race in the Multiethnic Literature Classroom. Her current research interests are in Asian diasporic speculative fiction and the role of social reading networks in Asian American/Anglophone literature.

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References

1. I use the publication of Ken Liu's The Grace of Kings in 2015 to mark the beginning of "Asian fantasy" as a legible publishing subgenre. However, Asian-inspired fantasy books by Asian authors existed before, though mostly in children's books like those by Grace Lin and, even earlier, Laurence Yep, and YA books by Cindy Pon, Malinda Lo, Sabaa Tahir, and Julie Kawaga. Writers like Cindy Pon have discussed the pushback they received from publishers that their books would not be marketable. See Kalyani Saxena, "What's In A Genre Name? The Trouble With 'Asian Fantasy,'" NPR, May 30, 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/05/30/1000466671/whats-in-a-genre-name-the-trouble-with-asian-fantasy. ↩︎
2. I refer to the resistance vs. accommodation dichotomy that Viet Thanh Nguyen theorizes in Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (Oxford University Press, 2002). ↩︎
3. Kuang's The Poppy Wars trilogy retells the Second Sino-Japanese War and Chinese Civil War; Xiran Jay Zhao's Iron Widow duology retells the rise of Empress Wu Zetian; S. L. Huang's The Water Outlaws retells the Chinese literary classic Water Margins. Other Asian-inspired fantasy novels by Asian diasporic writers with basis in literary or mythological retellings include Shelley Parker-Chan's She Who Became the Sun duology (Ming Dynasty founder Zhu Yuanzhang), Chloe Gong's These Violent Delights duology (Romeo & Juliet), K.X. Song's The Night Ends with Fire duology (Mulan), P.H. Low's These Deathless Shores (Peter Pan), Vaishnavi Patel's Kaikeyi (Ramayana), Sue Lynn Tan's Daughter of the Moon Goddess (Chinese legend of Chang'e) and Never Ever After (Cinderella), Axie Oh's The Floating World (Korean legend of Celestial Maidens), and Elizabeth Lim's A Forgery of Fate (Beauty and the Beast). ↩︎
4. Saxena, "What's in a Genre Name?"; Kandice Chuh, Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique (Duke University Press, 2003), 9. ↩︎
5. Fredric Jameson, "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture," Social Text, vol. 1 (1979): 130-48. https://doi.org/10.2307/466409. ↩︎
6. Betsy Huang, Contesting Genres in Contemporary Asian American Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 6. ↩︎
7. Mark Jerng, Racial Worldmaking: The Power of Popular Fiction (Fordham University Press, 2018), 12. ↩︎
8. Jerng, Racial Worldmaking, 18. ↩︎
9. Cornel Sandvoss et al., "Introduction: Why Still Study Fans?," in Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, ed. Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington, 2nd ed. (New York University Press, 2017), 6, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1pwtbq2.3. Also see Lev Manovich, "The Practice of Everyday (Media) Life: From Mass Consumption to Mass Cultural Production?" Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 319-31. https://doi.org/10.1086/596645. ↩︎
10. Paul Booth, Playing Fans: Negotiating Fandom and Media in the Digital Age (University of Iowa Press, 2015), 7, 14-15. ↩︎
11. For an excellent critical analysis of ATLA, see Xine Yao, "Arctic and Asian Indigeneities, Asian/North American Settler/Colonialism: Animating Intimacies and Counter-Intimacies in Avatar: The Last Airbender." Journal of Asian American Studies 24, no. 3 (2021): 471-504. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/jaas.2021.0036. ↩︎
12. Alicia Ostriker, "The Thieves of Language: Women Poets and Revisionist Mythmaking." Signs 8, no. 1 (1982): 68-90. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3173482. ↩︎
13. Stephen Hong Sohn, Asian Ameritopias: Asian American Speculative Fictions (Temple University Press, 2026), 11. ↩︎
14. See Kevin J. Wetmore, The Empire Triumphant: Race, Religion and Rebellion in the Star Wars Films (McFarland, 2005). ↩︎
15. R. F. Kuang, interview by Ifeoluwa Adeniyi, "Speculative World-Building as a Refracting Prism: An Interview with Rebecca F. Kuang." American Studies 60, no. 3 (2021): 119-126. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/ams.2021.0031, 120. ↩︎
16. Kuang, interview by Adeniyi, 121. ↩︎
17. For a deeper analysis of Sinofuturism and its relation to Techno-Orientalism, see Virginia L. Conn and Gabriele de Seta, "Sinofuturism(s)," Verge: Studies in Global Asias 7, no. 2 (2021): 74-99. https://doi.org/10.1353/vrg.2021.0003. ↩︎
18. Aimee Bahng, Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times (Duke University Press, 2018), 123. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv11g96vm.  ↩︎
19. Though I don't analyze either Kuang's novel Babel or M.L. Wang's Blood Over Bright Haven in this essay, as they are not historical/literary retellings, it is worth noting that these two popular fantasy novels focus explicitly on critiquing the extractive nature of colonialism and capitalism and also involve a lot of violence. In fact, Babel's full title is Babel, Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution. ↩︎
20. Seo-Young Chu, Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep?: A Science-Fictional Theory of Representation (Harvard University Press, 2010). ↩︎
21. Jameson, "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture," 140. ↩︎
22. Jameson, 140. ↩︎