“In this powerful and indispensable historiography, Long Bui puts to rest any lingering doubt about the pernicious pervasiveness of the model machine myth that has long cast Asians as technologized nonhumans in American cultural and economic histories. Through a meticulously researched catalog of the ways Asians have been instrumentalized via recalcitrant techno-Orientalist vocabularies, Bui provides rigorous analyses of the implications and damages of the myth as well as bold provocations for interventions and change.”—Betsy Huang, Associate Professor of English and Dean of the College at Clark University, and coeditor of Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media

“Model Machines tracks how fantasies of race and machines inform one another, but also inform the coding of the Asian American race through global history. Looking at the long history of Asian American racial formation, beginning with early nineteenth-century Chinese ‘coolies’ figured as labor machines, through Southeast Asian women imagined as ‘sex machines’ during the Cold War, into the present era of increasing machine-human interactions, Bui creates a welcomed bridge between theories of human-machine relations and critical ethnic studies of the racialization of technology.”—Kalindi Vora, Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies and Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale University, and coauthor of Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures