Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange (1997) parodies the North American Free Trade Agreement, but it characterizes the fight over free trade in the same terms as NAFTA’s liberal supporters, who represent this fight as a struggle between “zero-sum nationalism” and an emerging network of transnational “enterprise-webs.” Just as NAFTA’s supporters imagine a global free market comprised solely of “human capital,” Yamashita imagines an "expanding symphony" comprised solely of "conductors" attuned to transnational complexity -- a vision which depends on a disavowal of the structural differences that make such collectives possible. Sesshu Foster’s Atomik Aztex (2005), meanwhile, suggests that framing the conflicts faced by Mexican migrants as epistemic conflicts is a mistake. His novel imagines an alternative history in which the “Aztex” defeated the Spanish and non-Western cultural and epistemic values have triumphed, but the violence of exploitation remains. At the same, Foster’s novel ultimately suggests that migrant workers can create the possibility of an “alternative future” by embracing a vision of a world defined by class antagonisms rather than by epistemic conflicts.

Chapter 7 directs critical attention to contemporary narratives that are coalescing in popular technology discourses that imagine climate crisis as an occasion to expand on structures of capitalism. This narrative template – whose leitmotif is making rather than saving nature – turns away from what Ramachandra Guha termed “varieties of environmentalism” in celebrating technological acts of inventing, designing, and rebuilding biophysical worlds. It begins by addressing the parallel emergence of a high-tech planet and a planet in peril as divergent stories of global capitalism. It then examines two visions of remaking the planet: geoengineering and terraforming. These overlapping engineering arenas draw an expressly environmental portrait of innovation that imbues the tech industry with quasi-magical capacities that can be leveraged either to improve on or to transcend the Anthropocene. Offering a counterpoint to this techno-utopia, the chapter concludes with an analysis of Karen Tei Yamashita’s novel Through the Arc of the Rainforest (1990), which satirizes the colonial logic of world-building fantasies while making the planet a charismatic character with a story of its own.

This chapter considers the hemisphere as a geopolitical heuristic for Asian American literature. While the era of 1965 to 1996 is considered pivotal for new growth in Asian American populations in the United States because of liberal reforms in immigration policy, it was also one in which the expansion of the global Cold War led US power to brutally target newly decolonized and revolutionary societies in its fight against Communism. This chapter examines how diasporic Asian literatures from the period illuminate the mechanisms of “development” from the Cold War to the neoliberal, postsocialist present. Beyond registering the presence of Asians in the Americas since the sixteenth century, the chapter argues that various “hemispheric imaginings” grapple with the disavowed operations of political violence by which Latin American and Asian nations were “transitioned” from a region of nonaligned, postcolonial republics to capitalist states ruled by comprador and transnational elites. At the same time, a hemispheric imaginary provides a method for reading artists’ visions of alternate, shared futures and South–South, transracial solidarities that continue to haunt the postcolonial world.