Page - 180 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

180 siting futurity contrast to more recently developed franchises in spe such as Pacific Rim (2013), which feel they can no longer afford not to take Asian markets into account, the Jurassic universe has re- mained resolutely transatlantic Euro-American, which is to say, hegemonically ethnically white. Stephanie Turner underscores the prejudice against Asians in Crichton’s novels: “The Japanese investors funding this mess, whom the reader never sees, serve as the novels’ behind-the-scenes scapegoat, Crichton’s reference to Reagan-era hostility toward Japan’s considerable share of the American automobile and electronics markets. Indeed, the reengineered Toyota Land Cruisers, their faulty transmission apparent from the start, are the bad copies signifying this social disorder” (Turner 2002, 904). This prejudice shifts in the films from the Japanese to the Chinese, reflecting the changing geo- political status of those two nations. The evil geneticist role in Jurassic World is reprised from Jurassic Park by B.D. Wong, who came to prominence playing the Chinese opera singer lover of a French diplomat in M. Butterfly on Broadway and who remains the only “far-east” Asian in the Jurassic cast. The layering that Wong’s character represents affords us in- sight into the fears that, like a magnet, he is anticipated to attract: racism, homophobia, but also, importantly, clonophobia. What Mitchell pursues in Cloning Terror is “a deep cultural logic” that he reads as symptomatic of “a comprehensive cultural formation summarized by Michel Foucault as ‘the birth of biopolitics,’ and of a period that extends back into the Cold War era that [Mitch- ell] has called ‘the age of biocybernetics reproduction,’” whose figurehead is the clone (Mitchell 2011, 19–20). Mitchell’s focus is resolutely us-centric. What was urgent for him when he was writing was to engage the link between cloning and the terror- ism “that began to manifest itself visibly after 9/11” (ibid., 19). He therefore ignores the question of the Chinese, a key strand of the Jurassic universe’s DNA that remains to be teased out. a clone, and not a grandson. Moreover, the granddaughter provides the lynchpin for the white nuclear family that Claire and Owen form at the end, replacing her bad guy, single father.