Racial Beings

Experiments in Asian American New Materialisms

Michelle N. Huang

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9781478033196
  9781478029762
• eBook ISBN:
  9781478061953
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

In Racial Beings, Michelle N. Huang brings a feminist new materialist lens to bear on contemporary Asian American literature's innovative play with discourses of science and technology. She argues that emerging from these works is a "molecular aesthetics"—formal experimentation that diminishes the boundaries of the human—which challenge the perception of racial identity as a trait of an individual human. Instead, molecular aesthetics reveals how race permeates the matter of the world. Reading works by authors such as Ruth Ozeki, Larissa Lai, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and Julie Otsuka through the language of scientific discourses like quantum physics, genetic engineering, and elemental chemistry, Huang develops a synthetic reading practice which shows both that the nexus of race and science is not reducible to scientific racism and that science can provide an unlikely creative reservoir for Asian American writers and artists which allows us to imagine alternative ways of understanding racial being beyond the limits of the human individual.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Human: Reading Besides the Individual Racialized Subject
• 1. Object: Excavating Waste’s Ecologies of Entanglement
• 2. Gene: Rethinking Clone Fiction’s Consciousness
• 3. Element: Relating Water’s Phase Changes
• 4. Species: Reorienting Alien Encounters
• 5. Atom: Dissipating Nuclear Exceptionalisms
• Conclusion. Race: Accessing a Multiverse of Matter and Meaning
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index