Overview

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.

Full Product Details

9781478029762

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Reviews

""In this strikingly elegant and philosophical book, Michelle N. Huang makes a compelling case for why Asian Americans are an apt template for unveiling the line between the human and nonhuman. Focusing on experimental Asian American creative practices that challenge the materiality of race, Huang shows us how the projection of racialization onto things in the natural world enables varying forms of resource extraction, whether animal, mineral, or human.""--Leslie Bow, author of, Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasures of Fantasy

Author Information

Michelle N. Huang is Assistant Professor of English and Asian American Studies at Northwestern University.

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