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book: Racial Beings
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Racial Beings

Experiments in Asian American New Materialisms
Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2026

About this book

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.

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

“Huang leads us through the unexpected processes of subduction, reheating, and resqueezing of magma as an alluring metaphor for racial mattering—molecular processes that can both solidify a stony racism and, quite possibly, help critical thinkers get ahead of the distributed undoings of older racial forms as they stubbornly reform as newer metamorphic piles.”
-- Rachel C. Lee, author of The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality and Posthuman Ecologies

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Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
February 13, 2026
eBook ISBN:
9781478061953
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
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https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478061953
eBook ISBN: 9781478061953
Keywords for this book
Asian American literature; posthumanism; aesthetics; science studies; environment; racial formation; nonhuman; racial representation; feminist science studies; racial subjectivity; synthetic reading; plastic; racial form; Pacific Ocean; trash; Garbage Patch; Ruth Ozeki; Ken Liu; origins; reproduction; fungibility; Kazuo Ishiguro; Larissa Lai; Candice Lin; Mei-mei Berssenbruggge; Theodora Yoshikami; Basement Workshop; Craig Santos; Jeffrey Yang; Ted Chiang; linguistics; sea creatures; Orientalism; military intelligence; Aimee Nezshukumatathil; Brenda Shaughnessy; Cold War intelligence; Julie Otsuka; atomic bombs; states of exception; Native American dispossession; Japanese American incarceration; Global War on Terror; Hiroshima; Nagasaki; artificial intelligence; multiverse; worldmaking; Everything Everywhere All At Once 20220
Audience(s) for this book
For an expert adult audience, including professional development and academic research
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