Racial Beings
Experiments in Asian American New Materialisms

Michelle N. Huang (Author)

9781478033196

Paperback / softback, published 24 March 2026

264 pages, 18 illustrations
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.4 cm, 0.359 kg

“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

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.

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction. Human: Reading Besides the Individual Racialized Subject 1
1. Object: Excavating Waste’
s Ecologies of Entanglement 25
2. Gene: Rethinking Clone Fiction’
s Consciousness 57
3. Element: Relating Water’
s Phase Changes 93
4. Species: Reorienting Alien Encounters 127
5. Atom: Dissipating Nuclear Exceptionalism 159
Conclusion. Race: Accessing a Multiverse of Matter and Meaning 189
Notes 199
Bibliography 225
Index