A01=Michelle N. Huang
aesthetics
Aimee Nezshukumatathil
artificial intelligence
Asian American literature
atomic bombs
Author_Michelle N. Huang
Basement Workshop
Brenda Shaughnessy
Candice Lin
Category=DS
Category=JBSL
Cold War intelligence
Craig Santos
environment
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Everything Everywhere All At Once 20220
feminist science studies
fungibility
Garbage Patch
Global War on Terror
Hiroshima
Japanese American incarceration
Jeffrey Yang
Julie Otsuka
Kazuo Ishiguro
Ken Liu
Larissa Lai
linguistics
Mei-mei Berssenbruggge
military intelligence
multiverse
Nagasaki
Native American dispossession
nonhuman
Orientalism
origins
Pacific Ocean
plastic
posthumanism
racial form
racial formation
racial representation
racial subjectivity
reproduction
Ruth Ozeki
science studies
sea creatures
states of exception
synthetic reading
Ted Chiang
Theodora Yoshikami
trash
worldmaking
Product details
- ISBN 9781478029762
- Weight: 526g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 24 Mar 2026
- Publisher: Duke University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
Michelle N. Huang is Assistant Professor of English and Asian American Studies at Northwestern University.
