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.

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