Racial beings : experiments in Asian American new materialisms /
"Asian Americans have often been strongly associated with the inhuman, non-human, and post-human in its various iterations-from the historical exclusion of the Chinese in the late nineteenth-century US to the contemporary boom in Asian American speculative fiction. In Racial Beings, Michelle N....
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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Durham :
Duke University Press,
2026.
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| Series: | ANIMA (Duke University Press)
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| Subjects: |
| Summary: | "Asian Americans have often been strongly associated with the inhuman, non-human, and post-human in its various iterations-from the historical exclusion of the Chinese in the late nineteenth-century US to the contemporary boom in Asian American speculative fiction. In Racial Beings, Michelle N. Huang interrogates the ways in which Asian American literature and art have resisted the notion that being deemed human is a sufficient antidote to the dehumanizing effects of racism. Taking up an archive of contemporary Asian American cultural production, Huang examines how these works scramble the division between human and non-human, subject and object long upheld in Western notions of the subject. Through a method she calls "molecular aesthetics," Huang tracks how the scientific impulse, animated by an ethos of experimentation, displaces race onto the non-human and material world. Through this displacement of race onto matter, Asian American artists play with the paradox of racialization in which existential meanings are assigned to racialized people's embodied selves but where these meanings are inherently slippery. Reading works by Ted Chiang, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Ruth Ozeki, and Larissa Lai; artwork by Candice Lin; films such as "Everything Everywhere All at Once"; and geographical sites like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and nuclear bombing targets, Huang elegantly traverses the boundaries between science, literature, and race"-- |
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| Physical Description: | xi, 252 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 225-246) and index. |
| ISBN: | 9781478033196 1478033193 9781478029762 1478029765 |