How does contemporary Asian American literature experiment with the terms of racial representation? What happens when we recalibrate race through the scale of the molecular? How might doing so attune us to the reciprocal relations that unsettle arbitrary boundaries dividing the human and the nonhuman? Following these provocations forwarded by Michelle N. Huang, this proposed roundtable thinks alongside her new monograph Racial Beings: Experiments in Asian American New Materialisms (Duke University Press, March 2025). In Racial Beings, 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 attenuates the boundaries of the human—that challenges the lay perception of racial identity as a trait of an individual human. Instead, molecular aesthetics reveal race to suffuse the matter of the world. Reading these molecular aesthetics through the language of quantum physics, genetic engineering, elemental chemistry, and nuclear testing (among other scientific discourses) in works by authors such as Ruth Ozeki, Larissa Lai, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and Julie Otsuka, this book develops a synthetic reading practice that shows not only is the nexus of race and science not reducible to scientific racism, but also, that science can provide an unlikely creative reservoir for Asian American writers and artists that allows them to imagine alternative ways of understanding racial being beyond the tyranny of the human individual. Rather than understanding­ resistance as individual heroism, Racial Beings reattaches a more physical valence to­ resistance: the degree of slowing effect exerted by one thing on another. What emerges, Huang proposes, are different ways of racial being in relation.

Thinking alongside Huang’s work in this new book, the invited roundtable participants will each offer 7-8 minutes of prepared, but informal, remarks on the effects and implications of the monograph for the field. In so doing, their remarks will be grounded by animating concepts that have been central to their own scholarly thinking. Huang will then respond before opening to audience Q&A.