april ☔’s Reviews > Racial Beings: Experiments in Asian American New Materialisms > Status Update
april ☔
is on page 24 of 264
ok i’m gonna start summarizing the salient points for myself so i can keep track of the arguments. look away if u don’t want spoilers.
introduction—“human”:
- reading “besides the human”: moving away from scale of individual human subject into nonhuman (vis a vis “inhuman”) scales, esp the smaller/molecular, which reveals heterogeneity and allows for new possibilities.
— 15 hours, 43 min ago
introduction—“human”:
- reading “besides the human”: moving away from scale of individual human subject into nonhuman (vis a vis “inhuman”) scales, esp the smaller/molecular, which reveals heterogeneity and allows for new possibilities.
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april ☔’s Previous Updates
april ☔
is on page 55 of 264
chapter 2–“object”:
[really wish someone could invent a way to ctrl+f physical books. index rlly carrying me rn]
— 11 hours, 37 min ago
[really wish someone could invent a way to ctrl+f physical books. index rlly carrying me rn]
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15 hours, 42 min ago
(via incredible close reading of emily jungmin yoon, taking the “small matter” of rock/gravel. bby freshman me had not understood this collection at all when mnh assigned it so i am doubly impressed w/how she elucidates it.)
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- reading race in literature’s engagement w scientific shows how race permeates materiality of world itself. against representation, which reveals failures of viewing race as individual trait.
- synthetic reading = interdisciplinary reading. approaching humanities w/ scientific insights but also bringing asian am studies, women’s studies, etc to bear on “traditional” disciplines.- in light of scientific development that reduces race to the molecular level and/or invisibilizes it, following it to those scales is necessary. race is actually inextricable from science and its violence (victims/arbiters).
- given dehumanization of asian ams, disidentifying from primacy of humanness. cyborg identity!
- “new materialism” (compare with historical materialism) allows us to intervene materially with race and its effects. ie not just thought experiment. race is difficult but not unchangeable (rock metaphor). critique PLUS speculation (attending to what isn’t there/left behind, imagining pasts/futures).
- asian am lit’s engagements w the scientific not just aesthetic. they are formal experiments that allow us to do all these things mnh is arguing, challenging our dominant understandings of race/human.
