april ☔’s Reviews > Racial Beings: Experiments in Asian American New Materialisms > Status Update

- pacific ocean as site of knowledge and interrogation of transpacific relations
- waste (specifically example of great pacific garbage patch) needs to be reconsidered not as object vs human subject as it reveals entanglements not just between but with humans. intra-action rather than interaction.

ozeki section:

- we must attend to erasure/absence
- garbage is constructed by, and necessary to, building the idea of the individual and agential human
- objects are made and unmade into trash via memory and meaning, sometimes unconsciously. again, meaning emerges on particulate and scalar levels (ie debris insignificant until it becomes part of the greater patch. however, when certain objects become exceptional in our lives, they become not-trash—not sure if i’m interpreting this correctly? the responsibility part is tricky to me.)
- therefore, garbage as archive of forgetting that we are entangled with in a network of responsibility

- ozeki blurs and entangles the accepted distinctions between fiction and reality via form and by deemphasizing central protagonist
- quantum entanglement: particles coordinating across space and time. as such, characters/narratives across different space-times can alter each other, and are therefore mutually responsible
- “reader paradox”: SUPER interesting analogy using double-slit experiment. just as the paradox of the experiment posits that observers are agents in how reality is perceived, a reader can influence a narrative. ie novels are not stable objects/realities and the relationship between reader and narrative is two-way.
- taken a step further in which knowledge of path is “erased” (cf barad)—outcomes/“ends” can change via encounter (moment of interpretation), despite purported distance in space-time. fiction (aka narrative) has material effects. therefore, we can destabilize probable storylines that depend on accepted temporal and ontological understandings.

plastic section:

- plastic as racialized via characteristics of disposability and assimilation. plastics degrade into particulates but never biodegrade; similarly, race changes formations but never disappears

- mapping of plastic’s traits onto asian american racialization. also evidence of how plastic has indeed been racialized as asian in and of itself.
- plastic “diagram[s] the transpacific currents of war,” entanglements which are often obscured by oversimplifying plastic via national demarcations
- plastic is ubiquitous in our society, even as its molecular nature allows it to look invisible. it cannot disappear, just as race cannot be disappeared.

- plastic seen as substitution/imitation—assimilatory and a sealant, just as “model minorities” are. however, boundary of artificial vs natural must be done away with, because “fakeness” does not prevent plastic’s real presence, similar to asian american racialization.
- assimilation logic fails, just as plastic cannot actually be digested no matter how much it blends as something else. we become reconstituted in our entanglements (ie consuming plastic means one is part plastic). therefore, full assimilation is an impossible fantasy yet so is full alienation.
- plastic’s pervasiveness is enabled by its disintegration. aka both ubiquitous and nonbiodegradable —> assimilable (model minority) and unassimilable (perpetual foreigner)
- intoxication as refusal on subjectification, tho i didn’t fully follow this argument?