april ☔’s Reviews > Racial Beings: Experiments in Asian American New Materialisms > Status Update
april ☔
is on page 126 of 264
ch 3–“element”
this chapter was made for me omg (porcelain, water, & phase changes)
— Jun 07, 2026 05:50PM
this chapter was made for me omg (porcelain, water, & phase changes)
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april ☔’s Previous Updates
april ☔
is on page 158 of 264
ch 4–“species”
[aka the T-O chapter so i obviously loved it. this book has taken me to places i’ve never been before btw (chemistry subreddits).]
— Jun 10, 2026 09:52PM
[aka the T-O chapter so i obviously loved it. this book has taken me to places i’ve never been before btw (chemistry subreddits).]
april ☔
is on page 91 of 264
ch 2–“gene”
[that last line of this chapter (“future ‘possibles’”) is such a banger omg]
— Jun 03, 2026 11:06PM
[that last line of this chapter (“future ‘possibles’”) is such a banger omg]
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]
— Jun 02, 2026 10:52PM
[really wish someone could invent a way to ctrl+f physical books. index rlly carrying me rn]
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.
— Jun 02, 2026 06:46PM
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.
- “element” in the environmental-climactic sense (transformational) > chemical-compositional (irreducible, essential). as with race.
- fallacy of scientific transcendence—the racialized body will always be present, and that presence (and those contributions) is essential to the matter that produces western “discoveries”
- subjectivity emerges from atmosphere (our relations, our environment/context). inscrutability or opacity engender shifts to those other epistemologies.
- the underground (vs the transcendent) as a space of possibility and production for asian am arts activism
- reading critique of empire thru asian american lit, specifically how it uses anthropogenic climate change as a form of colonialism
- deposition as reverse of sublimation (in a metaphorical sense, transcendence into the sublime. super smart metaphor). aka materially grounding the human’s impact on climate change and showing its outsized impact, as well as its asymmetrical spatiotemporal impact