Molecular Aesthetics PDF Download

Molecular Aesthetics: Race, Form, and Matter in Contemporary Asian American Literature examines posthumanist aesthetics in post-1965 Asian American literature to trace racial formation at the molecular scale. In the wake of current ecological disaster and biotechnological fragmentation, a growing number of Asian American novelists, poets, and artists view the scientification of the world as a creative catalyst for imagining smaller and smaller dimensions of human existence. Yet a diametrically opposite inclination can be said to characterize Asian American literary critics, who have largely eschewed engaging with science due to the dark legacy of Enlightenment racial science that cast Asian Americans as fundamentally alien or inhuman. This project argues that fully grasping how these creative works denaturalize sedimented structures of racial knowledge and thinking requirescounterintuitively, perhapsredoubling critical engagement with scientific discourse. I term these literary experiments, which attenuate the boundaries of the human conceptually and formally, a molecular aesthetics. In conversation with Asian American literary studies, posthumanism, and science studies, Molecular Aesthetics considers works of speculative and science fiction, which explicitly engage with science and technology, as well as more traditional texts of Asian American literature where the import of a molecular reading practice is less self-evident. Focusing on texts that make visible microstructures of race shifts theoretical emphasis away from the individual subject to the persistence of racial forms and logics in the absence of recognizably raced bodies. Molecular Aesthetics foregrounds how the formal and aesthetic qualities of texts by authors such as Ruth Ozeki, Larissa Lai, Bhanu Kapil, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Perry Miyake, Julie Otsuka, John Yau, and Jeffrey Yang revise fundamental critical terms in Ethnic American literary analysis such as identity, agency, and race itself. Further, by deploying Asian American literary criticism as a powerful investigative tool for tracking evolving forms of racialization, this project is also an argument for the continuing value of Ethnic American literary studies in a so-called postracial era.