By Yue Chen

Though I’d spent years reading her work, I only first met Dr. Michelle N. Huang, Assistant Professor of English and Asian American Studies at Northwestern University, in 2024, during my personal hell of trying to get into an English PhD program as an Asian Americanist during this latest phase of fascism that the U.S. has shrugged into. I was touched by Huang’s generous pedagogy and willingness to connect with an applicant who would, unfortunately, not find their way to her classroom. When I found out from Huang’s former student, my beloved friend April, that her first book Racial Beings: Experiments in Asian American New Materialisms was releasing this year with Duke University Press, I was thrilled to return to conversation with one of my biggest academic inspirations.

Huang received her PhD in English and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Pennsylvania State University in 2017. Previously, she received an MA in English from Penn State and BAs in English and Economics from New York University. Huang’s research spans Asian American literatures, feminist science and technology studies, and post-humanism and new materialisms. Her first monograph, Racial Beings, introduces the concept of “molecular aesthetics,” or formal experiments with racial representation that disturb the boundaries of the “human” and alter our engagement with norms of being and subjecthood. Huang leverages a feminist new materialist perspective to entangle Asian American literary and scientific-technological discourses, destabilizing the purported severances between these fields’ strategic innovations, experiments, and play. She has a cat and a dog. The latter attempted to eat a comb during our interview.

This conversation took place in June 2026 and has been edited for length and clarity.

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Yue Chen: What led you to research in Asian American Studies in the end?

Michelle N. Huang: Being the only humanities person in my family, I've managed to end up studying Asian American literature that looks at science and technology. My mom worked at Pfizer as a computer programmer and my dad at Bell Labs as a computer engineer; my parents were happy I liked reading and writing but didn't really see it as productive. Now that I’m an Asian American studies professor, [I recognize] this is all shaped by the legacy of the Immigration Act of 1965. But at the time, of course, it felt more like my Asian American parents didn’t want me to do literature. So I also majored in economics and thought I was going to go to law school. But while I was working at a big law firm in New York after graduation, I just really missed literature. Luckily, the skills that I've learned from working in law, journalism, politics, and so on made me appreciate the freedom and self-direction that academic study provides even more. There's a way in which all jobs kind of suck, but [it’s about] choosing what kind of job sustains you.

YC: You name “synthetic reading” as “an interdisciplinary approach committed to using scientific insight to rewrite literary hermeneutics” and support other critical reading practices. Can you talk about how your interest in converging science, literature, and biomedical humanities emerged?

MNH: I noticed that ethnic studies—and Asian American studies more specifically—seemed allergic to engaging with science and technology. I felt this was highly ironic, given the association of Asian Americans with STEM. At the same time, I didn't start graduate school as an Asian Americanist. I started as a disability studies scholar. Disability studies is a field that requires more explicit engagement with medicine. Weirdly, coming into Asian American studies a little bit sideways helped me bring in the sort of more creative or capacious ways of thinking about how science and technological discourse can expand literary studies.

When I was a graduate student, I became very interested in the Asian Canadian author Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl—this wacky novel from 2002 shaped in a braided structure that eventually collapses, which is a very feminist form. To me, the whole book was also about clones and genetic engineering—doing something with the form of DNA, setting up this idea of encoding in a linear way only to collapse it.

The theory of symbiogenesis, from the evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis posits the reason complex eukaryotic organisms like humans [exist] is that the driving force of evolution is actually contamination rather than competition. This seemed like a very interesting way to think about narrative and literature as well: the ways in which bodies are contaminating, interpenetrating, and recombining to make new forms. Using molecular and scientific insights could expand the value of Asian American literary studies rather than trying to transcend it. I look at a lot of texts that we would consider experimental, either in a more literary-historical way of being avant-garde or in a more genre-fiction kind of way.

YC: I initially found your work because of Salt Fish Girl. On staff, one of us will read a book, and then everyone else reads the book, so we have this tiny little shared archive among our editors. That’s what happened with Do Not Say We Have Nothing [by Madeleine Thien].

MNH: I just told another student to read [Do Not Say We Have Nothing], since he likes music.

YC: If he likes music, another book I liked recently was Aja Gabel’s The Ensemble. It's so funny. I've spent so long thinking, maybe we as Asian Americans should talk about something besides music, Kumon, fruit-cutting, but they're actually integral.

MNH: It's how we talk about these things, not what they are, right? Of course they’re important—love, honor, pity, pride, compassion, and sacrifice. The problem is the reductive interpretive lenses we bring to ethnic literature. Name whatever experimental white man author was not just writing about family, friends, love, cut fruit, whatever the fuck.

YC: I really don't like the idea of people ‘seeing’ themselves in literature or having their stories ‘told’ in media. What’s so wonderful about fiction and movies is, you expand what you conceive of as possible, rather than reify what you think an Asian American story is.

MNH: I do think this is our duty as Chinese Americans; it's different when you're talking about actually underrepresented communities. It's not the same for me to say, “I need my story represented,” because it's not underrepresented, actually. This is why I feel strongly about my work, bringing in interpretive lenses that put more things in relation to one another.

YC: In the Asian American studies classes I’ve been fortunate to take, I’ve sometimes been frustrated by the atomization of scholarship into perfect corollaries to students’ lived experiences—while recognizing the importance of these personal anecdotes. This relates to my broader dissatisfaction with media representation discourse and the hunt for ‘relatability.’ How can instructors encourage students to think beyond how ethnic studies relates to the individual?

MNH: It is crucial to discern what is difference that makes a difference, and what is difference that doesn’t, the latter being closer to what Jodi Melamed might call neoliberal multiculturalism, which encourages the privatization of the individual and works with, not against, racial capitalism. So first, we should question relatability’s inherent virtuousness—for example, when I teach To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, I pair it with Patricia Chu’s introduction to Assimilating Asians, which postulates the marriage plot as a narrative formalization of assimilation into white American identity. Through this exercise, students learn to question their own attachments to these ‘relatable’ objects.

Second, we can work towards other modes of relating beyond identification, such as disidentification (qua Muñoz) and responsibility. To loosely paraphrase Kyla Wazana Tompkins, we should be reading to learn what we don’t already know, versus affirming what we already do.

Finally, as a second-generation Chinese/Taiwanese American, my own family history is as divergent as could be from the texts by and about Japanese American incarceration and Vietnamese American refugees. Rather than performing self-flagellation, I try to take seriously the epistemological task: this heterogeneity is a central feature of what the category of ‘Asian American’ can teach us, and which needs to be foregrounded through contradiction and difference.

YC: Your work extends and challenges new materialisms, a field exploring the material world as an animated actor enmeshed with human existence. In 2017, you wrote a response to Kyla Wazana Tompkins’ piece in Lateral, expanding the conversation on what a new materialism field that took race seriously would look like by attending more closely to form in literary studies to articulate racial difference. Obviously Racial Beings represents a huge step forward, but I’m wondering if you think the discipline has extended its boundaries and considerations in the past nine years.

MNH: New materialisms have made great steps regarding race, especially due to the critique of ‘newness’ stemming from Indigenous studies and similar critiques of the Anthropocene. Realizing that the world is porous, connected, entangled, that time is not linear—all these things have been said by scholars of race and Indigeneity well before what we call the new materialisms.

That said, feminist new materialisms are especially important in developing methodologies that allow us to see the epistemological cuts—to riff on Karen Barad—that produce subjects and objects. My own contribution builds on work by folks like Zakiya Jackson, Alex Wehelyie, Kim TallBear, Mel Chen, Aimee Bahng, and Rachel Lee by developing a more sustained attention to form. The way we talk about texts is so human-centered in a way that doesn't carry through all the insights of the new materialisms to fully recalibrate our aesthetic analysis… That's why I'm so interested in molecular aesthetics as a contribution to feminist new materialisms—the way that the texts allow us to re-represent reality.

YC: John Yau’s ‘Confessions of a Recycled Shopping Bag’ and Shaughnessy’s ‘Are Women People?’ both follow parallel structures and ask questions deconstructing minoritized human identity. Could you expound on how form shapes matter and identity—which you cover at some length in Racial Beings, too?

MNH: Both of them are tired poems. They take the tiredness that many women and people of color feel, about having to justify that our existence exceeds the boxes in which we've been put into, and then formalize it. In doing so, they draw our attention to the way that racial grammar connects what seem to be isolated events. Formal patterns allow us to see epistemological patterns.

My sort-of obsession is thinking against our centering of the human individual [in literature], because the form of the character is always a partial representation of how power, being, or knowledge is functioning in any given situation. The only way to get a broader aperture on [power] is through the [configurations] that formal experiments pose.

YC: The “ecologies of entanglement” described in Racial Beings’ first chapter reference “networks of circulation that diffuse the boundaries of the human.” How should we think about humans’ roles within these changing ecosystems and in relation with other forms of matter?

MNH: The way that humans interact with the environment is racialized, if we think about race as an epistemological structure of white supremacy, which means it's premised in extraction and exploitation. Plastic is not Asian American because Asian American is a demographic category we made up for people. At the same time, plastic is totally Asian American if we think about Asian American as a racial form defined by disposability, fakeness, and assimilative qualities.

YC: Thinking about several texts you include that involve water as an environment or vehicle, and the aquatic nature of many aliens you reference in Chapter 4 (e.g., the sunfish, the octopus), do you think of the Pacific itself as Racial Beings’ underlying ecology?

MNH: Water is a paradigmatic element to new materialisms because of its extreme environmental sensitivity. It's “ubiquitous,” but [water] also reflects the conditions around it: external pressures, temperature, etc. It's dynamic. Many of the ways in which we think about the world are land-based, property-based. Not just the way we think about the environment, but about ourselves as people—we're self-possessed. Think about Cheryl Harris's ‘whiteness as property’—the extent to which the category of the human is co-extensive with whiteness and masculinity is through the idiom of property possession. Right then and there is a way water refuses to stay contained. Even when you try to contain things from or try to contain water, it usually violates that. They tried to contain the nuclear fallout [after extensive U.S. nuclear testing] in the Marshall Islands within a dome. Much faster than they thought, the water breached the dome and the radioactive waste leaked out again. Water leads the book, in some ways, because it's the thing that forces connection and intimacy when we'd rather things stay separate.

YC: Larissa Lai is a frequent subject of your work. In our interview with her, she discussed speculative fiction as generating “metaphorical possibilities” that, for queer writers and writers of color, “gets us away from over-determinations of identity that we’re caught up in.” Can you speak to how Lai’s use of different, messier, narrative forms facilitates queer stories?

MNH: There’s a world in which the real title of my book is Weird Bodies. I’m very interested in experimental embodiment, and I would co-sign everything that Lai says, and even push it a little bit farther to say it's not just metaphorical possibility because metaphor is material.

Speculation is important because it produces material possibility. Everything that we consider real happened in the imagination first. Frankenstein predates organ transplantation. The [Strategic Defense Initiative] under the Reagan administration literally is called Star Wars. In addition to the more utopic possibilities Lai gestures to, I think it’d be stupid of us not to think about the ways in which speculation has been used for rapacious and regressive means. That's why it's so important, the work that Lai and other writers do, to imagine forms of being and worlds that exceed homogenization, reduction, and overdetermination.

YC: I want to talk about Lisa Lowe’s work on hybridity and the anti-developmental narrative, which has been an Asian Americanist anti-essentialist grammar for decades. Narrative symbiogenesis is different; it's not about the mixing of two preserved identities, but rather the formation of a new organism in which the originals can no longer be cleaved. I'm curious how you think narrative symbiogenesis operates with Lowe’s more putative concept of hybridity.

MNH: The thing I love about Lisa's definition of hybridity is its attention to materiality. For her, hybridity is a quality that indexes the asymmetrical power relations when two different cultures are brought into contact. When that happens, it's usually because of imperialism; cultures are not just randomly touching all the time.

Symbiogenesis was also important for Octavia Butler when she was writing her Xenogenesis Trilogy [Lilith’s Brood]. The species intermixing there is more coercive and violent than in Salt Fish Girl. But I wanted to capture the way that realizing we're actually not individuals allows us to be less alone—there's less burden to preserve this strong, agential, individual subjecthood when you realize we share 94% of our DNA with a daffodil. And there's less importance in trying not to be other Asians when you realize we're not self-driving cars and are actually just small expressions of a much larger story.

YC: Chapter 3 contains unique archival work. Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s 1980s water triptych had been pulled apart in the publication record, with ‘Fog’ gaining fame alone, de-contextualized from the dance-poetry collaboration at Basement Workshop. The reembodiment of this disembodied piece offers “a dynamic system of representation.” Can you speak more on how interdisciplinary and multimedia—or even multiversal—collaboration can unlock meaning in Asian American literature?

MNH: This one is such a good example of how you have to let the text ask questions rather than provide answers. As a graduate student, when I first saw Bersenbrugge’s poem ‘Fog,’ [I thought it was about] blurry boundaries, transformation, and the opacity of meaning. But because I'm interested in how things are produced, which is part of a new materialist perspective, I was wondering, “Where'd this fog quite literally come from?” When I realized it was part of these dance poetry performances, I thought, “Fuck, I don't know anything about dance.” I had to commission my chair, Susan Manning, who's a dance studies scholar, to watch [the performances] with me. [This triptych] actually required me to think in community, which was appropriate because the text in its very distributed bodies was also created in community.

YC: You prefaced discussion of Berssenbrugge’s work with a brief aside on the figure of the solitary poet and how this is a whitewashed masculine image distorting a lot of the labor behind many great poetic works. I had read ‘Fog’ before, but I had no idea about everything behind it.

MNH: No one did, because of the way we read poetry, which is looking for a poet and identifying their style. That's how we learn in school.

YC: In Chapter 4, you analyze Jeffrey Yang’s bestiary-abecedary An Aquarium (2008). It occupies an imperial form, descended from Linnaeus and the 19th-century rise of the aquarium as a domesticated piece of the sea. Yang is using the empire's own taxonomic apparatus. What does taking on the imperial form do that rejecting it can't?

MNH: It's important context that Yang himself was an editor at New Directions, working within rarefied circles of the literary establishment as well as being a translator. Using the empire's own taxonomic form shows both its strengths and weaknesses. It’s important to understand [in order] to defamiliarize something as basic as the alphabet… to denaturalize what is so naturalized. The second part of that, though, is in doing so, it also shows—following Lisa Lowe—that it's always fallible and fragile. The empire has to be maintained, actioned, performed into existence all the time. Taking that form, which seems very sedimented and solid, and playing with it shows it doesn't have as much power as we imbue it with.

YC: Taking a step back, many marginalized readers and writers have grown up told the politically responsible move is to claim humanity and be seen as full subjects. You offer a different invitation to occupy alienness and find out what's formally possible. What would you say to a young writer who is drawn to that invitation, but anxious that it sounds like surrender?

MNH: We have to understand that the non-human is not less than the human—the human is actually a very small category contained within the non-human. The field of non-human possibility is much larger than the one of the human, which is very constrained and limited. ‘The human’ and ‘individuality’—they're almost interchangeable. People say if we’d just recognize everyone as individuals or as human, that would solve our problems. But unfortunately, the human individual [only makes sense] because they've been created out of dividing cuts that cast other people and the world as non-human or not-individual. And if you look at the history of who has been categorized as human, it's a violent history. Maybe we should look at a history of the non-human and learn other ways of being or existing from there.

YC: Regarding furries, and also monsterfucking, which you [...], I'm curious: What does intimacy with the explicitly non-human in a sexual or romantic manner open narratively?

MNH: That makes me think of Franny Choi's octopus-like sex poems. A lot of minoritized writing produced by ethnic American authors draws our attention to the way the monster is us. Rather than trying to exceptionalize monstrosity as some mysterious or supernatural thing, it's actually contained within humans. The other more basic thing: “What does it mean to desire that which we're not supposed to desire?” [That] has resonances across histories of interracial desire and queerness. Intimacy with the threatening, the dangerous, the Other often recurs as a mode of wanting something else than [the object of desire] the world has directed you towards.

YC: A defining formal choice in Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor Was Divine is the refusal to name the central family except in relational terms of “father,” “mother,” etc. Critics have read this as Otsuka universalizing the portrayed experience, but your chapter connects her choice to the novel’s independent, compositional molecular aesthetics. What does the unnaming contribute to your argument for dispersing atomic identity?

MNH: When I first started working on this chapter, I was thinking about what I was calling the ‘neo-internment narrative.’ The father in [When the Emperor was Divine] is based on [Otsuka’s] grandfather [who was interned]. And then there’s Perry Miyake's 21st Century Manzanar. Though he was a teenager when he was incarcerated, he wrote this dystopian speculative novel set in the generation after his—the one that had not experienced incarceration. Both these books came out in 2002, which suggested there was something going on with the global War on Terror, that Japanese American authors were trying to make Japanese American incarceration matter beyond what happened historically…

Again, it's a way of drawing our attention less to the individual stories [and more to] the structures of power that created these situations. There's a way in which the universal is premised on the idea of a normative individual, and [Otsuka] is giving the lie to the idea that these Japanese Americans could have been normative individuals while also being singled out as racial threats.

YC: You opened Racial Beings’ introduction with Emily Jungmin Yoon's ‘An Ordinary Misfortune’ and the consonance of “girl” and “gravel” describing how Korean women's bodies under American military occupation become acoustically and ontologically indistinguishable from rocks. How would you compare the use of gravel as a synecdoche of violence with sand, which you study as an inherent instrument of memory?

MNH: I chose to open with Emily's work just because (1) I think the poem is amazing, and (2) I am making a value claim for centering Asian American girlhood and poetry. These things are seen as small, not important, esoteric. A lot of why I wrote this book is about capturing the antinomies of being an Asian American girl and trying to show the world the amount of critical perspective generated from being so minimized. You can see how the force required to minimize and disregard is actually what creates what we could consider to be big and important. Gravel and sand—these not even objects, really, but substances that are the background of the world—produce this bookend and return us to think about who and what histories are relocated into the background and into different forms.

YC: You conclude the book by discussing Everything Everywhere All At Once. I especially love the quote: “All literature functions as a multiverse.” Can you offer guidance on what the multiverse model has to teach us about the moment we're in now? Generative AI is also, weirdly, its own multiverse engine. Every prompt opens onto a divergent set of outputs, but its multiverse is statistically generated—the kind of statistical inevitability Everything Everywhere All At Once positions itself against. How should readers think about the multiverse now?

MNH: With AI, it is difference that does not matter. It’s not really like a multiverse because—in at least the way the movie thinks about it—[a multiverse] is supposed to create critical leverage by being non-statistically likely. [AI] is the opposite.

This is actually a good critique of the limits of neoliberal multiculturalism, too, where there’s a difference that does not matter. Now we all have our holidays and diverse CEOs, but that doesn't change the actual power structures. To capture the potential of the multiverse, there has to be a disruption in the underlying algorithms, which create these projections of reality. Algorithms are a way of understanding the epistemological frameworks through which we compute ‘reality.’

YC: In 2021, you and CA Davis published a gorgeous film essay, INHUMAN FIGURES: Robots, Clones, and Aliens with the Smithsonian’s Asian and Pacific American Center. Can you talk about this collaborative project, as well as what kinds of storytelling and argumentation you find more compelling when delivered through visuals or animation?

MNH: When I was first approached by CA about making a film I was flummoxed, because I work primarily with literature. But I thought about how in teaching my upper-level Techno-Orientalism seminar, three figures kept reappearing in these imaginaries—the robot, the clone, and the alien. And in a basic sense, they can’t be Asian or Asian American, because they aren’t human. But they also totally are, and allow us to think about racial logics—dehumanized labor, massed interchangeability, and radical foreignness, respectively.

I thought a film essay that shows students how to see this kind of literary and cultural analysis could be really useful as a pedagogical tool. Using excerpted footage, including from well-regarded films such as Arrival and Ex Machina, allowed us to show the importance of what Kandice Chuh calls “Asian Americanist critique,” which is not limited to texts by and about Asian Americans, but a critical lens attuned to the epistemological difference Asian American studies makes. But structuring a film essay just around critique (the excerpted footage and my talking-head analytical portions) would have felt incomplete.

I could hear my students asking, “But what do we do?” So we brainstormed a short narrative, brought to life by Keith Couture (art director) and the Sleepy Gallows (Brittney and Crystal Galloway; animators) that follows an Asian American everygirl who is initially confused and scared of, but learns to embrace, these inhuman figures.

I’ve been really edified that the film essay has been taught in classrooms across the country, including at the high school level (big thanks to Lawrence-Minh Buì Davis’ support in hosting INHUMAN FIGURES at the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center). When I’ve spoken to students, they often comment on is how the juxtaposition of the three different modes of the film essay—the excerpted footage, the talking-head portions that feature me, and the animated short—allows them to see how I, as an Asian American woman, am connected to the disposable Asian female clones from Cloud Atlas or the Asian grandmother in the animation sequence. I think making these connections visually lends an exigency and relevance to the scholarly work that I hope models an intellectual seriousness that is not premised in scholarly detachment.

YC: Which other archives or traditions have most influenced your work?

MNH: A relatively less known fact about me is that I have a dual-degree PhD in Women’s Studies. That feminist training—standpoint theory, identity politics, community—has really shaped how I understand intellectual work as best developed in community. It also informs my two-pronged approach to pedagogy. On one hand, I am dedicated to empowering students to do the kind of critique they can take into the world and see all around them, and on the other, I want them to revel in the beauty and ingenuity of work influenced by, but not reducible to, hegemonic ideas of gender and race. Since I’ve been at Northwestern, I’ve become much more influenced by Black Studies work, particularly because of dear colleagues here, and as I increasingly see one of my responsibilities as an Asian Americanist as being accountable to (but not claiming) Black studies.

YC: I've heard you're working on a new book, The Secret Life of Race, which integrates work from your 2021 article ‘Racial Disintegration: Biomedical Futurity at the Environmental Limit’ and the concept of ‘studious deracination.’

MNH: The new book is on Asian American racialization and biomedicine. I define ‘studious deracination’ as a mode of representation that doesn't explicitly name race, but ironizes the force that race still has within a text. An example would be Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. Given what we know about whose bodies are used for medical testing, the idea that there's no racial aspect to the clones’ existence is nonsensical. [In the novel,] it's been submerged in a way that requires readers to do more work to understand its structural presentation rather than its explicit epidermal individual presentation.

[‘Racial Disintegration’] came out of seeing a disjuncture in how we think about public health, which often can be solved with low-tech solutions: fixing food deserts and toxic environments, like Flint. Neglect is happening on one hand, and on the other, money is being dumped into individualized biomedical solutions like precision medicine. This shifting of resource attention capital was happening without any mention of race but was capturing whose future gets to be invested in, and whose futures are being divested of. Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea is the main text I look at, but other writers like Rachel Heng and Ted Chiang write about this issue from the position of privileged Asian Americans, capturing those shifting futures and resources from the position of ‘haves’ rather than ‘have-nots.’ That's a really important way of returning the critique to Silicon Valley.

Right now, I'm working on a second part about beauty horror. There’ve been a ton of texts recently wherein a second-gen Asian American woman with a white-collar job does a bunch of skincare and turns into a monster. It’s a horror variation on the model minority story. These texts exhibit a ‘traumatic enjoyment’—as Juliana Chang would call it—or a catharsis: we know the futures that we're working to bring into being are destructive and monstrous, but they're maintained at the level of the banal, the cosmetic. This routinization then all of a sudden explodes in this cathartic, monstrous way.

YC: Our final questions—which my friend and your former student April wanted to ask: What are you reading right now? Do you have a favorite science fiction book?

MNH: I just finished Taiwan Travelogue this morning. That's probably why I'm discombobulated.

YC: Oh, she’ll be happy to hear that. She has a lot of thoughts on Taiwan Travelogue.

MNH: Oh, I'll text her! And my favorite science fiction book… Oh, I don't know. I read Jacqueline Hartman's I Who Have Never Known Men recently. And it was really good.

YC: Congratulations on Racial Beings’ publication, and good luck on the next book. The grind never stops.

MNH: It really doesn't, but hopefully it'll be more freeing.