LAUSR

Response to Kyla Wazana Tompkins, “On the Limits and Promise of New Materialist Philosophy,” published in Lateral 5.1. Huang reassesses the methodological implications of new materialisms by grappling with renewed attention to form in literary studies to articulate the varying processes by which racial difference becomes elided, rematerialized, and remade. In November 2016, I attended an excellent panel at the annual Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA) conference in Atlanta on the topic of heterodox science. During the Q&A, one presenter, whose work situates UFOs within U.S. Cold War politics, was asked a question that in part queried if “she really believed in UFOs.” The audience laughed, and once the chuckles had subsided, the presenter replied that it was convenient that they could quickly answer “no,” while still af rming the intellectual value of pursuing such a project. I understood the presenter’s point. Yet at the same time (and as the presenter themself acknowledged), such a disavowal reinforces the very values of scienti c objectivity and distance their work seeks to challenge. Such questions of belief and nonbelief are even more fraught in relation to race, gender, sexuality, disability, and other axes of embodied difference. And so I was stung by the revelation that despite knowing that race is a mutable ction that is socially and materially distributed through networks of power, I could never say, even for a moment, that I do not “believe in race.” As a junior scholar working on the imbrications of scienti c discourse with Asian American racialization, I want to refuse any Manichean question—of belief or nonbelief—that leaves a contained and singular de nition of race intact. Instead, the great opportunity of New Materialism seems to lie, as Kyla Wazana Tompkins suggests in her pithy and provocative piece “On the Limits and Promise of New Materialist Philosophy,” in pressuring how we understand what race is. This opportunity is still yet to be realized, as race remains underrepresented in the scholarship of New Materialism as well as in the bodies of those working within this sundry eld. What results from this lack of representation are, unsurprisingly, too-quick dismissals of “representationalism,” which as Tompkins argues, manifest as: the ongoing citation of “the power of language” or “representationalism” as a problem that is corrected by new materialism, as well as . . . loose and vague references to “identitarian thinking” or “identity politics” as a failure to ground and create productive political thought. In the domain of literary studies, her words offer a necessary reminder that collapsing the politics of difference into a teleology that amounts to “less representational=more radical=more better” serves no one, least of all minoritized constituencies whose creative experiments have always been disquali ed as insuf ciently imaginative or aesthetically1