Remaking Porcelain

By retelling the story of porcelain, a material recently seized for its racialized and gendered cultural valences, this essay proposes a critical reorientation of Asian Americanist new materialisms around the concept of technique. Disturbing the racial and gendered ontological claims made on porcelain’s behalf through recourse to the history of its technical unfolding, this essay makes the case for studies in Asian Americanist new materialisms to pivot from the ontological realism of race to the technical evolution of race’s materiality, which reveals race, like porcelain, to “be” nothing except the retroactive form of historical scientific activities that render concepts contingent and unenclosed. Drawing on the ceaseless history of porcelain’s reinvention across early and industrial modernity, this essay remakes the telos of Asian Americanist critique: Activating the sociogenetic value of technical invention, it rereads Asian Americanist new materialisms as a theory of mediation attendant to the joint construction and deconstruction of race at the limit of the human’s constitutive negativity.