Racial Formlessness: Multiethnic Fiction after the Method Wars

Henry Ivry is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the School of Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow 

Jeremy Rosen is Associate Professor of English at the University of Utah. His work has appeared in ASAP/J, Contemporary Literature, New Literary History, and Post45. His first book, Minor Characters Have Their Day: Genre in the Contemporary Literary Marketplace, was published in 2016, with Columbia University Press. His second book, Genre Bending: The Plasticity of Form in Contemporary Literary Fiction, will be published by Stanford University Press in 2025. 

Jennifer Wang is an Assistant Professor of English at Middlebury College, where she teaches and researches postwar and contemporary American fiction, multi-ethnic literature, and Asian American Studies. She is completing her first book manuscript, “Problematic Fictions: Race, Transpacific Capital, and the Contemporary Novel,” which examines how contemporary Asian American fiction expresses increasingly politically conservative stances on racism and what that reveals about the realignments of race and class at the end of American empire.

Betsy Huang is Professor of English at Clark University. She served as Associate Provost and Dean of the College from 2019 to 2024 and was Director of the Center for Gender, Race, and Area Studies prior to the post. She specializes in American multiethnic and Asian American literature, science fiction, weird fiction, and genre theory. She is the author of Contesting Genres in Contemporary Asian American Fiction (Palgrave, 2010) and co-editor of four essay collections: Asian American Literature in Transition: 1996-2020 (Cambridge, 2021); Diversity and Inclusion in Higher Education and Societal Contexts (Palgrave, 2018); Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media (Rutgers UP, 2015), and Techno-Orientalism 2.0: New Intersections and Interventions (Rutgers, 2025). Her work has appeared in Race and Utopian Desire in American Literature, The Cambridge Companion to American Horror, The Cambridge Companion to the Weird, Journal of Asian American Studies, and MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the U.S.

Farai Chipato is a Lecturer in Black Geographies at the University of Glasgow. Prior to that, I was an Alex Trebek Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for International Policy Studies at the University of Ottawa. My primary research interests are in African politics, international interventions, Black political thought and the Anthropocene. I work with these themes at three different geographic scales, moving from a local politics to more abstract theoretical concerns at a planetary level. The first concerns international interventions in Africa to promote democracy and human rights, and their relationship to African NGOs. The second moves up a scale, to consider the nature and future of African governance at a continental level, and its relationship to conceptions of African identity, particularly Pan-Africanism and Afropolitanism. The third strand is the most theoretical, focusing on Black and African political thought and its relationship to the crisis of global modernity and the Anthropocene.

John Brooks is an assistant professor in the Department of Comparative Studies and the Department of Theatre, Film, and Media Arts at The Ohio State University. He is the author of The Racial Unfamiliar: Illegibility in Black Literature and Culture (Columbia UP, 2022), and he recently co-edited a special issue of liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies. His published research also includes essays in PMLA, American Quarterly, African American Review, and J19.

Dean Franco is the author of The Border and the Line:  Race, Literature, and Los Angeles (2019); Race, Rights, and Recognition:  Jewish American Literature Since 1969 (2012); and Ethnic American Literature (2007); and over twenty articles and essays on race and literature. Franco’s “The Racial Failures of Novel-Form: Ralph Ellison’s Three Days before the Shooting . . .”  is forthcoming in NOVEL.  He is currently writing a book on Race, Democracy, and Literary Form.

Stephanie T Ng (PhD, UCL) mobilized compromise as a conceptual heuristic in her investigation of gendered disaffection, domination, and consent. A fellow at the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing, she reads migrant mother-daughter narratives to interrogate assimilation as absorption, accommodation, and erasure. Drawing on her background in neuroscience, she is concurrently co-authoring an interdisciplinary book, No One is ‘Normal’ (UC Press), with geneticist Kim Zayhowski.

Connor Bennett is a PhD Candidate at the University of Toronto’s Department of English. His article entitled “Raymond Carver’s Minimalist Mouth-Work” was recently published in ELH (Summer 2025), and a second article, co-written with Apala Das and Robert McGill, is forthcoming in Modern Fiction Studies. In 2023, he co-edited with Michael Dango an essay collection called “Minimalisms Now: Race, Affect, Aesthetics” for Post45 Contemporaries. His research is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and by the Ontario Graduate Scholarship Program. He is a 2025-26 Doctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto’s Centre for the Study of the United States and at its Northrop Frye Centre.

James J. Donahue is the author or editor of several books, the most recent of which are Indigenous Comics and Graphic Novels: Studies in Genre (Mississippi 2024) and Greater Atlanta: African American Satire since Obama (Mississippi 2024), the former of which was a finalist for the Charles Hatfield Prize from the Comics Studies Society. He teaches courses on Fantasy Literature, The Graphic Novel, Young Adult Literature, and Visual Communication at SUNY Potsdam. He is currently working on his first novel.

Rebecca Ballard is assistant professor of English at Florida State University, where she researches and teaches U.S. literature and culture, speculative fiction, and environmental humanities. She is completing a book that investigates how structural and environmental understandings of violence that began to emerge in the 1960s shaped both U.S. fiction and social movements from the 1970s to the present and shows how environmental justice has been articulated through the speculative. Her essays (also under Rebecca Evans) have appeared in ISLE, American Literature, ASAP/J, Science Fiction Studies, Resilience, and elsewhere.