Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics

by Lisa Lowe

In Immigrant Acts, Lisa Lowe argues that understanding Asian immigration to the United States is fundamental to understanding the racialized economic and political foundations of the nation. Lowe discusses the contradictions whereby Asians have been included in the workplaces and markets of the U.S. nation-state, yet, through exclusion laws and bars from citizenship, have been distanced from the terrain of national culture.

Lowe argues that a national memory haunts the conception of Asian American, persisting beyond the repeal of individual laws and sustained by U.S. wars in Asia, in which the Asian is seen as the perpetual immigrant, as the “foreigner-within.” In Immigrant Acts, she argues that rather than attesting to the absorption of cultural difference into the universality of the national political sphere, the Asian immigrant—at odds with the cultural, racial, and linguistic forms of the nation—displaces the temporality of assimilation. Distance from the American national culture constitutes Asian American culture as an alternative site that produces cultural forms materially and aesthetically in contradiction with the institutions of citizenship and national identity. Rather than a sign of a “failed” integration of Asians into the American cultural sphere, this critique preserves and opens up different possibilities for political practice and coalition across racial and national borders.

In this uniquely interdisciplinary study, Lowe examines the historical, political, cultural, and aesthetic meanings of immigration in relation to Asian Americans. Extending the range of Asian American critique, Immigrant Acts will interest readers concerned with race and ethnicity in the United States, American cultures, immigration, and transnationalism.

Genres: Nonfiction, Asian American, History, Race, Academic, Theory, Politics

272 pages, Paperback

First published October 21, 1996

About the author

Lisa Lowe is Samuel Knight Professor of American Studies at Yale University, and an affiliate faculty in the programs in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Prior to Yale, she taught at the University of California, San Diego, and Tufts University. She began as a scholar of French and comparative literature, and since then her work has focused on the cultural politics of colonialism, immigration, and globalization. She is known especially for scholarship on French, British, and United States colonialisms, Asian migration and Asian American studies, race and liberalism, and comparative empires.

Reviews

[s · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book I will be "reading" for the rest of my life, it feels like. I need to write a proper precis for each chapter, eventually, but here I will say that Lowe has been invaluable to me in understanding not only Asian American cultural production, but also just the imperialist nation state and its evil machinations overall. Processing her argument -- detailing the contradiction inherent in Asian Americans' path to citizenship along the economic axis, but the ways in which they are barred from the terrain of national culture and therefore are perennial "exotic" others (amongst many other things she argues) -- has been incredibly important work for me. Though Asian Americans are arguably the most privileged under global capitalism (though a statement such as that kind of glosses over the vast heterogeneity of Asian America), their displacement from national culture is not considered crisis. But to ignore the history of their inclusion would be remiss, as its legacy is still deeply felt today and has great implications on the current state of the nation. Though the racist rhetoric levied against Asians is a distinct from the violence African Americans suffer from, they are certainly interrelated. This book is required reading not just for scholars of Asian America, but anyone who is interested in Western imperialism, immigration, race relations, capitalist exploitation, and coalition building.

[☽ · Rating 4 out of 5]

am delighted by lowe's location at the junction between political economy and cultural and literary production which is what i'd hoped to do in undergrad. do wish she'd defined 'culture' at least once explicitly somewhere in this book as it is both in the title and v much the hinge of the argument. anyway interesting that so much of it is still urgently salient to asian american political and ideological formations today, almost 3 decades after it was published and after the biggest tech heydays that permanently altered asian american immigration patterns. idk if she's working on a new book bc each of her books has been a tour de force but it would be cool if she wrote like. an update to this book in the digital age

[violeta · Rating 5 out of 5]

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4.5/5

came for the tfg stayed for chapter 3. muchas gracias lisa lowe por darme teoría y razonamientos que me acompañarán el resto de mi vida.

[Mostly on Storygraph · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very balanced book that looks at the condition of the Asian immigrant through the light of history, literature and politics. Lowe is probably at her best and most passionate in the discussion of the state of Asian immigrant women, and of the need for all of us to cross borders of race, ethnicity and class in order to work towards positive change.

She manages to contextualize some basic ideas while at the same time going in depth with some theories of Marx, Althusser, Audre Lorde, Fanon, Benjamin, and others and connecting them to this situation in ways I haven't thought of previously. She also does some great reading of Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters, Fae Myenne Ng's Bone, Carlos Bulosan's America is in the Heart: A Personal History, and, especially, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee.

Her writing can at times be dense and takes some getting used to, but it is a very important work to Asian American studies so it can't be ignored. It is winner of the 1997 Book Award in Cultural Studies from the Association for Asian American Studies and an HOnoroable Mention for the 1997 John Hope Franklin Prize for the best book published in American studies. It brings out some major issues in feminist studies, Marxist studies, and Asian American and immigrant history in general.

[SL · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars, probably. I think the writing was a bit difficult to understand, but that may a) just be me and b) a consequence of academic writing. Lots of think about and take in. Definitely a book that I'd return to, and contributes a lot to the conversation of Asian-American identity in regards to immigration and how immigration contributes to American capitalism.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Within the past year, I have begun to engage more critically in Asian American studies both for academic and personal interests. Recently, I've started to feel that many books and articles I've read often reiterate the same points about model minority myth, yellow peril, and perpetual foreigner. Reading Immigrant Acts by Lisa Lowe has completely changed everything for me and has become a foundational text that I will always come back to. Lowe does an incredible job using a Marxist feminist framework to provide a historical materialist analysis of the Asian experience in America by focusing on the links to class, economic exploitation, and global capitalism. Important too is Lowe's emphasis on building solidarity through horizontal relations with other women of color, both domestically and abroad, rather than a vertical recognition of the state. As someone new to Marxist theory, I found it difficult to follow along with Lowe's engagement with Althusser, Gramsci, Hall, and Williams, but I'm eager to read more Marxist scholars and continue to return to this book as I progress in my academic career.

[Charissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Lisa Lowe

[Erin Chen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Insightful read. Somewhat verbose, so often I felt like I was reading the same information over and over again. Helps drill the point in, though.

[aerialxav · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chapter 1 and 4. AMAZING

[juliana sasaki-george · Rating 5 out of 5]

will be returning to this a lot❤️

[Yanan Rahim · Rating 4 out of 5]

A must-read.

[S P · Rating 3 out of 5]

from Immigration, Citizenship, Racialization: Asian American Critique'
'Asian American culture "re-members" the past in and through the fragmentation, loss, and dispersal that constitutes that past. Asian American culture is the site of more than critical negation of the U.S. nation; it is a site that shifts and marks alternatives to the national terrain by occupying other spaces, imagining different narratives and critical historiographies, and enacting practices that give rise to new forms of subjectivity and new ways of questioning the government of human life by the national state.' (29)

'Asian American cultural forms emphasize instead that because of the complex history of racialization, sites of minority cultural production are at different distances from the canonical nationalist project of resolution, whether posed in either national modern or postmodern multiculturalist versions [...] I argue that the subject that emerges out of Asian American cultural forms is one in excess of and in contradiction with the subjectivities proposed by national modem and postmodern modes of aesthetic representation.' (31-2)

from Work, Immigration, Gender: Asian "American" Women
'As I argued in Chapter 1, the contradictions of Asian American formation emerged in relation to the modem nation-state's attempt to resolve the contradictions between its economic and political imperatives through laws that excluded Asian immigrant laborers as "non- white aliens ineligible to citizenship" from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. In that period, Asians entered along the economic axis, while the state simultaneously excluded Asians along racial and citizenship lines and thus distanced Asian Americans, even as citizens, from membership in the national culture. While official American cultural narratives aimed at reconciling the citizen to the modern nation-state, the material differentiation of Asian immigrants through racialization provided the conditions for Asian American cultural nationalism to emerge in the 1970s in contradiction to that official culture.' (170)

[Brooke · Rating 4 out of 5]

imo a foundational read for Asian American Studies though would've liked to see more examples of South Asian communities incorporated!

Growing up I always felt like different parts of my identity were at odds -- my Americanness, my Asianness at a larger level, but also my queerness and my belief/value system that combines Confucianism with more "western" values, and more recently, my political standing. Especially being raised east of California and living in a predominantly white area until middle school, my understanding of what it meant to be Asian and what it meant to be Asian American was shaped by mostly traditional, conservative immigrant perspectives in which I felt like I was constantly fighting back against. I felt so disconnected from my cultural heritage. But only when I started to read up on Asian American history and politics (not taught to us at all in school btw) did I start to recognize how my own experiences connect with a much broader context and radical tradition. Lowe's argument is sophisticated yet accessible and goes over so many of the basics that I wish I had known just a few years ago. It would've shown me that these parts of my identity I always thought were 'at odds' don't have to be and are in fact deeply interconnected. Definitely a great succinct introduction to anyone who is less familiar with these subjects, unpacking a legacy of Western/US imperialism, global capitalism, orientalism, and the Asian American political tradition/coalition building with other minority groups.

sidenote: reading this after having read many well known postcolonial theorists was so rewarding!! recognized so many thinkers that were mentioned

[Naddy Teo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wait like… literally just so so so so so cool. I’ve never felt so seen by a book… I didn’t even realize such a subject existed until my ASAM class made me read this. Some of it I felt was more theoretically applicable than practically useful in daily life, but I do appreciate the notion behind all of it (eg. Horizontal culture, which is an interesting concept, but I still think that vertical culture is inadvertently the real and main definition of culture anyways…). It’s crazy to think how relevant all these themes are today, a whole three decades after it was first published. Not sure how to feel about the fact that the same issues and dilemmas have barely changed…

Overall, lovely book. Bought the physical copy to keep hehe.

[Justin · Rating 5 out of 5]

The introduction comes out with an unsustainable amount of heat, but that's not a knock. I like the engagement with Marxist and nationalist thought in the context of Asian Americans and specifically Asian American women. The discussion of citizenship is probably the strongest given Asian Americans particularly fraught relationship with that. The book is probably at its weakest with the discussion of Marxism which tends to either be not particularly fresh (Cedric Robinson does a better job of talking about race and did it earlier) or not particularly fair about Marx's engagement with race (Marx isn't a race theorist but he does have some worthwhile thoughts about it).

[Vinay Khosla · Rating 3 out of 5]

We must historicize this book! Lowe really hit her stride from Chapter 5 on and to be fair the “obvious” claims she’s making at times probably weren’t so obvious once upon a time. Interesting argument that Asian American cultural production represents the dialectical synthesis in capital/the nation’s contradiction between liberal- representational multiculturalism and the historical legal/social exclusion of the Asian American immigrant by occupying oppositional sites of enunciation and performing alternative historiographies of American empire, imperialism, and citizenship.

[Peter Gao]

Take Care - SASAMI

[Janine]

dense but highly important

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really foundational theorization of Asian America.

[Laura]

When you read a book where you can tell the person writing it is operating on a higher plane of consciousness than you will maybe ever have access to. So smart and insightful hot damn.

[Nated Doherty · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, I'm done with this one for now, the pressures of the PhD workload, but I hope to return to it. I think Lowe shows herself here to be one of the few critical thinkers from the US that can do a Marxist infused reading of a text(for example, Hagedorn's Dogeaters) and actually talk about the text as it is, as opposed to just pasting the set political criticisms onto passages chosen seemingly at random (a la Messrs. Harvey and Jameson).

Here's hoping...

[Ruan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is indeed the best book on Asian American politics which I have ever read. Perhaps her style is not to everyone's liking as her sentences might not mean much and feel truncated at times if one is not used to academic writing, yet her ideas are well-developed and her research is complete and thorough. At times she might sound overtly political and not so worried about literary analyses, but considering this is such an important issue, who can blame her?

[Christopher Tirri · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was much more interested in the moments where Lowe used literary analysis to support her otherwise very politically-motivated arguments - it helped me understand what she was actually trying to see, specifically because I'd actually read most of the novels she discussed.

[Robyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Also for dissertation research. Also very useful. I like how she talked about LA and race relations there and some weirdo "multicultural" festival thing.

[Karla · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very important book in the AAS canon, but really hard to get through--I haven't touched lit theory in a really long time. I'll probably reread it when I get to the proposal stage.

[Anna · Rating 2 out of 5]

Promising collection of essays; could have been super-interesting were the writing style not so INACCESSIBLE. That's the rub with academic writing, I suppose.