Immigrant Acts Quotes

“it may be very clear indeed who “owns” culture. It is pronounced in the official language all must learn to speak, is declared if you can’t afford to buy the garments that you are employed to sew, and is evident if your call to 911 fails to bring emergency assistance to your neighborhood.”
― Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics

“while Asian American cultural identity emerges in the context of the racialized exclusion of Asian immigrants from enfranchisement in the political and cultural spheres of the United States, important contradictions exist between an exclusively Asian American cultural nationalist construction of identity and the material heterogeneity of the Asian American constituency, particularly class, gender, and national-origin differences among peoples of Asian descent in the United States.”
― Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics

“Let us emphasize instead that owing to complex, uneven material histories of colonization and the oppression of racialized groups within the United States, the sites of minority or colonized literary production are at different distances from the canonical nationalist project of reconciling constituencies to idealized forms of community and subjectivity.”
― Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics

“The narratives that suppress tension and opposition suggest that we have already achieved multiculturalism, that we know what it is, and that it is defined simply by the coexistence and juxtaposition of greater numbers of diverse groups; these narratives allow us to ignore the profound and urgent gaps, the inequalities and conflicts, among racial, ethnic, and immigrant groups.”
― Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics

“Without these tensions, multiculturalism fails to come to grips with the material inequalities and strata of a city like Los Angeles: the separations, unevennesses of opportunity because of different groups’ histories of labor, racism, and poverty.”
― Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics

“aesthetic representation is not an analogue for the material positions, means, or resources of those populations.”
― Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics