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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)
'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)
