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)

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.

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.

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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.

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?

I love Lisa Lowe

A really foundational theorization of Asian America.

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.

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.

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

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...

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.