Immigrant Acts : On Asian American Cultural Politics.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lowe, Lisa, Author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--History and criticism--Theory, etc--Asian American authors--20th century--United States.

American literature.

Politics and literature--History.

Politics and literature.

Asian Americans--Intellectual life.

Asian Americans.

Asian Americans in literature.

Immigrants in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (269 p.)

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Preface

1 Immigration, Citizenship, Racialization: Asian American Critique

2 Canon, Institutionalization, Identity: Asian American Studies

3 Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Asian American Differences

4 Imagining Los Angeles in the Production of Multiculturalism

5 Decolonization, Displacement, Disidentification: Writing and the Question of History

6 Unfaithful to the Original: The Subject of Dictee

7 Work, Immigration, Gender: Asian "American" Women

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 12. Dez 2020)

ISBN:

9780822379010

0822379015

OCLC:

1144344953