Immigrant Acts

Immigrant Acts is a compelling and persuasively written presentation of Asian American cultural production. It is both an exciting and instructive volume.Barbara Harlow, The University of Texas at Austin At long last a study that theorized the crucial place of the Asian American Immigrant Subject in the historical constitution of the color line, and thus, in the making of America. Tracing the genealogy of Asian immigrant labor and cultural production in the racial and gender formations of the pre-World War II, and contemporary U.S. State, Lisa Lowe offers us an ambitious, elegant, and incisive analysis that propels Asian immigrant women workers (and comparative feminist theory) to the center of discourses of nation and citizenship. Truly a book for the twenty first century.Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Hamilton College In Immigrant Acts, Lowe grapples with some of the most challenging and complex issues before us in the humanities and in cultural studies today. This is a major work by a mature scholar who brings authority and wisdom to her subject.Emory Elliott, University of California, Riverside Lisa Lowe does the most important and influential work in Asian American cultural studies today. Her book is noteworthy for its breathtakingly skillful deployment of materialist methodology, its penetrating and sensitive interpretations of various works of literature and film, and its attention to the relationships between Asian American cultural production and social and political issues in Asian American communities. Immigrant Acts is written with sophisticated grace. A profoundly and passionately humane voice emerges from it.Elaine H. Kim, University of California, Berkeley Lisa Lowe has written a brilliant, erudite, and meticulously thorough genealogy and critique of the U.S. institution of citizenship and immigration acts. Immigrant Acts will take its place as an indispensable text for theorists in cultural studies, ethno-racial literary studies, and Asian American feminist materialist critique. A stunning tour de force!Jos David Saldvar, University of California, Berkeley

Lisa Lowe is Samuel Knight Professor of American Studies at Yale University, and is the author of Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms and coeditor (with David Lloyd) of The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (Duke University Press).

Preface ix 1. Immigration, Citizenship, Racialization: Asian American Critique 1 2. Canon, Institutionalization, Identity: Asian American Studies 37 3. Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Asian American Differences 60 4. Imagining Los Angeles in the Production of Multiculturalism 84 5. Decolonization, Displacement, Disidentification: Writing and the Question of History 97 6. Unfaithful to the Original: The Subject of Dictee 128 7. Work, Immigration, Gender: Asian "American" Women 154 Epilogue 174 Notes 177 Bibliography 223 Index 241