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Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke UP,1996), xii+ 252 pp., $16.95 (paper).
In Immigrant Acts Lisa Lowe analyzes Asian American cultural production as a site of contest over the terms of membership in the national body. In so doing, she contributes invaluably to theorizing the connections between cultural production on the one hand, and racial formation and subaltern subjectivities on the other. Lowe's crucial first chapter details the history of Asians and Asian Americans in the United States through a genealogy of racial formation. Lowe clarifies the contradictions between US political and economic spheres that have embraced the labor of Asians and Asian Americans while excluding them from citizenship and national culture. Lowe then examines Asian American literature and filmic production as sites of critique and ongoing resistance within a struggle over the terms of national participation.
Serving as the foundation of Immigrant Acts is Lowe's articulation of two concepts, disidentification and decolonization. The works of fiction she discusses, including Fae Myenne Ng's Bone and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee, articulate dynamic and oppositional subjectivities that resist both identification with the nation-state as...