Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics

Anyone with an interest in Asian American history, politics, and culture needs to read this book. A courageous effort to synthesize and contextualize the Asian American experience.

With so many negative reviews of this book, I feel the need to give some context. About the difficulty of the language: first, those reading this text should note that you will be entering mid-stream into an academic conversation already taking place between marxism, poststructuralism, feminism and Asian American cultural politics (among other strands of thought). Academic language at its best helps us conceptualize in new ways, and like any language, we need to learn it. Second, as readers we should also be careful to not project what might be our own anti-intellectualism onto the texts we read. There are reasons why this book is a classic Asian American Studies text. Stick with it, and familiarize yourself with the different theoretical frameworks that are woven into it. There are many theoretical and practical insights to be gained from Lowe's work that are relevant to thinking about Asian American cultural politics.

Immigrant Acts performs its own multiple acts of immigration, assimilation, suablternization in sophisticated and probing ways that would unite a Gramscian problematic of class and place with a more professional concern with identity politics in ethnic studies and Asian American racialization patterns. While I might want to argue with the will to theorize and include diverse forms of decolonization and resistance that do not fit this racial calculus of abjected othering, still, this book is an indispensable text of US identity politics in this era of maximal globalization and localization for the Pax Americana. The chapter on beloved T. Cha remains incredibly good, the historicized reminder of immigrant acts of rejection directed against the Chinese then and Mexicans and Vietnamese now haunts any easy vision of US liberal tolerance and multicultural peace. I need this book, Mr. President, even when I hate it and love it and get locked into its hyper-textual terms (one sign of textual power, that, the displacement of the reader). I am no immigrant act myself, just a Scottish Italian half-poet,but am working overtime out here in Asia/Pacific waters off the coast of California and Taiwan and need to study the main moves. My praise is superfluous at this point, and the indigenous struggles go on far from the immigrant acts of assimilation textual resistance. The US nation wobbles, not a bit.

The most articulate, insightful, powerful voice in Asian American cultural and literary criticism. This book is essential reading not just for Asian Americanists but for everyone interested in American culture, ethnicity, capitalism, literature.