Lisa Lowe

Reading across archives, canons, and continents, Lisa Lowe examines the relationships between Europe, Asia, and the Americas in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- centuries. She argues that Western liberal ideology, African slavery, Asian indentured labor, colonialism and trade must be understood as being mutually constitutive.

The Intimacies of Four Continents

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.

On Asian American Cultural Politics

Immigrant Acts

Judith Halberstam

Kara Keeling

DIVThrough an analysis of filmic representations of Black femininity, and the Black Femme in particular, this book highlights the ways "the cinematic" structures both racist and sexist portrayals, and their potential undoing./div

The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense

The Witch's Flight

Hyun Yi Kang

Shelley Sunn Wong

A Collection of Essays on Dictée by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

Writing Self, Writing Nation

Stanley Fish

Fredric Jameson

David Lloyd

Eighteen contributed essays examine how localized and resistant social practices--including anticolonial and feminist struggles, peasant revolts, and various cultural movements--challenge contemporary capitalism. These essays--on Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, North America, and Europe--rework Marxist critique and advance a new understanding of "cultural politics" within the context of transnational neocolonial capitalism. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital

Examining and historicizing the concept of "otherness" in both literature and criticism, Lisa Lowe explores representations of non-European cultures in British and French writings from the eighteenth through the twentieth century. Lowe traces the intersections of culture, class, and sexuality in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters and Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes and discusses tropes of orientalism, racialism, and romanticism in Flaubert. She then turns to debates in Anglo-American and Indian criticism on Forster’s Passage to India and on the utopian projection of China in the poststructuralist theories of Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes and in the journal Tel Quel.

French and British Orientalisms

Critical Terrains

DIVComing from a broad cross-section of academic disciplines and theoretical positions, this collection of essays questions and reworks Marxist critiques of capitalism that center on the West and which posit a uniform model of development. More specifically/div

Lisa Lowe

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