Immigrant acts

Lisa Lowe contends that the story of Asian immigration is central to grasping how race and economics shaped the United States as a nation, and how politics did too. Asians were drawn into American workplaces and markets, yet exclusion laws and citizenship bars kept them at a distance from the nation's cultural life. Lowe traces how a lingering national memory keeps Asian Americans cast as permanent immigrants and "foreigners within", a perception that outlasted the repeal of specific statutes and was fed by American wars in Asia. Instead of showing that cultural difference had been absorbed into a shared national politics, she argues that the Asian immigrant, who sits uneasily with the nation's cultural, racial and linguistic norms, disrupts the expected timeline of assimilation.

From this vantage, Asian American culture appears as an alternative space that generates cultural forms which both material and aesthetic terms set against citizenship and national identity. Lowe reads the failure of Asian integration into American cultural life not as a shortcoming but as a source of critique, one that opens possibilities for political action and alliances across racial and national lines. The book takes an interdisciplinary approach, considering the historical, political, cultural and aesthetic meanings of immigration for Asian Americans.

Written for scholars and readers interested in race and ethnicity in the United States, American culture, immigration and transnationalism, the study extends the field of Asian American critique.