4.12.2006
Immigrant Acts (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Ah, the old favorite. What do we think of hybridity these days? Strategic Essentialism? I picked this book as my favorite AAS book of all time when I was an undergrad - I'd say times have changed. Please find below the excellent notes of guest blogger, J.He.
Lisa Lowe. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. Durham: Duke UP, 1996.
Identity and the Subject:
How is the fluidity of identity and the subject and yet the necessity for fixed notions of the self addressed in Immigrant Acts? What does Lowe’s discussions of the subject and identity yield towards an understanding of the emergence of contemporary individuals, communities, and nations as they are mutually articulated? How have these emergent entities and the conditions of their existence marked changes in the global, national, and local scales? What, if any, are the possibilities for identity and subjectivity as offered by Lowe (particularly in conversation with José Muñoz’s work on disidentification).
How does Lowe’s acknowledgment of the utility of particular moments or forms of nationalisms complicate these understandings of subjectivity and identity? Consider Lowe’s formulations of this dynamic in tandem with Chela Sandoval’s work on differential consciousness. If nationalisms are understood as one of many registers within a repertoire of oppositional politics or methodologies how do we then engage in scholarship that attenuates to these shifting notions of the self and the collective?
Asian American:
Taking off from these models of the subject and identity, how does Lowe complicate understandings of Asian immigrants and Asian Americans? How do her definitions of this grouping speak to and complicate projects of a post-nationalist American Studies?
Hybridity and Heterogeneity:
Consider Lowe’s deployment of difference in thinking through and arguing for the utility of key terms, specifically her ideas on heterogeneous groupings, hybrid cultural forms, and multiple subject position(ing)s. How does Lowe’s work here enable us toward effectively analyzing and studying objects and subjects that always evade containment in discrete categories of knowledge? How does Lowe’s analysis interact with Gilroy’s concepts of the Black Atlantic, counterculture, and double consciousness?
Culture:
Focusing on the treatment of law, citizenship, and culture as sites of contradiction (often in convergence or a state of overdetermination), how does Lowe’s interrogation of the nation-state gesture towards a theory of the Americas and a reconceptualization of forms of belonging? What does the orientation of Immigrant Acts within the lexicons of historical materialism, feminism, and racial formation offer in terms of methodology?
Literature and History:
How does Lowe’s analysis of cultural texts and Western epistemologies relate with Walter Mignolo’s interrogation of writing, literature, language and colonialism?
Identity and the Subject
I argue that the subject that emerges out of Asian American cultural forms is one in excess of and in contradiction with the subjectivities proposed by national modern and postmodern modes of aesthetic representation. (32)
Rather than considering ‘Asian American identity’ as a fixed, established ‘given,’ perhaps we can consider instead ‘Asian American cultural practices’ that produce identity; the processes that produce such identity are never complete and are always constituted in relation to historical and material differences. (64)
To the contrary, these differences [class and gender alongside race] represent greater opportunity to affiliate with other groups whose cohesions may be based on other valences of oppression rather than ‘identity.’ (74)
Interventions exist that refuse the static or binary conceptions of culture, replacing notions of ‘identity’ with multiplicity and shifting the emphasis from culture ‘essence’ to material hybridity. (75)
In this sense, I argue for the Asian American necessity to organize, resist, and theorize as Asian Americans, but at the same time, I inscribe this necessity within a discussion of the risks of a cultural politics that relies on the construction of sameness and the exclusion of differences. (68)
The concept of ‘strategic essentialism’ suggests that it is possible to utilize specific signifiers of racialized ethnic identity, such as ‘Asian American,’ for the purpose of contesting and disrupting the discourses that exclude Asian Americans, while simultaneously revealing the internal contradictions and slippages of ‘Asian American’ so as to insure that such essentialisms will not be reproduced and proliferated by the very apparatuses we seek to disempower. (82)
Hence, Asian American cultural nationalism that emerged in opposition to racial exclusion continues to address these modern institutions within transnational capitalism. Yet at the same time, the current global restructuring… constitutes a shift in the mode of production that now necessitates alternative forms of cultural practice that integrate yet move beyond those of cultural nationalism. (171)
This excess and differential places Asian American and other racialized women in critical, and dialectical, relationships to the subjects of feminism, Marxism, and ethnic nationalisms. In this sense, Asian immigrant and Asian American women may be said to constitute the dialectical sublation of these earlier models of political subjectivity. (163-4)
Singular narratives of consciousness aim at developing a subject position from which totalization becomes possible, whereas the cultural productions of racialized women seek to articulate multiple, nonequivalent, but linked determinations without assuming their containment within the horizon of an absolute totality and its presumption of a singular subject. (164-5)
Rather than dictating that subjects be constituted through identification with the liberal citizen-formation of American national culture, Asian American cultural forms offer the possibility of subjects and practices constituted through dialectics of difference and disidentification. Rather than vertical determination by the state, these forms are suggestive of horizontal relations between subjects across national boundaries. (167)
-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-
Disidentification is the third mode of dealing with dominant ideology, on that neither opts to assimilate within such a structure nor strictly opposes it; rather, disidentification is a strategy that works on and against dominant ideology. Instead of buckling under the pressures of dominatnt ideology (identification, assimilation) or attempting to break free of its inescapable sphere (counteridentification, utopianism), this ‘working on and against’ is a strategy that tries to transform a cultural logic from within, always laboring to enact permanent structural change while at the same time valuing the importance of local or everyday struggles of resistance.
José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. 11. [in this excerpt he is quoting Michel Pêcheux, Language, Semantics and Ideology. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982.]
I think of this activity of consciousness as the ‘differential,’ insofar as it enables movement ‘between and among’ ideological positionings (the equal-rights, revolutionary, supremacist, and separatist modes of oppositional consciousness) considered as variable, in order to disclose the distinctions among them. In this sense, the differential mode of consciousness functions like the clutch of an automobile, the mechanism that permits the driver to select, engage, and disengage gears in a system for the transmission of power… When enacted in dialectical relation to one another and not as separated ideologies, each oppositional mode of consciousness, each ideology-praxis, is transformed into tactical weaponry for intervening in shifting currents of power.
Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. 58.
Asian American
What is referred to as ‘Asian America’ is clearly a heterogeneous entity. (65)
‘Decolonization,’ then, is the social formation that encompasses a multileveled and multicentered assault on those specific forms of colonial rule; that project of decolonization is carried forth in the ‘postcolonial’ site by may equally be deployed by immigrant and diasporic populations… In other words, if we understand ‘decolonization’ as an ongoing disruption of the colonial mode of production, then Asian American writing performs that displacement from a social formation marked by the uneven and unsynthetic encounters of colonial, neocolonial, and mass and elite indigenous cultures that characterize decolonization. (108)
Hybridity and Heterogeneity
By ‘heterogeneity,’ I mean to indicate the existence of differences and differential relationships within a bounded category… By ‘hybridity,’ I refer to the formation of cultural objects and practices that are produced by the histories of uneven and unsynthetic power relations… We might understand ‘multiplicity’ as designating the ways in which subjects located within social relations are determined by several different axes of power… (67)
The materialist argument for heterogeneity seeks to challenge the conception of difference as exclusively structure by a binary opposition between two terms, by proposing instead another notion of ‘difference’ that takes seriously the historically produced conditions of heterogeneity, multiplicity, and nonequivalence. (72)
The materialist concept of hybridity conveys that the histories of forced labor migrations, racial segregation, economic displacement and internment are left in the material traces of ‘hybrid’ cultural identities… Hybridization is not the ‘free’ oscillation between or among chosen identities. It is the uneven process through which immigrant communities encounter the violences of the U.S. state, and the capital imperatives served by the United States and by the Asian states from which they come, and the process through which they survive those violences by living, inventing, and reproducing different cultural alternatives. (82)
By ‘hybridity,’ I do not mean simply cultural or linguistic mixing or ‘ambivalence’ but rather a material form that expresses the sedimented traces of a complex history of violence, invasion, exploitation, deracination, and imposed rule by different colonial and neocolonial powers. (210 n28)
Culture
Culture is the terrain through which the individual speaks as a member of the contemporary national collectivity, but culture is also a mediation of history, the site through which the past returns and is remembered, however fragmented, imperfect, or disavowed. (x)
It is through the terrain of national culture that the individual subject is politically formed as the American citizen. (2)
Culture is the medium of the present – the imagined equivalences and identifications through which the individual invents lived relationship with the national collective – but it is simultaneously the site that mediates the past, through which history is grasped as difference, as fragments, shocks, and flashes of disjunction. It is through culture that the subject becomes, acts, and speaks itself as ‘American.’ It is likewise in culture that individuals and collectivities struggle and remember and, in that difficult remembering, imagine and practice both subject and community differently. (2-3)
The racialization of Asian Americans in relation to the state locates Asian American culture as a site for the emergence of another kind of political subject, one who has a historically ‘alien-ated’ relation to the category of citizenship. (12)
Culture is the material site of struggle in which active links are made between signifying practices and social structure. (22)
Because culture is the contemporary repository of memory, of history, it is through culture, rather than government, that alternative forms of subjectivity, collectivity, and public life are imagined. (22)
Culture in and for the modern state is not in itself ‘political,’ but the contradictions through which immigration brings national institutions into crisis produces immigrant cultures as oppositional and contestatory, and these contradictions critically politicized in cultural forms and practices can be utilized in the formation of alternative social practices. (172)
-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-
Immigration restriction produced the illegal alien as a new legal and political subject, whose inclusion within the nation was simultanesouly a social reality and a legal impossibility – a subject barred from citizenship and without rights… The illegal alien is thus an ‘impossible subject,’ a person who cannot be and a problem that cannot be solved.
Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton University Press, 2004. 4.
Literature and History
In other words, the cultural institution of the novel legitimates particular forms and subjects of history and subjugates or erases others… In both England and the United States, the novel as a form of print culture has constituted a privileged site for the unification of the citizen with the ‘imagined community’ of the nation, while the national literary canon functioned to unify aesthetic culture as a domain in which material differences and localities were resolved and reconciled. (98)
In This Book…
In this book, I have wished to make connections between Asian American cultural studies and the current range of ethnic cultural studies projects, between discussions of race in the United States and Marxist theories, and between literary study and feminist analyses of racialized women’s work. I am not positing an orthodoxy to be followed but connecting these discussions in order to open a space in which others, perhaps finding worthy gaps, errors, or elisions, will make use of and build on the work only begun here. (x)
Thus, the immigration of Asians to the United States has been the locus of meanings that are simultaneously legal, political, economic, cultural, and aesthetic. In this book I attempt to situate these meanings and to gather them into a coherent, contemporary formation that is both a record of the emergence of Asian American ‘culture’ within a U.S. national and an international context and a comprehension of the dialectical critique generated by that emergence. (6)
In this book, I have argued that the contradictions of the political and economic spheres are manifested in Asian American cultural production as a material site of struggle, and Asian American critique is the dialectical politicization of these contradictions. (156)
In this book, I have wished to situate racialized immigrant formation within the context of national state institutions and the international forces of global economy as one site of a contemporary ‘state of emergency.’ (174)
I have hoped to draw attention to how these conditions have dialectically produced the emergence of specific oppositional racial and cultural groupings and, perhaps more important, to how they give rise to the emergence of new subjects whose horizons of definition open up different possibilities for political practice and coalition. (175)
Lisa Lowe. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. Durham: Duke UP, 1996.
Identity and the Subject:
How is the fluidity of identity and the subject and yet the necessity for fixed notions of the self addressed in Immigrant Acts? What does Lowe’s discussions of the subject and identity yield towards an understanding of the emergence of contemporary individuals, communities, and nations as they are mutually articulated? How have these emergent entities and the conditions of their existence marked changes in the global, national, and local scales? What, if any, are the possibilities for identity and subjectivity as offered by Lowe (particularly in conversation with José Muñoz’s work on disidentification).
How does Lowe’s acknowledgment of the utility of particular moments or forms of nationalisms complicate these understandings of subjectivity and identity? Consider Lowe’s formulations of this dynamic in tandem with Chela Sandoval’s work on differential consciousness. If nationalisms are understood as one of many registers within a repertoire of oppositional politics or methodologies how do we then engage in scholarship that attenuates to these shifting notions of the self and the collective?
Asian American:
Taking off from these models of the subject and identity, how does Lowe complicate understandings of Asian immigrants and Asian Americans? How do her definitions of this grouping speak to and complicate projects of a post-nationalist American Studies?
Hybridity and Heterogeneity:
Consider Lowe’s deployment of difference in thinking through and arguing for the utility of key terms, specifically her ideas on heterogeneous groupings, hybrid cultural forms, and multiple subject position(ing)s. How does Lowe’s work here enable us toward effectively analyzing and studying objects and subjects that always evade containment in discrete categories of knowledge? How does Lowe’s analysis interact with Gilroy’s concepts of the Black Atlantic, counterculture, and double consciousness?
Culture:
Focusing on the treatment of law, citizenship, and culture as sites of contradiction (often in convergence or a state of overdetermination), how does Lowe’s interrogation of the nation-state gesture towards a theory of the Americas and a reconceptualization of forms of belonging? What does the orientation of Immigrant Acts within the lexicons of historical materialism, feminism, and racial formation offer in terms of methodology?
Literature and History:
How does Lowe’s analysis of cultural texts and Western epistemologies relate with Walter Mignolo’s interrogation of writing, literature, language and colonialism?
Identity and the Subject
I argue that the subject that emerges out of Asian American cultural forms is one in excess of and in contradiction with the subjectivities proposed by national modern and postmodern modes of aesthetic representation. (32)
Rather than considering ‘Asian American identity’ as a fixed, established ‘given,’ perhaps we can consider instead ‘Asian American cultural practices’ that produce identity; the processes that produce such identity are never complete and are always constituted in relation to historical and material differences. (64)
To the contrary, these differences [class and gender alongside race] represent greater opportunity to affiliate with other groups whose cohesions may be based on other valences of oppression rather than ‘identity.’ (74)
Interventions exist that refuse the static or binary conceptions of culture, replacing notions of ‘identity’ with multiplicity and shifting the emphasis from culture ‘essence’ to material hybridity. (75)
In this sense, I argue for the Asian American necessity to organize, resist, and theorize as Asian Americans, but at the same time, I inscribe this necessity within a discussion of the risks of a cultural politics that relies on the construction of sameness and the exclusion of differences. (68)
The concept of ‘strategic essentialism’ suggests that it is possible to utilize specific signifiers of racialized ethnic identity, such as ‘Asian American,’ for the purpose of contesting and disrupting the discourses that exclude Asian Americans, while simultaneously revealing the internal contradictions and slippages of ‘Asian American’ so as to insure that such essentialisms will not be reproduced and proliferated by the very apparatuses we seek to disempower. (82)
Hence, Asian American cultural nationalism that emerged in opposition to racial exclusion continues to address these modern institutions within transnational capitalism. Yet at the same time, the current global restructuring… constitutes a shift in the mode of production that now necessitates alternative forms of cultural practice that integrate yet move beyond those of cultural nationalism. (171)
This excess and differential places Asian American and other racialized women in critical, and dialectical, relationships to the subjects of feminism, Marxism, and ethnic nationalisms. In this sense, Asian immigrant and Asian American women may be said to constitute the dialectical sublation of these earlier models of political subjectivity. (163-4)
Singular narratives of consciousness aim at developing a subject position from which totalization becomes possible, whereas the cultural productions of racialized women seek to articulate multiple, nonequivalent, but linked determinations without assuming their containment within the horizon of an absolute totality and its presumption of a singular subject. (164-5)
Rather than dictating that subjects be constituted through identification with the liberal citizen-formation of American national culture, Asian American cultural forms offer the possibility of subjects and practices constituted through dialectics of difference and disidentification. Rather than vertical determination by the state, these forms are suggestive of horizontal relations between subjects across national boundaries. (167)
-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-
Disidentification is the third mode of dealing with dominant ideology, on that neither opts to assimilate within such a structure nor strictly opposes it; rather, disidentification is a strategy that works on and against dominant ideology. Instead of buckling under the pressures of dominatnt ideology (identification, assimilation) or attempting to break free of its inescapable sphere (counteridentification, utopianism), this ‘working on and against’ is a strategy that tries to transform a cultural logic from within, always laboring to enact permanent structural change while at the same time valuing the importance of local or everyday struggles of resistance.
José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. 11. [in this excerpt he is quoting Michel Pêcheux, Language, Semantics and Ideology. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982.]
I think of this activity of consciousness as the ‘differential,’ insofar as it enables movement ‘between and among’ ideological positionings (the equal-rights, revolutionary, supremacist, and separatist modes of oppositional consciousness) considered as variable, in order to disclose the distinctions among them. In this sense, the differential mode of consciousness functions like the clutch of an automobile, the mechanism that permits the driver to select, engage, and disengage gears in a system for the transmission of power… When enacted in dialectical relation to one another and not as separated ideologies, each oppositional mode of consciousness, each ideology-praxis, is transformed into tactical weaponry for intervening in shifting currents of power.
Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. 58.
Asian American
What is referred to as ‘Asian America’ is clearly a heterogeneous entity. (65)
‘Decolonization,’ then, is the social formation that encompasses a multileveled and multicentered assault on those specific forms of colonial rule; that project of decolonization is carried forth in the ‘postcolonial’ site by may equally be deployed by immigrant and diasporic populations… In other words, if we understand ‘decolonization’ as an ongoing disruption of the colonial mode of production, then Asian American writing performs that displacement from a social formation marked by the uneven and unsynthetic encounters of colonial, neocolonial, and mass and elite indigenous cultures that characterize decolonization. (108)
Hybridity and Heterogeneity
By ‘heterogeneity,’ I mean to indicate the existence of differences and differential relationships within a bounded category… By ‘hybridity,’ I refer to the formation of cultural objects and practices that are produced by the histories of uneven and unsynthetic power relations… We might understand ‘multiplicity’ as designating the ways in which subjects located within social relations are determined by several different axes of power… (67)
The materialist argument for heterogeneity seeks to challenge the conception of difference as exclusively structure by a binary opposition between two terms, by proposing instead another notion of ‘difference’ that takes seriously the historically produced conditions of heterogeneity, multiplicity, and nonequivalence. (72)
The materialist concept of hybridity conveys that the histories of forced labor migrations, racial segregation, economic displacement and internment are left in the material traces of ‘hybrid’ cultural identities… Hybridization is not the ‘free’ oscillation between or among chosen identities. It is the uneven process through which immigrant communities encounter the violences of the U.S. state, and the capital imperatives served by the United States and by the Asian states from which they come, and the process through which they survive those violences by living, inventing, and reproducing different cultural alternatives. (82)
By ‘hybridity,’ I do not mean simply cultural or linguistic mixing or ‘ambivalence’ but rather a material form that expresses the sedimented traces of a complex history of violence, invasion, exploitation, deracination, and imposed rule by different colonial and neocolonial powers. (210 n28)
Culture
Culture is the terrain through which the individual speaks as a member of the contemporary national collectivity, but culture is also a mediation of history, the site through which the past returns and is remembered, however fragmented, imperfect, or disavowed. (x)
It is through the terrain of national culture that the individual subject is politically formed as the American citizen. (2)
Culture is the medium of the present – the imagined equivalences and identifications through which the individual invents lived relationship with the national collective – but it is simultaneously the site that mediates the past, through which history is grasped as difference, as fragments, shocks, and flashes of disjunction. It is through culture that the subject becomes, acts, and speaks itself as ‘American.’ It is likewise in culture that individuals and collectivities struggle and remember and, in that difficult remembering, imagine and practice both subject and community differently. (2-3)
The racialization of Asian Americans in relation to the state locates Asian American culture as a site for the emergence of another kind of political subject, one who has a historically ‘alien-ated’ relation to the category of citizenship. (12)
Culture is the material site of struggle in which active links are made between signifying practices and social structure. (22)
Because culture is the contemporary repository of memory, of history, it is through culture, rather than government, that alternative forms of subjectivity, collectivity, and public life are imagined. (22)
Culture in and for the modern state is not in itself ‘political,’ but the contradictions through which immigration brings national institutions into crisis produces immigrant cultures as oppositional and contestatory, and these contradictions critically politicized in cultural forms and practices can be utilized in the formation of alternative social practices. (172)
-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-
Immigration restriction produced the illegal alien as a new legal and political subject, whose inclusion within the nation was simultanesouly a social reality and a legal impossibility – a subject barred from citizenship and without rights… The illegal alien is thus an ‘impossible subject,’ a person who cannot be and a problem that cannot be solved.
Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton University Press, 2004. 4.
Literature and History
In other words, the cultural institution of the novel legitimates particular forms and subjects of history and subjugates or erases others… In both England and the United States, the novel as a form of print culture has constituted a privileged site for the unification of the citizen with the ‘imagined community’ of the nation, while the national literary canon functioned to unify aesthetic culture as a domain in which material differences and localities were resolved and reconciled. (98)
In This Book…
In this book, I have wished to make connections between Asian American cultural studies and the current range of ethnic cultural studies projects, between discussions of race in the United States and Marxist theories, and between literary study and feminist analyses of racialized women’s work. I am not positing an orthodoxy to be followed but connecting these discussions in order to open a space in which others, perhaps finding worthy gaps, errors, or elisions, will make use of and build on the work only begun here. (x)
Thus, the immigration of Asians to the United States has been the locus of meanings that are simultaneously legal, political, economic, cultural, and aesthetic. In this book I attempt to situate these meanings and to gather them into a coherent, contemporary formation that is both a record of the emergence of Asian American ‘culture’ within a U.S. national and an international context and a comprehension of the dialectical critique generated by that emergence. (6)
In this book, I have argued that the contradictions of the political and economic spheres are manifested in Asian American cultural production as a material site of struggle, and Asian American critique is the dialectical politicization of these contradictions. (156)
In this book, I have wished to situate racialized immigrant formation within the context of national state institutions and the international forces of global economy as one site of a contemporary ‘state of emergency.’ (174)
I have hoped to draw attention to how these conditions have dialectically produced the emergence of specific oppositional racial and cultural groupings and, perhaps more important, to how they give rise to the emergence of new subjects whose horizons of definition open up different possibilities for political practice and coalition. (175)
# posted by SMRT : 1:14 AM
