Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics, and: Asian/American: Historical Crossing of a Racial Frontier, and: Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (review)

Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. By Lisa Lowe. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996.

Asian/American: Historical Crossing of a Racial Frontier. By David Palumbo-Liu. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1999.

Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture. By Robert G. Lee. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999.

Key words such as "culture politics," "racial frontier," and "popular culture" in the subtitles of these three path-breaking texts delineate their authors' theoretical engagements with these significant concerns in the Asian American studies field as it enters the twenty-first century. All three texts are models of multi- and interdisciplinary scholarship, all admirably grounded in history, and displaying a critical rigor in historicizing a contemporary reality. The immense scholarly usefulness of all three texts lies in their careful attention to the racial formations of Asian American communities from the mid-nineteenth century, as well as to contemporary issues of new immigrants from Asia, and the complex web of identity formations. Significant numbers of the post-1965 immigrant populations from Asia who have brought compelling issues of nationality, citizenship, and language uses have necessitated reshaping certain parameters in the field of Asian American studies as a whole. I consider myself to be part of this generation of Asia-born immigrants whose identity transformation from Asian immigrant to Asian American entails a complex journey, geographical and psychological.

Identity formations unfold within the context of the U.S. nation and as Lowe, Palumbo-Liu, and Lee recognize, such subjectivities are couched within the prevalent racial climates, buttressed by anti-Asian legislations and by popular culture images in print and visual media, whether it be the 1880s or the 1980s. Both Lowe and Lee have chapters on the post-LA riot scenario in terms of race relations, popular culture, and multiculturalism.

All three texts make major contributions to Asian American studies and to cultural studies and media studies, and provide theoretical models for the effective deployment of cultural studies methodologies. Lowe's contributions date back the farthest, from 1991 with her excellent essay, "Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Asian American Differences," published originally in the very first volume of the journal Diaspora. Lowe's astute analysis of the differences in Asian American identities as grounded in material realities and her characteristically admirable attention to matters of culture and cultural politics has enabled a particularly useful shaping of the field as a whole. Indeed, Lowe's vision as a critic and theorist is remarkably consistent in her concerns over the years with Asian American subject-formations within a materialist, political, and cultural framework. Her work is widely cited, and I would assert that Immigrant Acts is as seminal in the Asian American studies field, as Edward Said's Orientalism has been in postcolonial studies. Both texts have the originality of thought, historical grounding, political engagement that have influenced the direction of an entire field of study, and that are deeply resonant with linkages for a variety of related fields and disciplines. Hence, Orientalism has enabled reconceptualizations of the Orient by scholars not only in postcolonial studies, but also in anthropology, political science, and history. Similarly, Immigrant Acts provides models of theoretical material and method that has links with not only Asian American studies, but also with immigration and citizenship studies, literary studies, and political theory. As a final note of comparison, both Lowe and Said use admirably lucid language and do not fall into the obscurity means profundity lure language and do not fall into the obscurity means profundity lure of much contemporary theory.

Lowe's text analyzes how immigration is " the most important historical and discursive site of Asian American formation through which the national and global economic, the cultural, and the legal spheres are modulated" (10) Immigrant Acts includes fine discussions of...