The Limits of the Nation-State, The Possibilities of Asian American Literature

Imagining the Nation: Asian American Literature and Cultural Consent. By David Leiwei Li. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1998. 261 pages. $45.00.

THE 1996 PUBLICATION OF LISA LOWE'S MONUMENTAL WORK, IMMIGRANT ACTS, profoundly reconfigured the terms of Asian American literary and cultural studies in its theorization of the relationship between the state, capital, and culture. ¹ In particular, Lowe's book made an engagement with Enlightenment liberalism's relationship to the nation-state a crucial concern. Although the title of David Leiwei Li's book alludes most obviously to Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, actually Imagining the Nation is more directly a contribution to the set of discussions articulated in Lowe's text. ² Li argues that Asian American racialization is produced out of an incongruity inherent in the practice of the nation-state: the tension between, on the one hand, the promise of universal citizenship and, on the other, the reality of differential access to the state based on race. Asian American literature, then, registers this inconsistency, sometimes expressing the racializing function of the nation-state and sometimes enabling the nation-state's more egalitarian ideal. Because Li is so obviously taking up the terms of Lowe's discussion, and because of the influence of Lowe's work to the field of Asian American studies in general, a more detailed examination of the differences between their arguments is necessary to fully understand Imagining the Nation. While Lowe's project exposes the limits of the liberal nation-state and articulates subject formations which are alternative to the citizen-subject, Li's purpose is to recuperate the nation-state as a site of liberatory potential.

To understand the stakes of Li's argument, we must examine the ways in which it departs from Lowe's. Lowe argues in Immigrant Acts that the U.S. state has tried and continues to try to "resolve" the competing and conflicting demands of the nation-state and capital through the racialization of Asian immigrants. Lowe demonstrates that in the period between 1850 and World War II the contradiction between the demands of the national economy (which needed a large influx of cheap, vulnerable and differentiated labor) and those of the nation-state (which needed to constitute itself through a homogeneous citizenry) were "sublated" (13) through the racialization of Asian immigrants as a result of a series of exclusion acts, bars to citizenship, and other disfranchisements. In contrast, the period from World War II onward saw Asian racialization as the locus of contradictions between global capital (which needs an economic internationalism to undermine the power of the nation-state) and the U.S. nation-state (which needs to consolidate a strong, hegemonic state in order to dictate the terms of the global restructuring of capital to its own benefit). In the U.S. these processes have created both a demand for low-wage labor in the service sector (as production has moved and continues to move overseas) that is filled by new waves of Asian and Latin American immigration. Yet the repressed contradictions of the earlier period--sublated through the racialization of Asian immigrant labor--return courtesy of these new immigrants, who, coming as they do from societies ravaged by U.S. imperialist wars and neo-colonial regimes, "retain precisely the memories of imperialism that the U.S. nation seeks to forget" (17). Haunted by the memories of a U.S. nation-state based on Asian immigrant racialization and imperialist projects in Asia, Asian American culture must necessarily be at odds with a national culture that seeks to erase such histories. To again quote Lowe: "This distance from the national culture constitutes Asian American culture as an alternative formation that produces cultural expressions materially and aesthetically at odds with the resolution of the citizen in the nation" (6). In other words, Asian American culture produces alternatives to national culture and thus creates possibilities for...