Week Four: Lowe: Immigration, Citizenship, Racialization

1.     Citizens p. 2

2.     U.S. National Culture: “ images, histories, narratives that place, displace and replace” p. 2, 29

3.     NB:  the importance of national culture in the largely invisible

4.     And political formation p. 2

5.     And traditional “unities” of “community, nation and culture” p. 3

6.     “re-membering” p. 3

7.     “The American citizen has been defined against the Asian immigrant: legally, economically, and culturally.”  p. 5, and 8 NB:  exclusion acts, bars to naturalization and war

8.     Immigrant Acts:  idea of the Asian “immigrant” and “national culture” and the idea that someone is foreign or foreign looking.  Also, agency (“acts of labor, resistance, memory survival and politicked cultural work that emerges from dislocation and disidentification).  Being subject to and a subject of. p. 6-7 and 9

9.     “Immigration as the most important historical and discursive site of Asian American Formation:  modulates national, global, economic, cultural and legal spheres.”  P. 10

10.  “A return to the Imperial center” p. 16  NB:  “the relationship of the history of U.S. involvement in Asia and the historical racialization of Asians in the U.S.”  p. 16, 17, 18.  Conquest and occupation; colonialism/modernization and development.

11.  Projections on the Asian Body:  p. 18-19

12.  The limits and failure of inclusion:  “political emancipation” through citizenship, “requires negation of a history of social relations” formed by racial projects, and including empire and colonization  p. 23 and 24

13.  Refusing a minority position: why internal critiques of enlightenment universals do not go far enough.  Location of Lowe’s critique (not Marx or the Frankfurt School) is Asian American Acts and Culture p. 33

14.  “nation,” local, global movement and force p. 34

15.  Cultural Nationalism:  and the immigrant, and representation. p. 34-5

16.  NB:  “critique of citizenship generated by its specific history opens the space for such cross-racial and cross-national possibilities p. 35.

17.    Examine the question of relationship to state!