Lisa Lowe. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics.   Durham: Duke, 1996.
"instead of understanding the law as merely a part of the “superstructure” that “reflects” social relations, I have posited that legal institutions reproduce the capitalist relations of production as racialized gendered relations and are therefore symptomatic and determining of the relations of production themselves.  In other words, immigration law reproduces a racially segmented and stratified labor force for capital’s needs, inasmuch as such legal disenfranchisements or restricted enfranchisements seek to resolve such inequalities by deferring them in the promise of equality on the political terrain of representation.  The state governs though the political terrain, dictating in that process the forms and sites of contestation.  Where the political terrain can neither resolve nor suppress inequality, it erupts in culture.  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. This is not to argue that cultural struggle can ever be the exclusive site for practice; it is rather to argue that if the state suppresses dissent by governing subjects through rights, citizenship, and political representation, it is only through culture that we conceive and enact new subjects and practices in antagonism to the regulatory locus of the citizen-subject by way of culture that we can question those modes of government."  (22)


"for Asian immigrants from Vietnam, Korea, or the Philippines, this negation involves “forgetting” the history of war in Asia and adopting the national historical narrative that disavows the existence of an American Imperial Project.  It requires acceding to a political fiction of equal rights that is generated through the denial of history, a denial that reproduces the omission of history as the ontology of the nation."  (27) 
 

 
My response, (hereafter Crow):

I wonder often, about the place of culture, of who creates culture and why.  If sexual identity, if one's sexuate being weren't up for contestations, would queer become marked in some other fashion, are those of us who enthusiastically claim "perv" as a location, are we inevitably going to migrate towards those margins, however articulated?  a way of being, a familiar, an important. 

but I also wonder, at what cost, we attempt relation.  At what cost must we give (on all sides) for empathy.  What narratives are disavowed?  What narratives disrupted?  What identity boundaries shaken?  The fictions of equal rights. The good Queer, or the good immigrant...denials that gain access.  Can we really write in the academy about queer?  About sexuate beings?  Does it, must it remain a vanilla narrative, and assimilationist narrative?  If we gave a glimpse of the anger, the frustration, the rage, would we be categorized as the crazy queers--the one's who make up things, who don't have a clear perception of reality?  Paranoid freaks. 
 

Lisa Lowe Continued:

While the nation proposes immigrant “naturalization” as a narrative of “political emancipation” that is meant to resolve in American liberal democracy as a terrain to which all citizens have equal access and in which all are equally represented, it is a narrative that denies the establishment of citizenship out of unequal relationships between dominant white citizens and subordinated racialized noncitizens and women. (27)
 

 
 
Crow:

In other projects, I am curious about how entitlement transfers.  So if I am a part of the mythical norm--the term Audre Lorde uses for "white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, Christian, and financially secure" (116)---and I start to age, to face discrimination for my aging body, do I transfer over entitlement from other places, deny the powerful role of the dominant imaginary, reshape the dominant imaginary?  Or do I fail to have strategies for negotiating a sudden self-awareness about lack of power?  Do I suddenly realize that I'm living in hell?  How does entitlement, and the familiarity of entitlement shape response to horror, to discrimination, to events that question one's power?  The assumption that equal access has always been available...the denial of apartheid like structures...
 
 
Lisa Lowe
"In the former project, the immigrant is fixed and taken as the symbol of Asian Americans . . . . . .
In the later project, however, the immigrant is at once both symbol and allegory for Asian Americans.  The immigrant is located in social relations and dialectically placed within historical process and struggle, but the concept of allegory presumes that social and historical processes are not transparent, taking place through what Benjamin calls “correspondences” rather than through figures that represent or reflect a given totality.  Such correspondences are neither resemblances nor analogies but displaced, mediated connections in which the “seizing” of the relation depends not only on a formal analysis of the social and historical conditions but also on the simultaneous comprehension of a displacement, a break, or even an absence–all signaling the impossibility of totality.
 
The latter project proposes immigration as the locus for the encounter of the national border and its “outsides” as the site of both the law and the “crossing of the borders” that is its negative critique.  Immigration as both symbol and allegory does not metaphorize the experiences of “real” immigrants but finds in the located contradictions of immigration both the critical intervention in the national paradigm at the point of its conjunction with the international and the theoretical nexus that challenges the global economic from the standpoint of the locality.  In addition, the allegory of immigration does not isolate a singular instance of one immigrant formation, but cuts across individualized racial formations and widens the possibility of thinking and practice across racial and national distinctions."  (35)

"One of the important acts that the immigrant performs is breaking the dyadic, vertical determination that situates the subject in relation to the state, building instead horizontal community with and between others who are in different locations subject to and subject of the state.  Asian American culture is thus situated to generate what Dips Chakrabarty has termed “other narratives of self and community that do not look to the state/citizen bind as the ultimate construction of sociality.”   (36)