The Power of Culture: Asian American Immigration, Citizenship, and Racialization

The Contradiction of Asian American Citizenship and Culture

• Conceptual Meditation on the Nation: The essay originates as a meditation on the concept of the "nation," particularly the universalism underlying it, in the wake of the $1996$ Association for Asian American Studies meeting in Washington, D.C.
• Materialist Critique: Lisa Lowe proposes a critique of universalism through a materialist account of Asian immigration to the United States.
• Asian American Culture as Dialectical Site: The essay frames Asian American culture not merely as an ethnic subset but as a critical, dialectical site relative to the political forms of the nation, including the state, government, and representative democracy.
• Core Thematic Link: There is an inherent, historically contradictory formation of Asian Americans in relation to citizenship, where they are placed "within" the nation's markets and workplaces but marked as "foreign" and "outside" the national polity.

Jeannie Barroga’s "Walls": The Vietnam War Memorial as a Site of Contestation

• Dramatic Framework: The essay begins by referencing Jeannie Barroga’s play "Walls" ($1989$), which dramatizes the controversy surrounding the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C.
• Conflict of Representation: The play portrays the tension surrounding Maya Ying Lin, the Chinese American woman architect who designed the memorial at the age of $21$.
  • The Veterans' Argument: Veterans and veterans’ organizations argued they were not "represented" in the abstract, modernist lines of the design.
  • The Demand for Form: Veterans demanded a representational statue with soldiers and an American flag be placed beside the official monument.
  • The Design Specifics: The official monument is a black, V-shaped stone horizontal to the earth, etched with the names of the dead.
• Significance of the Vietnam War ($1955-75$): The war shook the stability and coherence of U.S. national identity. It was an "unpopular" war from which the U.S. did not emerge "victorious," leading to the disruption of traditional unities like "community" and "nation."
• Aesthetic vs. Political Representation: The play suggests that the question of whether an Asian American can design a national monument is a debate about political representation. The monument is viewed by some as an unresolved contradiction, a "gash" that would not heal, representing a "return of the repressed."
• Triangulation of Identities: Barroga (a Filipina American) triangulates Chinese American, Filipina American, and the unremembered Vietnamese positions in the play.

Theoretical Definitions: National Culture and the Abstract Citizen

• The Political Space of the Nation: This space is defined as being simultaneously juridically legislated, territorially situated, and culturally embodied.
• Definition of National Culture: The "collectively forged images, histories, and narratives that place, displace, and replace individuals in relation to the national polity." It serves to integrate differentiated peoples into identifying with the national project.
• The Abstract Citizen: The legal and political concept of the citizen enfranchises subjects within the public sphere but defines them by the "negation of the material conditions of work and the inequalities of the property system."
• The Individual Subject as Citizen: The individual is formed as a citizen through the terrain of national culture—metaphorically introduced by the Statue of Liberty, discovered by the immigrant, and dreamed in a common language.
• The "Split" Subject: In being represented as a citizen, the subject is "split off" from the unrepresentable histories of situated embodiment that contradict the abstract form of citizenship.
  • Culture as a Medium of the Present: The imagined equivalences and identifications through which the individual invents a relationship with the national collective.
  • Culture as a Mediator of the Past: The site through which history is grasped as fragments, shocks, and disjunctions.

Historical Genealogy of Exclusion and Naturalization Laws

• The Asian Immigrant vs. The American Citizen: Over the last $150$ years, the American citizen has been defined over against the Asian immigrant legally, economically, and culturally.
• "Asia" as a Site of Anxiety: The U.S. nation-state figures Asia as exotic or barbaric while viewing Asian laborers as a "yellow peril" threatening to displace White European immigrants.
• Chronology of Exclusion and Naturalization Acts:
  • $1790$: Naturalization law stipulates that "Whites only" could be naturalized as citizens.
  • $1870$: Naturalization extended to men of African descent; Asian men remain barred.
  • $1875$: The Page Law effectively halts the immigration of Chinese women.
  • $1882$: Chinese Exclusion Act (suspending labor immigration and barring re-entry).
  • $1917$: Exclusion of Asian Indians via a "barred zone" (South Asia, Southeast Asia, Pacific Islands, except U.S. possessions like Philippines and Guam).
  • $1924$: Immigration Act bars entry to all "aliens ineligible to citizenship" (targeting Japanese and Koreans populations).
  • $1934$: Tydings-McDuffie Act cuts Filipino immigration to a quota of $50$ persons per year and reclassifies Filipinos as "aliens."
  • $1943-52$: Period of repeal acts; Magnuson Act of $1943$ grants Chinese the right to naturalize.
  • $1952$: McCarran-Walter Act creates the "Asia-Pacific triangle" and retains exclusionary language regarding those "prejudicial to the public interest."
  • $1965$: Immigration and Nationality Act abolishes national origin quotas but introduces new specifications.
• Wars in Asia as Context: Racialized figurations of Asian workers were displaced onto domestic spaces during conflicts in the Philippines ($1898-1910$), Japan ($1941-45$), Korea ($1950-53$), and Vietnam ($1955-75$).

The Gendering of Asian American Subjects

• Technology of Gendering: The administration of citizenship functioned as a method of both racialization and gendering.
• The Male Presumption: Changes to laws (like the $1943$ Magnuson Act) legally presumed the Chinese immigrant to be male; Chinese wives were only specified in relation to the changed status of the male immigrant.
• Feminized Positionality: Before $1940$, Chinese male immigrants often occupied a "feminized" position relative to White male citizens due to their concentration in service-sector jobs (laundry, restaurants) and the absence of family units (the "bachelor" community).
• The Cable Act of $1922$: Mandated that U.S.-born female citizens who married an "alien ineligible to citizenship" lost their own citizenship.
• Contemporary Gendering: Anti-immigrant campaigns in the current economy often construct "legal" immigrant labor as male and "illegal" immigrant labor as female.

Material Contradictions: Capital, State, and the Global Economy

• Capital vs. State Imperatives:
  • Capital's Need: Requires "abstract labor" and is unconcerned with origins; seeks cheaper factors of production (e.g., Chinese labor in the $1880s$ used to maximize profits through racial divisions).
  • The Nation-State's Need: Requires a citizenry bound by unified race, language, and culture to participate in the political sphere.
• Resolution Through Law: The contradiction is "resolved" through legal exclusions and restricted enfranchisement that racializes groups as "non-White."
• Global Capitalism Post-$1980s$: Manufacturing has shifted to Asia and Latin America, creating a "pull" for Asian and Latina women to fill insecure assembly and service-sector jobs in the U.S.
• Refining the Concept of Contradiction: Lowe departs from a singular Marxist teleology of capital/labor. She argues for an "overdetermined" model where economic contradiction is always simultaneously racial and gendered.

Asian American Culture as an Alternative Space and Counter-Site

• The "Foreigner-Within": A national memory haunts the Asian American, who is viewed as a metonym for Asia and an "alien" even when born in the U.S.
• Cultural Resistance: Because the political terrain cannot resolve inequality, it erupts in culture. Asian American culture is a site where "the palimpsest of lost memories is reinvented."
• Alternative Subjectivity: The historical alienation from citizenship allows for the emergence of a political subject in critique of the category of the citizen.
• Definitions of Identity and Agency: Asian Americans are not just "subject to" exclusion but are "subjects of" the immigration process—agents of political change and social transformation.
• Articulate Silences: Culture serves as a site where suppressed histories and "unlike varieties of silence" transform into articulacy.

Questions & Discussion (Referenced Scholars and Theories)

• Michael Omi and Howard Winant: Defined "racial formation" as an unstable, decentered complex of social meanings transformed by political struggle ($1994$).
• Michel Foucault: Referenced regarding "genealogy" and "governmentality," suggesting that governance bears on populations through techniques of security and economic administration.
• Theodor Adorno: Quoted regarding "Negative Dialectics"; argues that the thought of unity is the measure of heterogeneity and that the particular is often a function of the universal.
• Louis Althusser: Discussed regarding "contradiction and overdetermination"—the way different contradictions converge in historical moments.
• Robert Blauner: Distinguished between "colonized" and "immigrant" minorities, noting that the category of "immigrant" often erases hierarchies and the specific process of racialization.
• Chandra Talpade Mohanty: Argued that the definition of citizenship is always a gendered and racial formation tied to the patriarchal capitalist state.