Lisa Lowe > Quotes

“...it is necessary to act within but to think beyond our received humanist tradition and, all the while, to imagine a much more complicated set of stories about the emergence of the now, in which what is foreclosed as unknowable is forever saturating the "what-can-be-known." We are left with the project of visualizing, mourning, and thinking "other humanities" within this received genealogy of "the human.”
― Lisa Lowe

“it may be very clear indeed who “owns” culture. It is pronounced in the official language all must learn to speak, is declared if you can’t afford to buy the garments that you are employed to sew, and is evident if your call to 911 fails to bring emergency assistance to your neighborhood.”
― Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics

“while Asian American cultural identity emerges in the context of the racialized exclusion of Asian immigrants from enfranchisement in the political and cultural spheres of the United States, important contradictions exist between an exclusively Asian American cultural nationalist construction of identity and the material heterogeneity of the Asian American constituency, particularly class, gender, and national-origin differences among peoples of Asian descent in the United States.”
― Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics

“Let us emphasize instead that owing to complex, uneven material histories of colonization and the oppression of racialized groups within the United States, the sites of minority or colonized literary production are at different distances from the canonical nationalist project of reconciling constituencies to idealized forms of community and subjectivity.”
― Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics

“Without these tensions, multiculturalism fails to come to grips with the material inequalities and strata of a city like Los Angeles: the separations, unevennesses of opportunity because of different groups’ histories of labor, racism, and poverty.”
― Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics

“We understand the transnational to denote the stage of globalized capitalism characterized by David Harvey, Fredric Jameson, and others as the universal extension of a differentiated mode of production that relies on flexible accumulation and mixed production to incorporate all sectors of the global economy into its logic of commodification.”
― Lisa Lowe, The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital

“neither the postmodern conception of the transnational nor the liberal assumption of the congruence of capitalism, democracy, and freedom are currently adequate to address the ubiquity and variety of alternatives.”
― Lisa Lowe, The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital

“The narratives that suppress tension and opposition suggest that we have already achieved multiculturalism, that we know what it is, and that it is defined simply by the coexistence and juxtaposition of greater numbers of diverse groups; these narratives allow us to ignore the profound and urgent gaps, the inequalities and conflicts, among racial, ethnic, and immigrant groups.”
― Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics

“liberalism [is] a project that includes at once both the universal promises of rights, emancipation, wage labor, and free trade, as well as the global divisions and asymmetries on which the liberal tradition depends, and according to which such liberties are reserved for some and wholly denied to others. In this sense, the modern distinction between definitions of the human and those to whom such definitions do not extend is the condition of possibility for Western liberalism, and not its particular exception.”
― Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents

“aesthetic representation is not an analogue for the material positions, means, or resources of those populations.”
― Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics