Books by Lisa Lowe

Examining and historicizing the concept of "e;otherness"e; in both literature and criticism, Lisa Lowe explores representations of non-European cultures in British and French writings from the eighteenth through the twentieth century. Lowe traces the intersections of culture, class, and sexuality in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Turkish Embassy Letters and Montesquieu's Lettres persanes and discusses tropes of orientalism, racialism, and romanticism in Flaubert. She then turns to debates in Anglo-American and Indian criticism on Forster's Passage to India and on the utopian projection of China in the poststructuralist theories of Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes and in the journal Tel Quel.

Reading across archives, canons, and continents, Lisa Lowe examines the relationships between Europe, Asia, and the Americas in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- centuries. She argues that Western liberal ideology, African slavery, Asian indentured labor, colonialism and trade must be understood as being mutually constitutive.

This special issue of positions confronts questions of what it is to be Asian and how that differs from being Asian American.

Discusses the contradictions whereby Asians have been included in the workplaces and markets of the US nation-state, yet, through exclusion laws and bars from citizenship, have been distanced from the terrain of national culture.