“These latter efforts attempt to define ethnicity in a manner that accounts not only for cultural inheritance, but for active cultural construction as well. In other words, they suggest that the making of Asian American culture may be a much ‘messier’ process than unmediated vertical transmission from one generation to another, including practices that are partly inherited and partly modified, as well as partly invented” (27).
Lowe’s “Hybridity, Multiplicity” touches on a very interesting revision of viewing Asian-American literature not as a monolith that neatly parses the struggle between Western and Eastern familial values, but as a messier intersection of how generations can also be a confounding factor in assimilation or anti-assimilation. With Lowe’s apt observation with how complicated categorizing the Asian American experience can be, due to the swath of ethnicities that are comprised under the umbrella term of “Asian American,” do the benefits of grouping these seemingly disparate experiences together outweigh the potential harm, such as flattening the intricacies of each ethnic experience and potentially inviting stereotype? How can we responsibly categorize this identity and literature falling under/expressing this identity, without leaving out nuance?
In Hall’s analysis of Freudian theory regarding formation of identity, he says that it “accepts that identities are never unified and, in late modern times, increasingly fragmented and fractured; never singular but multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic, discourses, practices and positions” (4). How can this be applied to Lowe’s article? If Hall is asserting that all identity is by nature fragmented, what makes Asian American identity different than other identities? Is there a difference?
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