Lisa Lowe’s 1991 essay “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, and Multiplicity: Marking Asian American Differences,” published in Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, argued for the profound generativity of the concept of difference in cultural politics. By instead characterizing Asian American racial formation and its cultures through the terms heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity, Lowe challenged the orientalist binaries that had for so long constricted considerations of Asian American culture. Because difference could generate affiliation and expansion, rather than unity, closure, and finitude, it would become a new starting point for apprehending minority cultures outside of the dominant frameworks of national inclusion and normative citizenship. This essay uses the frameworks of “recovery,” “reckoning,” and “remediation” to structure a discussion of the impact of Lisa Lowe’s work, and particularly the insights offered by her 1991 “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, and Multiplicity” essay, on the field of Asian American studies.

Huang and Mendoza’s introduction to the fourth volume of Asian American Literatures in Transition offers a refresher on Lisa Lowe’s formative critical work, Immigrant Acts (1996), published at the beginning of the time period covered in this volume. The authors reframe Lowe’s terms “heterogeneity,” “hybridity,” and “multiplicity” within several watershed moments affecting Asian Americans and other groups in the USA: including the Defense of Marriage Act (1996), the September 11 attacks, the decriminalization of sodomy (2003), the COVID pandemic, and the Black Lives Matter movement. While many of these events exacerbated the vulnerability and precarity of some Asian American groups, the turbulence of the time fueled the Asian American literary imagination as writers in this period drew on more representational strategies for their literary experimentations than in previous periods. This volume covers precisely these tensions: artistic proliferations in the face of injustice, recognition in the face of social erasures, innovation in the face of neoliberal white supremacy’s monopoly on wealth and violence.