Lisa Lowe's work delves into the intricate intersections of cultural politics and history, exploring how racial and ethnic identities are shaped and reshaped by migration and globalization. Her scholarship critically examines the complex relationships between culture, politics, and capital, analyzing how these dynamics influence the formation of communities and identities across diverse geographical and historical landscapes. Lowe employs an interdisciplinary approach, weaving together literary criticism, cultural studies, and historical analysis. Her insights illuminate the specificities of Asian American cultural politics and the broader global entanglements that define the contemporary world.
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.
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.