Attempted Assimilation: Immigrant Inclusion and Outsiderness in Native Speaker Josie Reynolds College

The Asian American immigrant experience is often marked by both assimilation to American norms and, somewhat ironically, exclusion from the dominant American culture. In her novel Immigrant Acts, Lisa Lowe describes the concept of immigrant inclusion as “stories of the Asian immigrant’s journey from foreign strangeness to assimilation and citizenship—[which] may in turn attempt to produce cultural integration and its symbolization on the national political terrain. Yet these same narratives are driven by the repetition and return of episodes in which the Asian American, even as a citizen, continues to be located outside the cultural and racial boundaries of the nation.” The idea of immigrant inclusion provides a frequently toxic motivation for acculturation, specifically within Asian American communities. Similarly, this process of attempted assimilation to white American norms further excludes Asian Americans from Lowe’s described “cultural and racial boundaries of the nation” (6). By way of this systematic exclusion, the concept of immigrant inclusion lends itself to a converse idea: immigrant outsiderness. In her 2017 dissertation, Pangri G. Mehta defines the concept of immigrant outsiderness to mean “the subjective...