Inter‐Asia Cultural Studies

ISSN: 1464-9373 (Print) 1469-8447 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/riac20

Our visionary comrade, Donald M. Lowe,

1928–2009

Tani E. Barlow

To cite this article: Tani E. Barlow (2010) Our visionary comrade, Donald M. Lowe, 1928–2009,
Inter‐Asia Cultural Studies, 11:1, 3-5, DOI: 10.1080/14649370903403488

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14649370903403488

Published online: 17 Mar 2010.

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Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Volume 11, Number 1, 2010

Our visionary comrade, Donald M. Lowe ( ), 1928–2009

Tani E. BARLOW

barlow.tani@gmail.com
Inter-Asia
10.1080/14649370903403488
RIAC_A_440526.sgm
1464-9373
Original
Taylor
102010
11
TaniBarlow
00000March
and
& Article
Francis
Cultural
(print)/1469-8447
Francis
2010Studies (online)

Donald Mingdah Lowe was born in Shang-
hai on December 27, 1928 and died at the age
of 80 on July 29, 2009 in Houston, Texas. The
arc of his early life took him from Shanghai
to Hong Kong, Rangoon, Dali (Yunnan), and
Calcutta, always a step ahead of the Japanese
Imperial Army, and finally to the United
States in 1934. He was the eldest son of an
upwardly mobile Christian family. Donald’s
father, Chuan-hua Gershom Lowe, and his
mother Hsien-en Sharon Lowe (née Nie),
worked in the diplomatic corps of the
Guomindang until Liberation in 1949. Origi-
nally from Jiujiang, Jiangxi, Gershom’s
branch of the Lowes had moved to Hankou
in Hubei, where Donald’s grandfather
worked in the Anglican missionary
compound. The family dialect and comfort
food is Hubei. After a dislocated and spotty
primary education during the family’s long
flight, Donald attended Williston Academy
in Easthampton Massachusetts, Yale Univer-
sity and took his MA at the University of
Chicago (where his father and uncles had
been educated) and his doctoral degree in
History at the University of California,
Berkeley; his daughters were born during
those years. His first marriage ended in

ISSN 1464–9373 Print/ISSN 1469–8447 Online/10/010003–03 © 2010 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/14649370903403488
4 Tani E. Barlow
divorce. Lowe taught at Duquesne Univer-
sity, University of California at Riverside
and City College of New York before settling
at San Francisco State University in 1968,
where he taught until his retirement in 1993.
Ever itinerant, he set down temporary roots
in Columbia, Missouri, Seattle, Washington
and Houston, Texas, for his temperament
and his life experience oriented him to look
optimistically toward what he always called
‘the next destination.’
Donald Lowe wrote three major books:
The Function of China in Marx, Lenin and Mao
(1966, University of California Press), The
History of Bourgeois Perception (1982, Univer-
sity of Chicago Press) and The Body in Late-
Capitalist USA (1995, Duke University
Press). Each seemingly published just before
its time, each went on to become what he
liked to call ‘a sleeper,’ outliving the work
of his contemporaries by many decades. An
inspired teacher, he stubbornly persisted in
giving an elite university education to the
working class commuter students who
made up the bulk of his student following.
Among those who went on to fruitful intel-
lectual and literary work are Bob Black, the
prominent Anarchist theoretician,1 and
performance artist Stanya Kahn.2 And
during the turbulent years of the 1960s,
Donald Lowe began the great odyssey of his
existence: recreating himself in the image of
the man he sought to be – learning, he
claimed, as much from his counter-culture
students as they from him, binding with us
to start his life anew. He grew a moustache
and his hair long. He lived as passionately
as any of us did during those extraordinary
times. He turned back to Marx, Lenin and
Mao as sources of intellectual inspiration,
rather than simply evidence, while also
embracing and interpreting the tidal wave
of Foucault and Kojeve, Baudrillard and
Bataille, Deleuze and Guattari, and, in a
fiery three-year-long reading group he orga-
nized at SFSU in the mid 1980s, Laclau,
Mouffe and Derrida.
After retiring, Donald moved to Seattle
where he worked with his wife, Tani
Barlow, and local architect Anne Van Dyne
to create a beautiful modernist loft space in
the Union Art Co-op where the couple lived
for 14 years. During these years, he worked
steadily to support the journal positions,
founded in 1992, along with his wife’s
cohort of theoretically adventurous and
politically engaged scholars whose interests
and education had led them to specialize in
the languages and histories of ‘Asia’
(‘whatever that means,’ in the catch slogan
of those early days). In that capacity he
served as a bridge between more orthodox
Marxist scholars, who found it difficult to
accept the ideas he embraced, ideas that
seemed so threatening to some of his own
peers, such as so-called ‘post-modernism’ or
‘post-structuralism.’ In these years, he also
traveled extensively. He indulged his
passion for Italy, and particularly Sicily. He
took his partner to Istanbul and to Morocco
and his entire, three-generation, stem family
to Yunnan. Mostly he reconnected with
extended family, friends and colleagues in
China and Japan where he spent significant
amounts of time and made many new
friends. He was always the oldest person in
the room. And in a room of his age group he
was always the most alive.
Donald Lowe was an immigrant scholar.
He had rock-like confidence in his upbring-
ing, as a loving son to his mother, filial son to
his father and loyal father to his children, and
in this regard considered himself to be a
Chinese man. After sojourning with his wife
at Shanghai Teachers College in 1980–81 (an
experience the two wrote about in Teaching
China’s Lost Generation, 1987, San Francisco:
China Books), Lowe and Barlow opened their
lives to Luo relatives from the PRC, support-
ing the education and migration of two neph-
ews and two nieces, and living in the same
compound with ten members of the extended
immigrant family, including the patriarch,
Gershom, who the couple supported until his
death in 1995. Donald Lowe labored for his
family and, like his father before him, became
a bridge across the ocean.
Yet, Donald Lowe’s greatest struggle
was to become more and to live beyond the
obligations and expectations that he came,
particularly as he aged, to affectionately
embrace as core elements of the complex
 Our visionary comrade, Donald M. Lowe, 1928–2009 5
person he had become. He was conserva-
tive, excessively frugal, private and bookish
in everyday life, and an apologetic, self-
proclaimed ‘party pooper.’ He compulsively
played Solitaire to relax, and often cheated.
Ba Jin’s novel Family affected him deeply
and he referred to himself as a morose May
Fourth-style intellectual at times. However,
he was deeply versed in the love lives of
Hollywood movie stars of the 1920s through
the 1970s, a knowledge that seemingly gave
him as much pleasure as Sartre’s Search for a
Method. Fearful that his grandchildren
might lack a sense of humor he consciously
undertook a humor campaign, sending
annual comical gifts and pictures of himself
in improbable outfits or situations.
Although not gregarious by nature, he
nonetheless took to heart the ethical and
political imperative to live a visible and
exemplary life devoted to justice, fairness,
cultural flexibility, a commitment never to
discriminate, to compassion and civility. He
had beautiful manners and a graceful way
of focusing his attention on every interlocu-
tor without discrimination. His greatest
personal struggle was to learn to love freely
and to accept the loving presence of other
people. Donald Lowe did not always
succeed in his desire, for he was as human
as the next person. But more than anyone I
have ever met, he struggled hard at this
project until the day he died.
Donald Lowe was our comrade. As
Jesook Song pointed out in a letter she wrote
to Donald after hearing of his death, and
addressed to him as her comrade,
Comradeship might sound anachronis-
tic in the context where faithful collec-
tive actions with common political goals
became rare and sabotaged as dogmatic,
where intellectuals are relinquished
from the representational authority, and
where revolutionary ideologies were
subsumed under Cold War competi-
tions within state-based ideological
power. However, you are one of vision-
aries who knew and showed that this is
the time we need to build true comrade-
ship neither losing focus on revolution
nor denying different positions.
This sentiment is echoed many times in the
letters and tributes that comrades around
the world have sent and shared.
Donald M. Lowe leaves behind his life
partner of 35 years, Tani Barlow, his daugh-
ters Lisa M. Lowe of San Diego, and Lydia
M. Lowe of Cambridge, MA and three
granddaughters, Juliet Nebolon, Kaya Mark
and Thea Mark, as well as a large, loving
family in the United States, the People’s
Republic of China and the United Kingdom.
Notes
1. See website: http://www.spunk.org/texts/
writers/black/sp001644.html, accessed 20
September 2009.
2. See website: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/
03/02/arts/design/02fink.html, accessed 20
September 2009.