Chang Rae Lee’s Native Speaker: Diasporic Power Art

8/30/05

Chang Rae Lee’s Native Speaker: Diasporic Power Art

Deleuze and Guattari in “What is a Minor Literature?” discuss the “literary struggle” of a Diasporic literature (Jewish literature), an idea borrowed from Franz Kafka, who believes that Diasporic literature is “something impossible” when it is written in the language of the host country, because its cultural authenticity is compromised in the process (Richter 167).  What Kafka’s “literary struggle” suggests, then, is that in order to retrieve a true authentic meaning of a diasporic literature, the reader must be able to de-code the culturally cryptic, narratological intensions of the author, so, too, is the Native Speaker.  Overtly, the novel is about the three protagonists’ social descent due to their Asian complex, while covertly, it is about their ascension into the three hierarchical powers of America: (1) “finance,” by Henry’s father who is an “adopter”; (2) “intelligence,” by Henry who is an “assimilator”; and (3) “politics,” by Kwang who is a “merger.”  Ultimately, the social ascent of the three diasporic characters is achieved through what I call a “diasporic power art” for two reasons:  First, because their industrial successes are rendered through intense, dynamic reinventions of their diasporic subjectivities and conditions in semi-fictitious ways.  Second, because each of their individual American becomings can be aesthetically described as a “diasporic cultural art” which entails “cultural aesthetics”—the elements that elevate/cultivate one’s cultural refinement.

Asian diasporas are adept cultural artists, who reinvent themselves in order to acclimate from one end of cultural atmosphere to another—from East to West.  The nature of diasporic condition—living not in one’s motherland but in an adopted/foreign land—requires nomadic “choices,” “versatility,” and “resilience.”  It requires constant mental, physical, and cultural adjustments, but most importantly, entails recasting of their personas.  Linguistically, culturally, and phenotypically, since the East and West are arguably not the most alike, Asian diasporic acculturation into Western decorum and society is more adversative and intense.  Their inchoate American becoming is molded and remolded into an often indeterminate subjectivity by turbulent, (at times traumatic) bipolar cultural forces, thus their new life in America is almost a fiction to their consciousness.  It is a process that requires both artful nimbleness and itinerant hardiness on their part, which can be described as a “diasporic cultural art,” something that cannot be gauged by methodical or political formulas.  Rather, its appreciation comes through the lens of “cultural aesthetics”—elements that elevate or cultivate one’s cultural refinement.  Of the infinite elements of what one considers/includes as cultural aesthetics, there are at least two prevailing traits shared by all three diasporic characters which enhance/sanctify their immigrant life: (1) their ability to make prudent or conscientious choices; and (2) their nomadic versatility—the ability to reinvent themselves as needed.  The three characters in the novel employ in varying degrees these and other diasporic cultural aesthetics, not only to cultivate their nascent American subjectivities, but more primarily to adapt to their new culture.

Just as the immigrant stories of the three characters in Native Speaker —Henry’s father, Henry, and Kwang—differ from one another, so are the colors and shapes of their diasporic arts.  To fare well in their new adopted land (America), these three characters reinvent themselves as three different types of semi-fictitious personas: (1) Henry’s father as an “adopter”; (2) Henry as an assimilator; and (3) Kwang as a “merger.”  Each of these characters half-fictitiously “chooses,” in most part, what function they want to play for the dominant in power.  For instance, Henry’s father selectively “adopts” primarily one ideology of America—capitalism—while he largely ignores the others.  He therefore chooses to “adapt” to America’s economic conditions in the ghettos for financial gains.  Henry, on the other hand, wants to be singularly American, so he chooses to assimilate by gaining American intelligence.  Finally, Kwang dreams of coalition among different ethnic groups in America, so he chooses to merge different cultures for a political reason.  These brands of diasporic characters face challenges unique to their own type, and each of their moral or sociopolitical “rise” (ascent) and “fall” (descent) involve synergy of multifaceted cultural aesthetics aforementioned.  While on the plot level, their ultimate “fall” as an “adopter,” “assimilator,” or “merger” may be merely sympathetic to the readers of Western consciousness, it is simultaneously unnerving and heartening to the diasporic readers, because behind each of the character’s “fall” is the antithetical message of “rise” (hope) for them.

I. The Father’s Fall and Rise as an “Adopter”

As an opportunistic “adopter” of Western ideologies, Henry’s father fully subscribes to American capitalism, even at the cost of demoralization and intellectual enervation.  In Henry’s words, his father considers “capitalism” to be the “unseen force” and has been “single-minded[ly] determine[ed]” to succeed “through [his] twenty-five years of green-grocering in a famous ghetto” (49).  As an owner of labor-intensive grocery chains, he is proud that he is a rich man, though not proud of the industry.  He suffers intellectual atrophy and dehumanization, not only because his high scholarship from Korea is wasted—a top “industrial engineer” with a master’s degree from the best college—but because his limited English and ethnic isolation displace him from the social and intellectual centers of the U.S. (56, 57).  Though he lives in an upper class neighborhood, the wealth he amasses merely becomes an ethnic signifier—“Oriental Jews”—which does nothing to help him blend in with the mainstream Americans (53): “he never fe[els] fully comfortable in his fine house in Ardsley (affluent neighborhood)” (52).  His American becoming is thus at the social periphery, where he is a perpetual outsider without affect.  More tragically, he is even diminished to ethical immorality.  Henry describes his father’s demoralized mentality in America: “If anything, I think my father would choose to see my deceptions in a rigidly practical light, .  .  . the need to adapt” (297, emphasis added).  Thus as an ambitious adopter of capitalism, Henry’s father “falls” (becomes dehumanized), as his subjectivity alters from his former intellectual Korean self into an American nobody—the metamorphic versatility of a diaspora.

Indeed, at a glance, the intellectual and moral “fall” of Henry’s father seems to be a high price that he pays as an adopter of American capitalism.  Worst yet, since he loses his wife early from cancer, and he himself dies rather young without fully enjoying the fruits of his hard labor, the readers get a sense that his life in America ultimately signifies “death” or nothingness.  Yet from a historical context, there is more to his immigrant story than just the cost of dehumanization and death.  Jae Min Shin’s chronological analysis of Korean immigrants in his editorial column of Korea Times sheds insight into Henry’s father’s historical background and his financial motivation.  Shin reports in his editorial that until the 1960’s, Korean immigrants in America largely consisted of poor class: students, war-orphans, and females married to Americans; but in the 70’s, it shifted to the middle class capitalists with visions of economic expansion in America; then since the 80’s, it consists of even a higher class of entrepreneur Koreans with large investments in American companies (Shin D8).  According to Shin’s data, then, as a product of the 70’s and 80’s Korean American opportunism, Henry’s father has, in fact, successfully played his role as an “adopter” of American capitalism.  In other words, his principal reason for coming to America is not to augment his scholarship, but to make “enough money [so] that he could live in a majestic white house in Westchester and call himself a rich man,” even if that debases him into laboring with “a handful of vegetable stores” (333).  Thus, the cost of dehumanization and intellectual degeneration on the part of Henry’s father are factored in as a “fair” sacrifice to fulfill his financial desires.  In a word, he “chooses” to be what he is in America—an opportunist.  Then regardless of one’s intention, this “option to choose a different nation-state” as one’s new home is the advantageous “power” of the contemporary diasporas, which eventually does translate to his financial success in America, more than what his homeland, Korea, offers.

As a former industrial engineer, Henry’s father not only realistically estimates the “most” financial success he can accrue in America as a first generation immigrant, but maps the “maximum” his son, Henry, can approximate by purchasing a house in an affluent neighborhood.  With what he can financially provide, he wishes that his son will do better than him, and Henry, too, wants to do better than his father by studying hard, obviating his mother’s “tears. . . from her concern over [his] mediocre studies” (77).  Thus as a capitalist, Henry’s father’s seemingly dehumanizing existence is actually the intended, prudent course he willingly takes to humanize his son, and between the two, there is an inextricable causality, as the father’s “fall” (dehumanization) paves a way for his son’s intellectual “rise” as an upper class American.  Henry later comes to a deeper appreciation of his father’s sacrifice for him: “I see how my father had to retool his life to the ambitions his meager knowledge of the language and culture would allow . . . I am his lone American son, blessed with every hope and quarter he could provide” (333).  Considering the fact that Lee (the author) himself has intellectually “risen” from his well meaning immigrant parents, it is helpful to know that he has respectfully dedicated his first novel, Native Speaker, to his parents: “For my mother and my father.”  If we infer from the author’s reverence paid to his own parents, then the opportunistic immigrant life of Henry’s father which is devoid of human sociality does not suggest—contrary to its face value—that it is meaningless and pathetic.  Rather, the moral of this story is about how the father’s financial success can elevate/cultivate his son’s intellectual and social refinement in their adopted land, which sanctifies the father’s immigrant struggles.

II. Henry’s Fall and Rise as an “Assimilator”

Since, Henry as a spy is immorally engaged in treacherous activity against his own people, Henry’s moral “fall,” then, is textually a valid outcome.  While Henry’s father is a single-minded adopter of American capitalism—who enjoys a certain degree of independence due to his socio-political alienation—Henry, as an “assimilator,” on the other hand, is more scrutinized by the American society.  Henry is “a linguist of the field. . . [with] the troubling, expert power” (171, emphasis added).  Henry’s intellectual status is what Crystal Parikh in his essay, “Ethnic America Undercover: The Intellectual and minority Discourse,” describes as a “gained social position” of “minority intellectuals, [who] in gaining access to the mechanisms of cultural and political representation, no longer speak from a marginalized position” (Parikh 258).  Henry relies on his “gained intellectual position” to define himself as singularly American, an ultimate “assimilator,” by pledging allegiance to the dominant in power.  In order to keep his vows with the established— though his work involves extensive racialization and exploitation of ethnic minorities, including his own—he blinds himself to the racial dynamism in his work (Dennis’s private detective agency).  As a spy, he instead abuses his own cultural insidership and familiarity to “sell out” his own people.  He fictitiously and perfunctorily performs the racial dance which his superior, Dennis Hoagland, choreographs: “I am the obedient. . . the invisible underling. . . [and] this [is] my assimilation, so many years in the making” (202, emphasis added).  Most tragically, Henry’s fictitious selves created through the “legends” at his work—the fiction that allows him to be many persons at once—are the vestiges of a schizophrenic assimilator, who has morally “fallen” (22).

Henry’s versatility of being “many persons at once,” however, is precisely the auspicious edge of postmodern Asian Americans, when interpreted from a contravening contemporary point of view.  As an assimilator, the remnant of Asian silence in Henry is a cryptic language to those around him, including his most intimate wife, Lelia, and superiors at work, Jack and Dennis.  For example, Lelia cannot decipher “Henryspeak” (Henry’s reticence), and Jack and Dennis cannot decode the silent language and affinity exchanged between Henry and Kwang.  Henry, on the other hand, can both penetrate and dismantle theirs at will: “I and my kind possess another dimension.  We will learn every lesson of accent and idiom, we will dismantle every last pretense and practice you hold, noble as well as ruinous.  You can keep nothing safe from our eyes and ears” (320, emphasis added).  What Henry articulates in this passage is, in effect, an enunciation of the cultural edge of the contemporary polyglots—the irreducible linguistic versatility of diasporas.  

In our postmodern world, the versatile polyglots also have more “options,” both publicly (occupational) and privately (moral).  Henry—as someone with intellectual and cultural edge—is  a “denizen,” a royal assimilator not to be condemned, but to be emulated for the conscientious choice he ultimately makes between the oppressor (his boss) and the oppressed (him and his people).  According to Robin Cohen in Global Diasporas, “denizen” is a privileged postmodern diaspora with “considerable wealth and portable skills—a different group from the unskilled labour migrants of the nineteenth century” (164, 168).  In other words, in contrast to “the unskilled labour migrants” of the past, postmodern diasporas no longer need to tolerate any forms of oppressions, if s/he has the proper social, professional, or legal training/resources—in other words, “intellectual power” (Cohen 168).  As an educated person, Henry finally understands that an assimilator also has “options”: that wanting to assimilate to dominant culture does not mean one must allow oppression.  Upon this epiphany, he unshackles himself from his boss’s demonical bondage (Dennis’s detective agency).  Assertively, to the messenger of his boss, Jack, who asks, “Dennis thinks you will come back,” Henry answers, “Dennis is wrong” (288).  Henry continues, “Listen, Jack.  This is my mind finally speaking” (288).  The fact that it is Henry, not Dennis or Jack, who has the last word in the final scene of their relationship, symbolically and literally diminishes the power of the institutionalized racism in America.  Thus, as a contemporary assimilator, Henry exercises this “right to choose” as a denzen—to quit, if he must, those who oppress and exploit him and his people.  Ultimately, then, Henry’s such capability to make moral choices—free from vocational insecurity—is the prerogative of the diasporic intellectuals.

As an intellectual diaspora, Henry’s “right to choose” stretches farther than rejecting oppression; it extends to disseminating his linguistic expertise to other migrants.  At the end of the novel, Henry makes a conscientious choice.  He becomes an ESL teacher to share his intellectual privilege with the underprivileged.  He disseminates “knowledge of power”— English—unto the ethnic migrants of America, to help them better entrench their future in their new land.  Clearly, the fact that Henry converts from being a treacherous assimilator (his moral “fall”) to an intellectually nurturing teacher (his moral “rise”) is the acme of contradicting moment in the novel, which Lee deliberately dramatizes for didactic implications.  One way of interpreting Lee’s antithetical narratology is to deduce that Henry’s moral “fall” and “rise” is about an assimilator—with an intellectual power in America—making conscientious “choices” between his two cultures.  Henry ultimately chooses empathy and responsibility towards his fellow diasporas, and this change of attitude in Henry exemplifies what Lee may hope to see in other diasporic elites towards their marginal counterparts.

III. Kwang’s Fall and Rise as a “Merger”

From one’s “gained position,” if Henry falls morally, so does Kwang, politically.  If Henry is a fictitious assimilator, Kwang, on the other hand, is a versatile diasporic “merger,” who is faithful to both his past and present cultures, and plays his bi-cultural roles for a higher stage—politics in America.  He is a consummate actor of both cultures.  He is in Henry’s words someone who is “effortlessly Korean [and] effortlessly American,” simultaneously (328).  Unlike Henry, who as a spy aids in the deportation and dispersion of the ethnic migrants, Kwang—“an ambitious minority politician [with]. . . unwavering agenda [and] stridency”—labors to reconcile the hostility among the variegated minority groups in New York (139).  Similarly, unlike Henry’s father who is unmindful of racial “irony,” Kwang is both sensitive and sensible to racial issues, and attempts to form a political coalition among different races (58).  His career as a New York City Councilman, however, ends tragically, as his illegitimate fund-raising apparatus—the Korean money club “ggeh”—is disclosed by his most trusted staff members, Eduardo and Henry (280).  These two, who betray Kwang, work for those who represent the major political powers in America: Dennis Hoagland (Henry’s boss), De Roos (Kwang’s opponent), and indirectly, INS.  Thus, Kwang’s “messianic” political rise—as a prototypical self-made “American [in]. . .flyer[s]”—is pulverized by his political superiors for subtly contesting and threatening the White American politics (141).  As a diasporic merger, Kwang’s political “fall” ultimately intimates the vulnerability and indeterminacy of his self-claimed American persona in the political stage.

Read literally, Kwang’s political fall is tragic and discouraging.  More than any other characters in the novel, Kwang as a politician, espouses and magnifies his diasporic consciousness—sensitivity to multi-pluralism.  Unlike Henry and his father, he rejects tertiary roles in racial plays that are strategized by the so-called superpowers of America.  Rather, from his diasporic margins, Kwang encroaches inroad to challenge the very core of the American racial politics.  He is in Henry’s words “a larger public figure who [is] willing to speak and act outside the tight sphere of his family [ethnic enclave],” and is not “afraid like [Henry’s] mother and father” (139, emphasis added).  Henry “hadn’t yet envisioned” that a public career is something that “a Korean man would find significant or worthy of energy and devotion,” but is what Lee would like to have his (fellow diasporic) readers to pay a closer attention to, as a source of America’s deep seated racism (139, emphasis added).  Thus, it is precisely the turbulent theatricality of Kwang’s public career—especially his political “fall”—which crystallizes Lee’s desire to raise political awareness in his readers.  Ultimately, Kwang, among the three diasporic characters, is the one who is portrayed by Lee as someone who reaches the highest pivot of the American hierarchical achievements: politics, which wields more influence than Henry’s father’s financial success or Henry’s intellectual aptitude.  He is the consummate diasporic cultural artist.    

Furthermore, if we flip the lens, Kwang’s “fall” in the political arena projects an inverted vision that is ineffably surreal and inspiring to the readers.  Contrary to those who think Kwang would commit suicide as a result of his political calamity, Henry as a fellow Korean American understands Kwang’s Korean way of facing life crisis, thus he believes otherwise.  Henry believes that no matter how bitter Kwang’s ignoble political defeat may be, he will choose life over death, as if Kwang is a Christ figure.  Henry solemnly narrates that “Koreans don’t take their own lives.  At least not from shame” (333, emphasis added).  Henry further explains why: “My mother said to me once that suffering is the noblest art, the quieter the better.  If you bite your lip and understand that this is the only world, you will perhaps persist and endure” (333, emphasis added).  According to the mother’s definition of “noblest art,” then, Kwang indeed is the noblest hero who suffers sublimely.  Like Christ, he bears his cross—his political fall—without saying anything and answering nothing “as if he is deaf” (342).  Though the angry crowd “scream at him like he is a child . . . and spit on his shoulder, . . . nothing registers in his face” (342).  In Henry’s words, Kwang “is already in another world” (342).  As it is demonstrated through Kwang’s Christ-like suffering that seems to transport him to another spiritual world, diasporas’s tendency to “hope” and capacity to “persist and endure”are some of the noblest “diasporic cultural aesthetics,” which sublimate their immigrant tribulations and inspire the readers. 

Thus, just when the readers of Western consciousness think that Kwang is being buried by his superior political opponents, the fact is Kwang’s political fall is largely an enactment of self-induced, masochistic punishment to himself for failing his people.  It stems from his unremitting loyalty to his political constituents.  It is Kwang’s way of “enduring crisis with Korean nobility” (333).  Because Lee pitilessly encapsulates Kwang’s political fall in a racially and socially claustrophobic denouement, it does not allow catharsis for the readers, but ingenuously does the reverse.  Psychologically and aesthetically, Kwang’s political “fall” to (fellow diasporic) readers—who similarly persist and endure social injustices in America—is liable to produce de-catharsis in varying degrees:  Mildly, it may evoke a nagging “reciprocal yearning” to counter the situation.  Powerfully, it may induce a strong “insurgent impulse” to combat the racial situation in America.  Thus, instead of the purging effect, Kwang’s political fall intoxicates the (fellow diasporic) readers with the unquenchable emotions, and that is the narratological scheme of the author—Lee’s way of producing powerful and lingering feelings of political injustice in the readers through his literary reversal psychology.  Indeed, Lee’s deployment of de-catharsis inversely stir and turn the readers’ interests towards more political awareness and participation in American minority politics.

Thus, decoding the author’s alternate intensions enlightens us with the deeper meaning of the text—a moment of revelation.  This kind of reader’s moment of intellectual and spiritual union with the author’s encoded message is delivered through the power of diasporic literature—the diasporas’s cognitive and cultural bond with its literature which is impenetrable by their predominant counterparts.  For instance, while it seems to the Western consciousness that the moral or sociopolitical “fall” of the three characters—Henry’s father, Henry, and Kwang—signifies their ultimate failure in acculturating into Americanism, its contravening interpretations suggest otherwise:  They are diasporic heroes, who reach their individual “maximums” in the three hierarchical levels of American successes: (1) finance; (2) intelligence; and (3) politics.  Then what is easily neglected, but should be paid its due recognition to these characters, is that they—as the best positioned and equipped characters to make a difference in American politics—wield their silent de-cathartic affectivity by influencing their readers to adopt sensible anti-racist measures.  Thus, “diasporic power art” is the effect of an exceptional diasporic literature.  Through its exemplary diasporic protagonists who display nomadic finesse—like versatility, bold choices, or resilience—it inflames profound cultural reflections in the reader.  

Works Cited and Consulted

Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997.

Lee, Chang Rae. Native Speaker. New York: Riverhead Books, 1995.

Gilles, Deleuze, and Guattari, Felix. “What Is a Minor Literature?” Falling into Theory. Richter,

David H. Boston:

Parikh, Crystal. “Ethnic America Undercover: The Intellectual and Minority Discourse.”

        Contemporary Literature 43 (2002): 249-84.

Shin, Jae-Min. “Desperate Immigration (Jul Mang Yi Min).”  Editorial. Korea Times. 23 Sept.

        2002, D8

Sumida, Stephen H. “The More Things Change: Paradigm Shifts in Asian American Studies.”

American Studies International 38 (2000): 97-114.

Chang Rae Lee’s “Native Speaker”: Diasporic Power Art

Chang Rae Lee’s Native Speaker: Diasporic Power Art

Deleuze and Guattari in “What is a Minor Literature?” discuss the “literary struggle” of a Diasporic literature (Jewish literature), an idea borrowed from Franz Kafka, who believes that Diasporic literature is “something impossible” when it is written in the language of the host country, because its cultural authenticity is compromised in the process (Richter 167).  What Kafka’s “literary struggle” suggests, then, is that in order to retrieve a true authentic meaning of a diasporic literature, the reader must be able to de-code the culturally cryptic, narratological intensions of the author, so, too, is the Native Speaker.  Overtly, the novel is about the three protagonists’ social descent due to their Asian complex, while covertly, it is about their ascension into the three hierarchical powers of America: (1) “finance,” by Henry’s father who is an “adopter”; (2) “intelligence,” by Henry who is an “assimilator”; and (3) “politics,” by Kwang who is a “merger.”  Ultimately, the social ascent of the three diasporic characters is achieved through what I call a “diasporic power art” for two reasons:  First, because their industrial successes are rendered through intense, dynamic reinventions of their diasporic subjectivities and conditions in semi-fictitious ways.  Second, because each of their individual American becomings can be aesthetically described as a “diasporic cultural art” which entails “cultural aesthetics”—the elements that elevate/cultivate one’s cultural refinement.

Asian diasporas are adept cultural artists, who reinvent themselves in order to acclimate from one end of cultural atmosphere to another—from East to West.  The nature of diasporic condition—living not in one’s motherland but in an adopted/foreign land—requires nomadic “choices,” “versatility,” and “resilience.”  It requires constant mental, physical, and cultural adjustments, but most importantly, entails recasting of their personas.  Linguistically, culturally, and phenotypically, since the East and West are arguably not the most alike, Asian diasporic acculturation into Western decorum and society is more adversative and intense.  Their inchoate American becoming is molded and remolded into an often indeterminate subjectivity by turbulent, (at times traumatic) bipolar cultural forces, thus their new life in America is almost a fiction to their consciousness.  It is a process that requires both artful nimbleness and itinerant hardiness on their part, which can be described as a “diasporic cultural art,” something that cannot be gauged by methodical or political formulas.  Rather, its appreciation comes through the lens of “cultural aesthetics”—elements that elevate or cultivate one’s cultural refinement.  Of the infinite elements of what one considers/includes as cultural aesthetics, there are at least two prevailing traits shared by all three diasporic characters which enhance/sanctify their immigrant life: (1) their ability to make prudent or conscientious choices; and (2) their nomadic versatility—the ability to reinvent themselves as needed.  The three characters in the novel employ in varying degrees these and other diasporic cultural aesthetics, not only to cultivate their nascent American subjectivities, but more primarily to adapt to their new culture.

Just as the immigrant stories of the three characters in Native Speaker —Henry’s father, Henry, and Kwang—differ from one another, so are the colors and shapes of their diasporic arts.  To fare well in their new adopted land (America), these three characters reinvent themselves as three different types of semi-fictitious personas: (1) Henry’s father as an “adopter”; (2) Henry as an assimilator; and (3) Kwang as a “merger.”  Each of these characters half-fictitiously “chooses,” in most part, what function they want to play for the dominant in power.  For instance, Henry’s father selectively “adopts” primarily one ideology of America—capitalism—while he largely ignores the others.  He therefore chooses to “adapt” to America’s economic conditions in the ghettos for financial gains.  Henry, on the other hand, wants to be singularly American, so he chooses to assimilate by gaining American intelligence.  Finally, Kwang dreams of coalition among different ethnic groups in America, so he chooses to merge different cultures for a political reason.  These brands of diasporic characters face challenges unique to their own type, and each of their moral or sociopolitical “rise” (ascent) and “fall” (descent) involve synergy of multifaceted cultural aesthetics aforementioned.  While on the plot level, their ultimate “fall” as an “adopter,” “assimilator,” or “merger” may be merely sympathetic to the readers of Western consciousness, it is simultaneously unnerving and heartening to the diasporic readers, because behind each of the character’s “fall” is the antithetical message of “rise” (hope) for them.

I. The Father’s Fall and Rise as an “Adopter”

As an opportunistic “adopter” of Western ideologies, Henry’s father fully subscribes to American capitalism, even at the cost of demoralization and intellectual enervation.  In Henry’s words, his father considers “capitalism” to be the “unseen force” and has been “single-minded[ly] determine[ed]” to succeed “through [his] twenty-five years of green-grocering in a famous ghetto” (49).  As an owner of labor-intensive grocery chains, he is proud that he is a rich man, though not proud of the industry.  He suffers intellectual atrophy and dehumanization, not only because his high scholarship from Korea is wasted—a top “industrial engineer” with a master’s degree from the best college—but because his limited English and ethnic isolation displace him from the social and intellectual centers of the U.S. (56, 57).  Though he lives in an upper class neighborhood, the wealth he amasses merely becomes an ethnic signifier—“Oriental Jews”—which does nothing to help him blend in with the mainstream Americans (53): “he never fe[els] fully comfortable in his fine house in Ardsley (affluent neighborhood)” (52).  His American becoming is thus at the social periphery, where he is a perpetual outsider without affect.  More tragically, he is even diminished to ethical immorality.  Henry describes his father’s demoralized mentality in America: “If anything, I think my father would choose to see my deceptions in a rigidly practical light, .  .  . the need to adapt” (297, emphasis added).  Thus as an ambitious adopter of capitalism, Henry’s father “falls” (becomes dehumanized), as his subjectivity alters from his former intellectual Korean self into an American nobody—the metamorphic versatility of a diaspora.

Indeed, at a glance, the intellectual and moral “fall” of Henry’s father seems to be a high price that he pays as an adopter of American capitalism.  Worst yet, since he loses his wife early from cancer, and he himself dies rather young without fully enjoying the fruits of his hard labor, the readers get a sense that his life in America ultimately signifies “death” or nothingness.  Yet from a historical context, there is more to his immigrant story than just the cost of dehumanization and death.  Jae Min Shin’s chronological analysis of Korean immigrants in his editorial column of Korea Times sheds insight into Henry’s father’s historical background and his financial motivation.  Shin reports in his editorial that until the 1960’s, Korean immigrants in America largely consisted of poor class: students, war-orphans, and females married to Americans; but in the 70’s, it shifted to the middle class capitalists with visions of economic expansion in America; then since the 80’s, it consists of even a higher class of entrepreneur Koreans with large investments in American companies (Shin D8).  According to Shin’s data, then, as a product of the 70’s and 80’s Korean American opportunism, Henry’s father has, in fact, successfully played his role as an “adopter” of American capitalism.  In other words, his principal reason for coming to America is not to augment his scholarship, but to make “enough money [so] that he could live in a majestic white house in Westchester and call himself a rich man,” even if that debases him into laboring with “a handful of vegetable stores” (333).  Thus, the cost of dehumanization and intellectual degeneration on the part of Henry’s father are factored in as a “fair” sacrifice to fulfill his financial desires.  In a word, he “chooses” to be what he is in America—an opportunist.  Then regardless of one’s intention, this “option to choose a different nation-state” as one’s new home is the advantageous “power” of the contemporary diasporas, which eventually does translate to his financial success in America, more than what his homeland, Korea, offers.

As a former industrial engineer, Henry’s father not only realistically estimates the “most” financial success he can accrue in America as a first generation immigrant, but maps the “maximum” his son, Henry, can approximate by purchasing a house in an affluent neighborhood.  With what he can financially provide, he wishes that his son will do better than him, and Henry, too, wants to do better than his father by studying hard, obviating his mother’s “tears. . . from her concern over [his] mediocre studies” (77).  Thus as a capitalist, Henry’s father’s seemingly dehumanizing existence is actually the intended, prudent course he willingly takes to humanize his son, and between the two, there is an inextricable causality, as the father’s “fall” (dehumanization) paves a way for his son’s intellectual “rise” as an upper class American.  Henry later comes to a deeper appreciation of his father’s sacrifice for him: “I see how my father had to retool his life to the ambitions his meager knowledge of the language and culture would allow . . . I am his lone American son, blessed with every hope and quarter he could provide” (333).  Considering the fact that Lee (the author) himself has intellectually “risen” from his well meaning immigrant parents, it is helpful to know that he has respectfully dedicated his first novel, Native Speaker, to his parents: “For my mother and my father.”  If we infer from the author’s reverence paid to his own parents, then the opportunistic immigrant life of Henry’s father which is devoid of human sociality does not suggest—contrary to its face value—that it is meaningless and pathetic.  Rather, the moral of this story is about how the father’s financial success can elevate/cultivate his son’s intellectual and social refinement in their adopted land, which sanctifies the father’s immigrant struggles.

II. Henry’s Fall and Rise as an “Assimilator”

Since, Henry as a spy is immorally engaged in treacherous activity against his own people, Henry’s moral “fall,” then, is textually a valid outcome.  While Henry’s father is a single-minded adopter of American capitalism—who enjoys a certain degree of independence due to his socio-political alienation—Henry, as an “assimilator,” on the other hand, is more scrutinized by the American society.  Henry is “a linguist of the field. . . [with] the troubling, expert power” (171, emphasis added).  Henry’s intellectual status is what Crystal Parikh in his essay, “Ethnic America Undercover: The Intellectual and minority Discourse,” describes as a “gained social position” of “minority intellectuals, [who] in gaining access to the mechanisms of cultural and political representation, no longer speak from a marginalized position” (Parikh 258).  Henry relies on his “gained intellectual position” to define himself as singularly American, an ultimate “assimilator,” by pledging allegiance to the dominant in power.  In order to keep his vows with the established— though his work involves extensive racialization and exploitation of ethnic minorities, including his own—he blinds himself to the racial dynamism in his work (Dennis’s private detective agency).  As a spy, he instead abuses his own cultural insidership and familiarity to “sell out” his own people.  He fictitiously and perfunctorily performs the racial dance which his superior, Dennis Hoagland, choreographs: “I am the obedient. . . the invisible underling. . . [and] this [is] my assimilation, so many years in the making” (202, emphasis added).  Most tragically, Henry’s fictitious selves created through the “legends” at his work—the fiction that allows him to be many persons at once—are the vestiges of a schizophrenic assimilator, who has morally “fallen” (22).

Henry’s versatility of being “many persons at once,” however, is precisely the auspicious edge of postmodern Asian Americans, when interpreted from a contravening contemporary point of view.  As an assimilator, the remnant of Asian silence in Henry is a cryptic language to those around him, including his most intimate wife, Lelia, and superiors at work, Jack and Dennis.  For example, Lelia cannot decipher “Henryspeak” (Henry’s reticence), and Jack and Dennis cannot decode the silent language and affinity exchanged between Henry and Kwang.  Henry, on the other hand, can both penetrate and dismantle theirs at will: “I and my kind possess another dimension.  We will learn every lesson of accent and idiom, we will dismantle every last pretense and practice you hold, noble as well as ruinous.  You can keep nothing safe from our eyes and ears” (320, emphasis added).  What Henry articulates in this passage is, in effect, an enunciation of the cultural edge of the contemporary polyglots—the irreducible linguistic versatility of diasporas.  

In our postmodern world, the versatile polyglots also have more “options,” both publicly (occupational) and privately (moral).  Henry—as someone with intellectual and cultural edge—is  a “denizen,” a royal assimilator not to be condemned, but to be emulated for the conscientious choice he ultimately makes between the oppressor (his boss) and the oppressed (him and his people).  According to Robin Cohen in Global Diasporas, “denizen” is a privileged postmodern diaspora with “considerable wealth and portable skills—a different group from the unskilled labour migrants of the nineteenth century” (164, 168).  In other words, in contrast to “the unskilled labour migrants” of the past, postmodern diasporas no longer need to tolerate any forms of oppressions, if s/he has the proper social, professional, or legal training/resources—in other words, “intellectual power” (Cohen 168).  As an educated person, Henry finally understands that an assimilator also has “options”: that wanting to assimilate to dominant culture does not mean one must allow oppression.  Upon this epiphany, he unshackles himself from his boss’s demonical bondage (Dennis’s detective agency).  Assertively, to the messenger of his boss, Jack, who asks, “Dennis thinks you will come back,” Henry answers, “Dennis is wrong” (288).  Henry continues, “Listen, Jack.  This is my mind finally speaking” (288).  The fact that it is Henry, not Dennis or Jack, who has the last word in the final scene of their relationship, symbolically and literally diminishes the power of the institutionalized racism in America.  Thus, as a contemporary assimilator, Henry exercises this “right to choose” as a denzen—to quit, if he must, those who oppress and exploit him and his people.  Ultimately, then, Henry’s such capability to make moral choices—free from vocational insecurity—is the prerogative of the diasporic intellectuals.

As an intellectual diaspora, Henry’s “right to choose” stretches farther than rejecting oppression; it extends to disseminating his linguistic expertise to other migrants.  At the end of the novel, Henry makes a conscientious choice.  He becomes an ESL teacher to share his intellectual privilege with the underprivileged.  He disseminates “knowledge of power”— English—unto the ethnic migrants of America, to help them better entrench their future in their new land.  Clearly, the fact that Henry converts from being a treacherous assimilator (his moral “fall”) to an intellectually nurturing teacher (his moral “rise”) is the acme of contradicting moment in the novel, which Lee deliberately dramatizes for didactic implications.  One way of interpreting Lee’s antithetical narratology is to deduce that Henry’s moral “fall” and “rise” is about an assimilator—with an intellectual power in America—making conscientious “choices” between his two cultures.  Henry ultimately chooses empathy and responsibility towards his fellow diasporas, and this change of attitude in Henry exemplifies what Lee may hope to see in other diasporic elites towards their marginal counterparts.

III. Kwang’s Fall and Rise as a “Merger”

From one’s “gained position,” if Henry falls morally, so does Kwang, politically.  If Henry is a fictitious assimilator, Kwang, on the other hand, is a versatile diasporic “merger,” who is faithful to both his past and present cultures, and plays his bi-cultural roles for a higher stage—politics in America.  He is a consummate actor of both cultures.  He is in Henry’s words someone who is “effortlessly Korean [and] effortlessly American,” simultaneously (328).  Unlike Henry, who as a spy aids in the deportation and dispersion of the ethnic migrants, Kwang—“an ambitious minority politician [with]. . . unwavering agenda [and] stridency”—labors to reconcile the hostility among the variegated minority groups in New York (139).  Similarly, unlike Henry’s father who is unmindful of racial “irony,” Kwang is both sensitive and sensible to racial issues, and attempts to form a political coalition among different races (58).  His career as a New York City Councilman, however, ends tragically, as his illegitimate fund-raising apparatus—the Korean money club “ggeh”—is disclosed by his most trusted staff members, Eduardo and Henry (280).  These two, who betray Kwang, work for those who represent the major political powers in America: Dennis Hoagland (Henry’s boss), De Roos (Kwang’s opponent), and indirectly, INS.  Thus, Kwang’s “messianic” political rise—as a prototypical self-made “American [in]. . .flyer[s]”—is pulverized by his political superiors for subtly contesting and threatening the White American politics (141).  As a diasporic merger, Kwang’s political “fall” ultimately intimates the vulnerability and indeterminacy of his self-claimed American persona in the political stage.

Read literally, Kwang’s political fall is tragic and discouraging.  More than any other characters in the novel, Kwang as a politician, espouses and magnifies his diasporic consciousness—sensitivity to multi-pluralism.  Unlike Henry and his father, he rejects tertiary roles in racial plays that are strategized by the so-called superpowers of America.  Rather, from his diasporic margins, Kwang encroaches inroad to challenge the very core of the American racial politics.  He is in Henry’s words “a larger public figure who [is] willing to speak and act outside the tight sphere of his family [ethnic enclave],” and is not “afraid like [Henry’s] mother and father” (139, emphasis added).  Henry “hadn’t yet envisioned” that a public career is something that “a Korean man would find significant or worthy of energy and devotion,” but is what Lee would like to have his (fellow diasporic) readers to pay a closer attention to, as a source of America’s deep seated racism (139, emphasis added).  Thus, it is precisely the turbulent theatricality of Kwang’s public career—especially his political “fall”—which crystallizes Lee’s desire to raise political awareness in his readers.  Ultimately, Kwang, among the three diasporic characters, is the one who is portrayed by Lee as someone who reaches the highest pivot of the American hierarchical achievements: politics, which wields more influence than Henry’s father’s financial success or Henry’s intellectual aptitude.  He is the consummate diasporic cultural artist.    

Furthermore, if we flip the lens, Kwang’s “fall” in the political arena projects an inverted vision that is ineffably surreal and inspiring to the readers.  Contrary to those who think Kwang would commit suicide as a result of his political calamity, Henry as a fellow Korean American understands Kwang’s Korean way of facing life crisis, thus he believes otherwise.  Henry believes that no matter how bitter Kwang’s ignoble political defeat may be, he will choose life over death, as if Kwang is a Christ figure.  Henry solemnly narrates that “Koreans don’t take their own lives.  At least not from shame” (333, emphasis added).  Henry further explains why: “My mother said to me once that suffering is the noblest art, the quieter the better.  If you bite your lip and understand that this is the only world, you will perhaps persist and endure” (333, emphasis added).  According to the mother’s definition of “noblest art,” then, Kwang indeed is the noblest hero who suffers sublimely.  Like Christ, he bears his cross—his political fall—without saying anything and answering nothing “as if he is deaf” (342).  Though the angry crowd “scream at him like he is a child . . . and spit on his shoulder, . . . nothing registers in his face” (342).  In Henry’s words, Kwang “is already in another world” (342).  As it is demonstrated through Kwang’s Christ-like suffering that seems to transport him to another spiritual world, diasporas’s tendency to “hope” and capacity to “persist and endure” are some of the noblest “diasporic cultural aesthetics,” which sublimate their immigrant tribulations and inspire the readers. 

Thus, just when the readers of Western consciousness think that Kwang is being buried by his superior political opponents, the fact is Kwang’s political fall is largely an enactment of self-induced, masochistic punishment to himself for failing his people.  It stems from his unremitting loyalty to his political constituents.  It is Kwang’s way of “enduring crisis with Korean nobility” (333).  Because Lee pitilessly encapsulates Kwang’s political fall in a racially and socially claustrophobic denouement, it does not allow catharsis for the readers, but ingenuously does the reverse.  Psychologically and aesthetically, Kwang’s political “fall” to (fellow diasporic) readers—who similarly persist and endure social injustices in America—is liable to produce de-catharsis in varying degrees:  Mildly, it may evoke a nagging “reciprocal yearning” to counter the situation.  Powerfully, it may induce a strong “insurgent impulse” to combat the racial situation in America.  Thus, instead of the purging effect, Kwang’s political fall intoxicates the (fellow diasporic) readers with the unquenchable emotions, and that is the narratological scheme of the author—Lee’s way of producing powerful and lingering feelings of political injustice in the readers through his literary reversal psychology.  Indeed, Lee’s deployment of de-catharsis inversely stir and turn the readers’ interests towards more political awareness and participation in American minority politics.

Thus, decoding the author’s alternate intensions enlightens us with the deeper meaning of the text—a moment of revelation.  This kind of reader’s moment of intellectual and spiritual union with the author’s encoded message is delivered through the power of diasporic literature—the diasporas’s cognitive and cultural bond with its literature which is impenetrable by their predominant counterparts.  For instance, while it seems to the Western consciousness that the moral or sociopolitical “fall” of the three characters—Henry’s father, Henry, and Kwang—signifies their ultimate failure in acculturating into Americanism, its contravening interpretations suggest otherwise:  They are diasporic heroes, who reach their individual “maximums” in the three hierarchical levels of American successes: (1) finance; (2) intelligence; and (3) politics.  Then what is easily neglected, but should be paid its due recognition to these characters, is that they—as the best positioned and equipped characters to make a difference in American politics—wield their silent de-cathartic affectivity by influencing their readers to adopt sensible anti-racist measures.  Thus, “diasporic power art” is the effect of an exceptional diasporic literature.  Through its exemplary diasporic protagonists who display nomadic finesse—like versatility, bold choices, or resilience—it inflames profound cultural reflections in the reader.  

Works Cited and Consulted

Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997.

Lee, Chang Rae. Native Speaker. New York: Riverhead Books, 1995.

Gilles, Deleuze, and Guattari, Felix. “What Is a Minor Literature?” Falling into Theory. Richter,

David H. Boston:

Parikh, Crystal. “Ethnic America Undercover: The Intellectual and Minority Discourse.”

        Contemporary Literature 43 (2002): 249-84.

Shin, Jae-Min. “Desperate Immigration (Jul Mang Yi Min).”  Editorial. Korea Times. 23 Sept.

        2002, D8

Sumida, Stephen H. “The More Things Change: Paradigm Shifts in Asian American Studies.”

American Studies International 38 (2000): 97-114.

The Illogic of the American Canon that Segregates Ethnic Literature (Published in CSULA Significations 2007)

The Illogic of the American Canon that Segregates Ethnic Literature

While attempting to defend the Western literary canon, Edward W. Said in “The Politics of Knowledge,” reveals the Eurocentric mentality towards subaltern literature: “[literary] politics has needed to assume, indeed needed to firmly to believe, that what was true about Orientals or Africans was not however true about or for Europeans” (191). In essence, Said is trying to articulate his theory of “politics of knowledge”—that, in the canon war, an author’s “racial identity” translates to his/her “knowledge” and the quality of his/her work. In other words, if an author is other than “white,” then, his/her literary work is less likely to be received as equal to that of the “white” standard, thus subaltern. In this canonical dichotomy between the “White” and the “other,” America—the land of diversity—is no less a culprit to its steep division, in that, we, as well, divide our literature as either belonging to “white” (American Literature) or “other” (ethnic literature). This system of racialization in the American canon is illogical and problematic, because it is, in effect, denying the transnational subjectivity of America —the fact that America as a nation is a “nation of immigrants that produce cultural hybridity,” and thus its multiethnic literatures are, in fact, its primary building blocks. What American canon needs, then, is a re-conceptualization of “American literature” as inherently transnational, to include the works of minor/ethnic literature as its indispensable parts, categorized only by their different genres and chronology, thus obviating separate ethnic curriculum in institutions.

In order to show why ethnic literature should not be an extraneous component to, but an essential core of, an American literature, first part of this essay explores the racist and nationalistic milieu of the Western canon itself. First, it reviews the definition and the function of “ethnic” and “minor” literature to deduce why these types of literature would be marginalized by the canon. Second, it discusses cultural hybridism largely from the point of views of the critics who advocate fair and equal representation of the ethnic minorities in the Eurocentric texts. Third, it psychoanalytically probes into the notion of “foreigner” or the “other” to illustrate that the canon—by segregating ethnic literature as not part of its own—is, in fact, being self-antagonistic. Then the second part of this essay focuses on arguing against the biased practice of canon in couple of ways: First, it introduces an example of an ethnic literature (Native Speaker) in America to show how it is received and why it is labeled as a minor literature. Then the rest of this essay argues against and proves why the canonical segregation of any literature written in America as “ethnic/minor” is an act of self-negating the intrinsically hybrid, transnational “Americanism.”

I

Until recently, the inclusion into or the exclusion from the Western canon was dependent upon the work’s “familiarity” and/or “durability” within the dominant culture. Although canon debates by their very exclusionary nature can never please all sides, traditionally, they have systematically marginalized ethnic literature. Perhaps, Samuel Johnson’s observation still holds true today: that “the reverence due to writings that have long subsisted arise…not from any credulous confidence in the superior wisdom of past ages,…but is the consequence of acknowledged and indubitable positions, that what has been longest known has been most considered, and what is most considered is best understood” (230, emphasis added). Like Said, what Johnson’s theory is implying is that what survives as “revered” (the canonized) literature owes to its “indubitable positions” (the positions of white males) within the literary circles.

The canonical bias—which both Johnson and Said acknowledges—can therefore be stifling to ethic/minor literature of the colored writers. With this racism within the canonical circle in mind, I beg questions pertaining to the works by postmodern writers, particularly, those who fall into what Homi Bhabha in “Locations of Culture” calls the subjects of “liminal cultural locations.” They are those with ambiguous bi-cultural locality, or more popularly known as “diasporas”—ethnic minorities who are living, not in their homeland, but in their adopted land. Their cultural bi-locality places them in between the superior and the inferior social status. They are, for example, Americans who are not fully Americans, but “half Americans,” as their prefixes will designate: Afro, Latino, Asian-Americans. In short, they are America’s “ethnics,” and their literature is labeled as “ethnic literature.” Etymologically, “ethnic” is one who is not a Christian or Jew, but a Gentile, heathen, pagan, or simply the “other.” Similarly, according to Oxford’s contemporary definition, “ethnic minority” is a racial or other group within a larger system; hence, foreign or exotic” (emphasis added). Thus, “ethnic literature” is not really “American literature”; rather, it is a “foreign or exotic” literature of “racial or other group” within America.

It is precisely this widely accepted notion that “ethnic literature does not represent American mainstream culture, but that of the “foreigner’s,” which spurs American canonizers to rather marginalize it at its best, or exclude it at its worst. Since ethnic literature in their minds is “exotic” and “foreign,” it cannot be translated as part of an American culture, nor can it help them constitute and transmit “homogenous Americanism” through literature. John Guillory in “The Canon as Cultural capital,” says that much of the canonical debates stem from racist nationalism. In his essay, Guillory states that “the ‘West’ was always the creation of nationalism,” in that its “assertion of the continuity of Western tradition exactly corresponds in its intensity to the assertion of nationalism” (222). He further critiques that Western universities are involved in the discriminatory “project of constituting a national culture” largely through the process of canonization (222). According to Guillory, the method of sustaining what he calls the West’s “imaginary cultural continuities” begins with the assumed Eurocentric superiority, weighing what is culturally “Western” more principally into the canon, while subordinating or excluding literature that represents the “other.” Thus, in this nationalistic milieu of the Western canon, ethnographic literature is often pushed out as “not [representing] our culture” (222). However, Guillory warns that “the very distinctness of cultures, Western or non-Western, canonical or noncanonical, points to a certain insistent error…in the supposed transmission of culture” through literature (223), because the very idea of “cultural homogeneity” is an illusion—a “fiction” (221). However, Guillory admits that this fictitious conviction on the part of the canonizers—that the Western canon should represent the “great works of Western civilization only”—is “nevertheless a very powerful one (because it is ideological)” (221).

Then, what exactly is the distinctive trait of ethnic/minor literature that is more likely to be excluded from the Western canon? Deleuze and Guattari in “What is a Minor Literature?” define that “minor literature” is what “minority constructs within a major language.” They further list three other characteristics of the minor literature: (1) its language deterritorializes; (2) it is always political; and (3) the text serves as a collective enunciation. As an example, Deleuze and Guattari point to Jew’s experience of Diaspora to illustrate how their literature can de-territorialize cultural and national boundaries. They say that the act of “de-territorialization” happens as a result of a special situation where dispersed (often traumatized) Diasporas, who live in their host countries, cannot write their stories in their own language. However, left with no better way of emotional survival, they ironically write their Jewish story in the language of their oppressors, effectuating de-territorialization of the cultural and national boundaries. As it is shown in this example of Jewish Diasporas, the ultimate threat that a minor literature poses for the xenophobic authorities in the canon would be that it not merely transgresses its linguistic territory, but that it unavoidably penetrates the master’s culture, potentially undermining national solidarity.

Though the canonical authority in power may wish to bolster national solidarity through literature, critics like Bhabha demands equal representation of the postcolonial cultural hybridity written by diasporas and other ethnic minorities. He says, “The Western metropole must confront its postcolonial history, told by its influx of postwar migrants and refugees, as an indigenous or native narrative internal to its national identity” (1335, emphasis added). He proposes that “the centre of …[our] study would [no longer] be the “sovereignty” of national cultures, nor the universalism of human cultures, but a focus on those ‘freaks’ of social and cultural displacements”’ (1340). He asks that our contemporary “critic[s] must attempt to fully realize, and take responsibility for, the unspoken, unrepresented pasts that haunt the historical present” of the marginalized, hybrid postmodern subjects (1340). In other words, Bhabha is asking the Western canon to include those who in the past have been perceived as “freaks” by the dominant culture.

Similarly, the chief spokesperson of subaltern studies, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in her essay, “Imperialism and Sexual Difference,” requests accurate, not distorted, representation of women of color in Eurocentric literature. She challenges Western academia to stop misrepresenting the women of the third world by first deconstructing the tropological truth-claim made by the imperial masculists. Spivak believes that western academic institutions commit “translation-as-violation” (344) both in a literal sense (linguistic translation) and in a representational sense (fictional misrepresentation of the women of the third world). She claims that this cultural violation stems from the fact that Western academia insists “the white race as a norm for universal humanity” (340). Spivak is insulted not only by the assumed racial and intellectual superiority of the Western universal masculist, but also by its feminist counterparts. She believes that feminist writers of the first world are complicit with their masculist counterparts, in that, they, too, grossly misrepresent the women of the third world in their writings. Particularly, what troubles Spivak the most is that this cultural violation—committed by the Western male and female elitists—perpetuates through cultural ignorance of the teachers to their students, which she describes it as the “sanctioned ignorance” (345). In order to avoid sanctioned ignorance, Spivak is, in effect, insinuating that ethnographic texts should be written and critiqued by those with cultural familiarity and authority. Consequently, for these culturally appropriate writers to re-vision their misrepresented history written by the Eurocentric writers and to create a new “just representation” of their presence as equal humans, they need, according to Spivak, an “equal right” in the literary circles, which also implies an “equal access” in the canon (347).

If those in control of the canon, or more specifically, American canon perceives minor literature to be less than American, it is because they see the minorities as “foreigners,” “the others,” who in their eyes cannot and is not yet fully assimilated to their culture. However, Julia Kristeva’s analysis of “foreigner” in Strangers To Ourselves, shows how the “others” are in fact “our nocturnal selves”—the dark strangers who are repressed within ourselves. Psychoanalytically, she explains that Freud’s “Uncanny, [means that] foreignness is within us: we are our own foreigners; we are divided:” (181). Hence, she says, “foreigner is neither a race nor a nation” (181). In fact, Kristeva believes that “it is [only] through unraveling transference—the major dynamics of otherness. . . [which is] . . . the foreign component of our psyche—that, on the basis of the other, [we] become reconciled with [our] own otherness-foreignness” (182). Most significantly, according to Kristeva’s theory, the so called “the other,” “the foreigner, “the stranger,” or “the inferior” is, in fact, none other than “ourselves.” We are all “an integral part of the same” (181). Then psychoanalytically speaking, the Eurocentric canon war is, in fact, self-antagonistic, in that each time it alienates/negates entry of what they perceive as “foreign texts” into its collection, it is ironically diminishing and self-effacing its own culture. Thus, if Kristeva’s interpretation of the Freudian “uncanny” is adopted, it would drastically change our concept of “foreignness,” and this change of our mind, in turn, would ideally dissolve the canonical racism in America.

II

Whereas Kristeva in Strangers to Ourselves probes the notion of a “foreigner” in a psychoanalytical sense, a novel, Native Speaker explores the reality of being a “foreigner” in America. A decade ago, in 1995, an Asian Diaspora who was raised in America since the age of three wrote a novel claiming numerous awards, to name just one from the long list is the Hemingway Foundation/Pen Award. Most memorably, for his novel Native Speaker, he was selected by the New Yorker as one of the twenty best American writers under forty. This “American,” or should I say “Korean-American,” is Chang Rae Lee. Lee’s Native Speaker is an example of a “minor literature” which fits the definition of Deleuze and Guattari, in that it is written by a minority in a major language. Fittingly, Lee’s Native Speaker as a minor literature demonstrates how a “half American” (prefixed American), or more specifically, a Korean American writer, can write with the effect of racial, cultural, and national de-territorialization between Korea and America. Finally, as Deleuze and Guattari have pointed out, Native Speaker bears two other characteristics of a minor literature: it is “political” and “collective.” It exposes the political tension felt by the Asian immigrants in America, and one Korean protagonist’s immigrant life collectively expresses the life of all Korean Americans. Ultimately, the value of this novel is that it helps us examine how ethnic literature is received and labeled by the American canon.

On a plot level, the protagonist in the novel, Henry Park, is a second-generation, Korean-American private spy who works for a white racist, Dennis Hoagland, to spy on his own people, John Kwang. Henry is instructed by Dennis to get close enough to Kwang so he can betray him. Henry’s reports on Kwang, which of course are written in excellent English, surpass any native speaker in their fluency, form, and efficiency (Dennis rewards him for this). However, as Henry spends more time with Kwang, he identifies with Kwang, and starts to realize that he must do what he has avoided all his life: face up to and evaluate who he really is. Is he an American? Korean? Or Korean-American? Although he is an American born citizen with American education and American mentality, he is no longer sure that he is American, and thus clings to what his American wife—who is the “standard barrier”—says who he is (Lee 12). Though later she apologizes, the list she hands him cataloguing who he is, is long enough to kill the hope of any Korean-American who thinks s/he can become singularly American: “You are surreptitious / B+ student of life / first thing hummer of Wagner and Strauss / illegal alien / emotional alien / genre bug / Yellow peril: neo-American / great in bed / overrated / poppa’s boy / sentimentalist / anti-romantic / ____ analyst (you fill in) / stranger / follower / traitor / spy” (Lee 5). Her list basically sums up who Henry Park is to the dominant U.S. culture, and more specifically, by the American canon.

According to Deleuze and Guattari, Native speaker fits the genre of a minor literature, but does it really? True, it is written by a minority in a major language. Yet, Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of a “minor literature” is problematic for two reasons. First, the term “minor” implies that it is smaller in scale and/or is less significant than its “major” counterpart. Like the definition and connotation of “ethnic literature,” a “minor literature” similarly intimates something that is tangential, inauthentic second-class literature. Second, Deleuze and Guattari’s point that minor literature is “political” and “collective” in nature is also true, but these qualities are not exclusive to minor literature; rather, all literature is “political” and “collective.” Who in American/Western canon has written anything that was not political, and has not either implicitly/explicitly spoken for the group the writer represented? How is literature even possible to be written in a purely nonpolitical and noncollective manner? This is not possible, and if such a writing is possible, in that it is purely “objective” (as opposed to political) and “personal” (as opposed to collective), then, are not these two conditionals—“objective” and “personal”—mutually exclusive? In other words, can a writing be “purely objective” but “purely personal” simultaneously? Besides, is not “personal” (such as the list made by Henry’s wife) inherently “political?” Thus, the two of the three constituents of a minor work listed by Deleuze and Guattari—“political” and “collective”— cannot be used to label and place ethnographic literature under a “minor literature.” The point is that frankly none of this labeling business should be espoused. If the writer is an American, then, s/he is singularly American, and his/her work is singularly an American literature. No prefixes such as “Afro,” “Asian,” “Latino,” nor qualifiers such as “minor” or “ethnic” is needed, unless the canon is willing to equally dissect the entire culturally hybrid, transnational writers of America.

To illustrate why labeling any literary work as “minor/ethnic” is nonsensical, I would like to point to an example from the Native Speaker. On a plot level, an example of this racial categorization is again the previously mentioned list compiled by Henry’s wife, which symbolically documents in print her sundry reasons why she is impelled to de-legitimize her Korean American husband as not a true American. However, Henry’s white American wife, by writing this list, ironically creates a “minor literature,” since her list is “political” and “collective”: it politically alienates her husband from her culture; and implicitly, her list collectively makes a claim about Asian-Americans in general. Then who is to be blamed, in this case, for being political and collective? Meanwhile, Chang Rae Lee’s Native Speaker is segregated under the “minor literature” in a separate American canon.

Why can’t Henry’s American wife, who is the “standard barrier,” and metaphorically the American canon, allow Henry to be singularly American? He does what is required of him, but, her list, indicts him of being too alienated or “foreign” to be singularly American. Obviously, his wife has not been convinced by Kristeva’s theory that the “foreigner” (her husband) whom she resents is, in fact, “herself.” Pertinent to Henry’s dilemma of wanting to be singularly American is the essay called “The More Things Change: Paradigm Shifts in Asian American Studies” written by Sumida Stephen. Stephen, in his essay, informs that “for about a decade the critique of Asian American ‘dual identity’ empowered Asian American studies with the contravening idea that it is the concept of ‘America’ that needs to be changed so that it is understood that Asian Americans are singularly American” (Sumida 1). In the past, if silent submissive Asian Americans can be effortlessly alienated (e.g., Japanese internment and Chinese exclusionary Act) on the basis of “phenotypically/culturally being more foreign than others”—thus requiring qualifiers and prefixes describing what type of an American they are—now, such systemized alienation are no longer feasible. With the coming-of-age of children of the Asian Diasporas, who may be the future writers/scholars, who have grown up in America, and who are mentally, culturally, and legally “Americans,” need to be dealt with. Surely, it is inevitable that the canon debates in the U.S., in the very near future, will have to re-examine the concept of “American” in categorizing the works written by Asian Americans, and by extension, other prefixed half-Americans.

Though the canonizers intentionally or unintentionally mold “white race” as the true “American culture” through literature, just as African American history and culture cannot be cognitively nor textually segregated from “Americanism,” so is the ethnic/minor literature. For the variegated ethnic subcultures and their history are inseparable constituents of America. Although the nation’s white elitists may rather regard ethnic/minor literature as not American, more often than not, however, it overwhelmingly represents authors who are American citizens with American education and American mind (like Chang Rae Lee) invariably writing in some ways about “Americanism.” Thus, the fact that American canon routinely place literature written by its diasporic/hybrid scholars under the “ethnic category”—which automatically precludes them from being included as an essential part of the whole—is both insensitive and illogical, in that it defies the multicultural make up of the American populace.

Today, any large cosmopolitan country like England, and even China, for example, is transnational in nature, because it is made up of diverse peoples and cultures, let alone “America”—the land of liberty, equality, and diversity. Yet disturbingly, contemporary critics such as Said, Spivak, Guillory, and Bhabha would all agree that Eurocentric nationalism/racialization is the invisible force in the canon war that divides and groups, includes and excludes the wide-range of literature. However, Bhabha warns that “the very idea of a pure ‘ethnically cleansed’ national identity can only be achieved through…death” (1334). Similarly, Said in “The Politics of Knowledge” critiques that the illusion of culturally homogenous nationalism in the canon debates is that it is perceived and internalized “as if…it [is] pure and unchanging from the beginning to the end of time” (192). In other words, Said is trying to explain that (canonical) nationalism as a concept is susceptible to mutation and hybridization over time. Thus, the insistence on the part of the canonizers to forge and transmit monolithic Western culture through racially selective process of canonization not only threatens the sociopolitical harmony, but is a futile act of resisting the global currency. Instead, the authorities of the Western canon, more narrowly, those in control of the American canon need to re-assess and realign the concept of “American” as inherently transnational in scope to include the works of the prefixed American writers as singularly “American,” without qualifiers or separate curriculum.

Works Cited

Bhabba, Homi. “Locations of Culture.” The Critical Tradition. Richter, David H. Boston: Bedford Books, 1989.

Lee, Chang Rae. Native Speaker. New York: Riverhead Books, 1995.

Johnson, Samuel. “Preface to Shakespeare.” The Critical Tradition. Richter, David H. Boston: Bedford Books, 1989.

Gilles, Deleuze, and Guattari, Felix. “What Is a Minor Literature?” Falling into Theory. Richter, David H. Boston:

Guillory, John. “The Canon as Cultural Capital.” Falling into Theory. Richter, David H. Boston: Bedford Books, 2000

Kristeva, Julia. Strangers To Ourselves. Roudiez, Leon S. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.

Said, Edward W. “The Politics of Knowledge.” Falling into Theory. Richter, David H. Boston: Bedford Books, 2000.

Spivak, Gayatri. “Imperialism and Sexual Difference.” Falling into Theory. Richter, David H. Boston: Bedford Books, 2000.

Sumida, Stephen H. “The More Things Change: Paradigm Shifts in Asian American Studies.” American Studies International 38 (2000): 97-114.