Globalized Racial Space in Native Speaker

초록

This paper deals with a novel, Native Speaker written by Chang-Rae Lee, a Korean American novelist, to find how racial segregation and Korean Americans in the social space are imagined, substantiated and unfolded in the literary space. Broadly speaking, in reading closely and analyzing Native Speaker, I search for critical meaning of Korean American spaces as social spaces embedding such ideological apparatuses as cultural difference and differential racism. To initiate my argument, in the introduction, I use Hannah Arendt’s contentious arguments about racial space and segregation as a springboard to raise questions about complex issue of globalized racial space in Native Speaker. In turn, I broaden the scope of racial space from Korean enclave built by early Korean American immigrants including Henry’s father to John Kwang’s pan-ethnic utopia in the era of globalization. By this analysis, I discover Kwang’s failure has a root in the early Korean immigrants’ beliefs on Eastern and Western social discourses though Kwang’s space embeds more complex issues of multiculturalism, cultural difference and differential racism mediated by globalization and unbalanced global capitalism.

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