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“This Doesn't Mean What You'll Think”: Native Speaker, Allegory, Race

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Elda E. Tsou
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Abstract

This article contributes to the new formalism by considering the relation between literary form and race. It argues that Chang-rae Lee's novel Native Speaker is primarily concerned with its own figurative activity and that only when the analytic framework is shifted away from Asian America and toward allegory does the novel's far-ranging critique of whiteness, referential language, and native speaking become apparent. This figurative activity consists of strategies of concealment that disguise their artfulness by posing as self-evident or referential. Race, espionage, and allegory are examples of this representational mode, defined by hiding in plain sight. As part of a larger argument for formal analysis in Asian American literature, the article explores how the novel's central tropes figure the figuration of Asian American experience, and it seeks to demonstrate how reading for form can sharpen the politics of race.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 128 , Issue 3 , May 2013 , pp. 575 - 589
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 by The Modern Language Association of America

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