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The End of Whiteness and the Rise of Multicultural Asian America in Chang-rae Lee's Aloft
- Journal of Asian American Studies
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 20, Number 3, October 2017
- pp. 441-459
- 10.1353/jaas.2017.0035
- Article
- Additional Information
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This article reads Chang-rae Lee's Aloft (2004) for what it reveals about how literature is used by neoliberal multiculturalism to recruit subjects into its rationale, highlighting the problems that multiculturalism generates for Asian American studies scholars. Aloft uses its white male protagonist to launch a cogent critique of whiteness, revealing how whiteness constructs itself as an invisible norm against which all difference emerges as abnormal and aberrant. Yet even as the novel critiques whiteness, Aloft also envisions a multicultural future in which the structures of privilege that once defined whiteness are not abandoned or dismantled; rather, they are inherited by Paul Pyun, Jerry's Korean American son-in-law. These two facets of the novel are not in conflict—they do not contradict each other, but rather work in tandem to unfold a multicultural vision of privilege, flexibility, worthiness, and dignity that appears to resolve the problems of racial difference while actually cutting racial formations along new lines. Aloft then demonstrates the ways in which trenchant critiques of whiteness, Orientalism, and racialized exploitation can travel alongside, and even enable, narratives of multicultural ascension.