Ethnicity as Cognitive Identity: Private and Public Negotiations in Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker

"They are every shape and color but they still share this talk, and this is the other tongue they have learned, this must be the special language."

(Chang-Rae Lee)¹

"What is it then between us?"

(Walt Whitman, "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry")²

One of the main incentives for writing this article is my understanding that in the United States notions of ethnicity and ethnic identity are still mainly based on a person's origins as they manifest themselves in physical features and the kind of culture usually associated with these looks. Though there is no denial that such forces of descent exist and are powerful, I believe that, particularly in the United States, they are embedded in the even more powerful unifying force of the national culture ("E pluribus unum"), which co-opts them into a flattering pattern of ethnic pluralism as multiculturalism. Thus, the emphasis on ethnic studies in literature of the recent past has created the illusion that there is more influence of a diversity of mind in the United States than actually exists, mainly because the fact has been taken for granted that there is a correspondence between people's descent (ethnicity in the sense of physical markers and culture of origin) and their "cultural identity" in the sense of practiced cultural habits and skills.³ In short, a pluralism of descent has been translated into—and therefore has been assumed to automatically yield—a culture of multiplicity.

Through such a notion of "ethnicity," origin has been naturalized into the main force of identity formation, be it in terms of body identity (biological determinism) or culturally determined identity (and ensuing issues of cultural untranslatability as we find them in certain kinds of poststructuralist ethnic theory).⁴ Much ethnic criticism tends to fence in the turf in ways that leave at best some room for structural oppositions—a tendency that tends to allegorize non-ethnic characters as mere signifiers of bordering ideological fields, thus denying any serious effort an author might make to describe human communication.⁵ Wlad Godzich, for example, presents a theory of the agency of "cultural fields."⁶ This perspective results in his location of cultural change in "emergent literatures" as a play of fields, i.e., as an abstract matter of metatheory.⁷ Similarly, Djelal Kadir suggests a strategy of ethnic deconstruction as "(t)exteriority" to implement cultural change,⁸ thus remaining in a hermeneuticist mode that focuses on agency by structure itself. To some extent, even Hartwig Isernhagen's suggestion of "writing interculture," of theorizing "text or a group of texts as a form of Öffentlichkeit,"⁹ smacks of such agency of language all by itself. To be sure, these critics argue in highly sophisticated ways when they trace "discursive mechanisms." But if Isernhagen insists that the position of "writing interculture" is necessarily one of "powerlessness" beyond discursive determinism, I want to suggest, in turn, that Lee's writing in Native Speaker also implies that such an Öffentlichkeit of powerlessness starts in the private, that discursive mechanisms can (only?) be subverted on a pragmatic and cognitive, i.e., an interpersonal, level of agency. It is this agency that I associate with cognitive interiority and see at the origin of any negotiation of identity.

My concern is that, though "ethnic forces" of original body and original cultural fields are powerful and must be acknowledged, they don't tell the whole story and fall short of satisfactorily explaining a person's experiencing "identity." After all, the site where intercultural Öffentlichkeit "happens," where it can be processed and negotiated, is cognition, i.e., the bottleneck of personal experience. The cognitive kind of approach that I will associate with Lee's Native Speaker, rather than subjecting identity to ethnicity, is based on an epistemology of individual human understanding and therefore subjects ethnic identity to experiential negotiations. This is the main point of a cognitive position—it insists that controlled change (and this includes even the attribution of exterior control!) can only be understood and implemented on a level of individual psychology...