Do I, Too, Sing America?: Vernacular Representations and Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker

Native Speaker is, in many ways, a Korean-American reimagination of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.

—A. Magazine

With echoes of Ralph Ellison, Chang-rae Lee's extraordinary debut speaks for another kind of invisible man: the Asian immigrant in America. . . a revelatory work of fiction.

—Vogue

As the comments above suggest—which are included as blurbs for the paperback edition of Chang-rae Lee's debut novel, Native Speaker—a particularly convenient way for reviewers to praise Asian American literary works is to liken them to roughly comparable if more famous African American texts. It is easy to see how such compliments might seem double-edged: in this case, they laud Lee's novel not by suggesting its originality but rather by depicting it as an artfully executed "reimagination" of a text widely regarded as a masterpiece of African American literature. If the value of his writing is seen as deriving solely from the inventiveness with which it reworks Ellison's, then Lee's literary performance risks being reduced to an act of authorial impersonation. From such a perspective Henry Park, the Korean American spy who serves as the protagonist and narrator of Native Speaker, might come across simply as an invisible man in yellowface, a spook of another color. I would argue, however, that such comparisons, while overly facile, are suggestive of the ways in which the established presence of the African American tradition enables as well as constrains the attempts of Asian Americans to situate themselves in the literary and political landscape of U.S. culture. This interracial legacy and how it is negotiated by Asian American writers is one of my primary concerns.

My focus here is Native Speaker, a work in which "echoes of Ralph Ellison" certainly can be discerned. Most obviouslyLee's novel, like Ellison's, attempts to cast light on the psychic costs of the invisibility imposed on a minority community by white Americans and of the invisibility that prevents those within a minority community from recognizing each other. Native Speaker also shares with Invisible Man a deep interest in the relationship between political and literary forms of racial representation. For as these works anatomize the conditions that prevent African Americans and Asian Americans, respectively, from achieving a viable sense of visibility in the political domain, they do so to point out the inadequacy of purely political solutions. Indeed these are to a significant degree post-political texts, for they ultimately point toward the domain of literature as one of abundant recompense—as a site where the racial invisibility that reigns in the political order can be compensated by the kinds of representation to be attained in literary culture.

But while this literary ideology is one that Lee, in a sense, inherits from Ellison, it is one that is reshaped, as I will show, to fit a quite different historical need. For it is important to recognize not only the differences of racial positioning that divide Lee from Ellison but also the half-century that divides the publication dates of their first novels. In Invisible Man, written in the early years of the Cold War, Ellison reflects upon some fifty-odd years of African American political activism, a period encompassing Booker T. Washington's program for black uplift, Marcus Garvey's Pan-Africanism, the New Negro movement, the Harlem Renaissance, and black communism. Thematized by the question that the invisible man takes from Louis Armstrong's refrain—"What did I do to be so black and blue?—Ellison's is essentially a backwards glance across a panorama of African American history, one that attempts to grapple with the inadequacies of prior political and cultural movements that had claimed to speak for the black masses. In contrast, Native Speaker acknowledges that there is no comparably monumental Asian American tradition of political and literary...