The End of Whiteness and the Rise of Multicultural Asian America in Changrae Lee's Aloft
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12469190 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Emily Raymundo (University of Manchester, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 20 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 441-459 |
| Publication date | 2017-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Asian American Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1096-8598 • E-ISSN: 1097-2129 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1353/jaas.2017.0035 |
| OpenAlex | W2767088154 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 17 |
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
Aesthetics · Art · Dignity · Literature · Multiculturalism · Narrative · Orientalism · Political science · Privilege (computing · Racism · Sociology · White privilege · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Asian Culture and Media Studies · Gender Studies · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Philosophy
Marxism and literature
The Wages of Whiteness
Racial Formation in an Age of Permanent War
Nowhere in Particular
Freedom with Violence
Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century
Immigrant Acts
Imagine Otherwise
Racial Formation in the United States
Morphing Race into Ethnicity
Terrorist Assemblages
Reontologising Race
A phenomenology of whiteness
Whiteness of a Different Color
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0.25 |
| Citation span | 2022 - 2022 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |