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영어

This paper approaches the whiteness presented in Chang-rae Lee’s The Native Speaker as one form of interpellated ideologies. Taking a cue from Louis Althusser’s Interpellation Theory in which all social members are interpellated into the social order and asked to perform socially-given roles in accordance with his/her subject position within the symbolic order (therefore, “imagined relations” with the symbolic order), this paper posits that the white people in The Native Speaker are also interpellated into the hierarchy of racial order to obtain the socially-constructed significances of whiteness and act accordingly. This assumption can be meaningful in the sense that whiteness has usually seen as a ‘non-racial’ entity, whereas the colored are identified foremost by their specific racial features. As many critics have argued, whiteness stripped off and thus unmarked of its racial qualities takes the form of universality and even Americanness, in which it is less a kind of race than the symbolic measure to which other ‘raced’ Others attempt to be equal. Lee closely follows the process this socially constructed whiteness, in which white people are interpellated into the racial order to reinstate the function of whiteness. Through this process, whiteness is not only posited as the non-raced authority to define and judge the racial identity of the colored, but it also acquires a form of racial neutrality based upon whiteness as a non-visualized form of race.