The Cosmopolitan Vision In Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker

Reading Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker in contexts of the cosmopolitan ideas proposed by Robin Cohen,Gerard Delanty,David Hollinger,Peter Van der Veer,et al.,this thesis explains how the political,cultural and ethnical appeals of cosmopolitanism underlie the fictional narration.The novel develops around Henry Park's espionage investigation on the NYC democratic MP and mayor runner John Kwang,both of whom are Korean-American,in the 1990s New York.The author includes in the novel his contemplation on immigrant experience,especially the pain of cultural consent and self-erasure.The thesis examines how elements like hierarchy,capital form habitus in the public sphere,and suggests "deterritorialization" and "minority cosmopolitanism",concepts created by Gilles Deleuze and Susan Koshy,as a possible solution.Based on the fiction,the thesis also discusses the ideas of border-crossing embedded in cosmopolitanism and lists the strategic practices:cultural imagination,political envision and action,as well as critical reflection.In this sense Native Speaker may as well be read as a secular metaphor of the cosmopolitan call.Cosmopolitanism,after all,is an answer to the humane aspiration for solidarity.