The Fiction of Neoliberal Ontology in Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker

As the category of “Asian American” has been challenged and stretched to accommodate a proliferating number of identities in the US, Asian American literary scholars and writers have struggled with issues of representation. I turn to Chang-rae Lee’s novel Native Speaker (1995) to examine Lee’s use of fiction that questions and searches for ontological identity through the use of language as an Asian American, even as the term “Asian American” is suspect and fractured. In a neoliberal context, what place does fiction have, and moreover what role does fiction play in challenging the ways we produce, market, and consume Asian American literature and Asian America as a (fractured) whole? Moreover, this study seeks to look at how neoliberalism has come to shape, challenge, authenticate, and utilize the fiction of ontology as a means of identity formation. More specifically, this study looks to the ways fiction unravels the fictions of ontological being, even as it utilizes and capitalizes on its usefulness as a cultural capital symbol in a neoliberal America.