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Towards Interracial Understanding and Identification: Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing and Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2010

KUN JONG LEE
KUN JONG LEE
Affiliation:
Kun Jong Lee is Professor of English at Korea University, Anam-dong, Sungbuk-ku, Seoul, 136-701, Korea. Email: kunjonglee@hotmail.com
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Abstract

African Americans and Korean Americans have addressed Black–Korean encounters and responded to each other predominantly in their favorite genres: in films and rap music for African Americans and in novels and poems for Korean Americans. A case in point is the intertextuality between Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing and Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker. A comparative study of the two demonstrates that they are seminal texts of African American–Korean American dialogue and discourse for mutual understanding and harmonious relationships between the two races in the USA. This paper reads the African American film and the Korean American fiction as dialogic responses to the well-publicized strife between Korean American merchants and their African American customers in the late 1980s and early 1990s and as windows into a larger question of African American–Korean American relations and racialization in US culture. This study ultimately argues that the dialogue between Spike Lee's film and Chang-rae Lee's novel moves towards a possibility of cross-racial identification and interethnic coalition building.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 44 , Issue 4 , November 2010 , pp. 741 - 757
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

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3 Spike Lee and Lisa Jones, Do the Right Thing: A Spike Lee Joint (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), 36.

4 Do the Right Thing, 1989, Disc One: The Movie, Do the Right Thing, prod. and dir. Spike Lee, DVD, double-disc set, Criterion Collection, Universal Home Video, 2001.

5 Pyong Gap Min, Caught in the Middle: Korean Merchants in America's Multiethnic Cities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 23.

6 See “Cannes, 1989,” Do the Right Thing, Disc Two: The Supplement.

7 Ella Stewart, “Communication between African Americans and Korean Americans: Before and after the Los Angeles Riots,” in Edward T. Chang and Russell C. Leong, eds., Los Angeles – Struggles toward Multiethnic Community: Asian American, African American, & Latino Perspectives (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994), 33.

8 See P. G. Min, 102; Kyeyoung Park, The Korean American Dream: Immigrants and Small Business in New York City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 57; Helen Zia, Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 88; and Patrick D. Joyce, No Fire Next Time: Black–Korean Conflicts and the Future of America's Cities (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 69.

9 Zia, 88.

10 P. G. Min, 177–78.

11 See Lee and Jones, Do the Right Thing, 55, 282; Spike Lee, “Spike Lee Replies: ‘Say It Ain't So, Joe,’” letter to the editor, New York, 17 July 1989, 6; “Spike Lee,” in David Breskin, ed., Inner Views: Filmmakers in Conversation (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1992), 188; and Lee, S. and Gates, Henry Louis Jr., “Final Cut: Spike Lee and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Rap on Race, Politics, and Black Cinema,” Transition, 52 (1991), 176–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 180, 182.

12 Claire Jean Kim, Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black–Korean Conflict in New York City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 25–26.

13 Lee and Jones, 38.

14 Alex Haley and Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley (New York: Ballantine Books, 1989; first published 1964), 114.

15 Lee and Jones, 35.

16 Ibid., 251; and frame number 99B of the “Storyboard Gallery,” in Do the Right Thing, “The Riot Sequence,” Disc Two.

17 Kim, Janine Young, “Are Asians Blacks? The Asian-American Civil Rights Agenda and the Contemporary Significance of the Black/White Paradigm,” Yale Law Journal, 108, 8 (1999), 2385–412CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 2392.

18 Hanson, Philip, “The Politics of Inner City Identity in Do the Right Thing,” South Central Review, 20, 2–4 (2003), 47–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 60, 61.

19 Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996; first published 1995), 50.

20 Ibid., 49.

21 Ibid., 47.

22 Ibid., 50, 49.

23 Ibid., 121.

24 See “Success Story of One Minority Group in U.S.,” U.S. News & World Report, 26 Dec. 1966, 73 ff.

25 For the stereotypes of the Korean American model minority, see John L. Dotson Jr., “The Pioneers,” Newsweek, 26 May 1975, 10; John Grimond, “Los Angeles Comes of Age,” Economist, 3 Apr. 1982, 3 ff.; Michael Daly, “Making It: The Saga of Min Chul Shin and His Family Fruit Store,” New York, 20 Dec. 1982, 32–38; Pauline Yoshihashi and Sarah Lubman, “American Dreams: How the Kims of L.A. and Other Koreans Made It in the U.S.,” Wall Street Journal, 16 June 1992, eastern edn, A1 ff.; Edward Norden, “South-Central Korea: Post-riot L.A.,” American Spectator, Sept. 1992, 33–40; and Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Overachievers,” New York, 10 April 1995, 43–51.

26 C. Lee, 121.

27 Ibid., 52–53.

28 King-kok Cheung, “Three Korean American Dreams: Performing the Model Minority in Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker,” Inmoon nonchong (Journal of the Humanities), 55 (June 2000), 1–31, 11.

29 C. Lee, 186.

30 Ibid., 185, original emphasis.

31 Ibid., 186.

32 Ibid.

33 Ibid., 234.

34 Ibid., 337.

35 Ibid., 304.

36 Ibid., 344.

37 June Dwyer, “Speaking and Listening: The Immigrant as Spy Who Comes in from the Cold,” in Katherine B. Payant and Toby Rose, eds., The Immigrant Experience in North American Literature: Carving out a Niche (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), 79, 82.

38 C. Lee, 337.

39 Ibid., 181.

40 For the fourteen boycotts during the period see Joyce, No Fire Next Time, 10–21, 65–118.

41 C. Lee, 180. See Joyce, 111, for a brief description of the boycott.

42 C. Lee, 271.

43 Joyce, 54.

44 C. Lee, 192.

45 Ibid., 151.

46 Ibid., 193.

47 For an excellent study of the colloquy, see Neil Gotanda, “Multiculturalism and Racial Stratification,” in Jean Yu-wen Wu and Min Song, eds., Asian American Studies: A Reader (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 379–90.

48 C. Lee, 151, 152.

49 Ibid., 151.

50 K. Cheung, “Three Korean American Dreams,” 23.

51 C. Lee, 153.

52 S. Lee, “Spike Lee Replies,” 6.