An Ethics of Betrayal: The Politics of Otherness in Emergent U.S. Literatures and Culture
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The Intellectual in Minority Discourse The Intellectual in Minority Discourse
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The Knowledge Work of the Minority Spy The Knowledge Work of the Minority Spy
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The Invention of the Minority Intellectual The Invention of the Minority Intellectual
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4. Ethnic America Undercover: The Intellectual and Minority Discourse
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Published:13 April 2009
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Abstract
This chapter considers narratives that actualize the metaphor of minority subjects as intelligence agents—racialized spies who are indeed “traitors” of their “own people.” It begins with a stalemated issue that has faced U. S. ethnic studies since its inception, the divide between academic work and community experience. This division underpins charges that ethnic studies is out of touch and ineffective in producing change in the “real world” and that its practitioners exploit the community for professional advantage. To address this question, the chapter turns to two spy narratives, Américo Paredes's George Washington Gómez and Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker, both of which confront the anxiety that ethnic insiders might come to serve as traitorous informants against their community. The novels allegorize intellectual work, in this case, ethnic studies, as “intelligence work.” They conceive of the institution as neither a space where one discovers an authentic racial identity, nor one that generates inadequate, second-order representations of racial identities that are essentially located elsewhere. Rather, the university serves as a crucial site, in conjunction and in conflict with other locations, for the making and unmaking of racial identifications.
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