[In the following essay, Lye examines the portrayals of gender, race, nationality, geopolitics, and power within M. Butterfly, and discusses the variety of critical interpretations the play has garnered.]

Few works by Asian American artists have captured as much attention as David Henry Hwang's dramatic adaptation of a newspaper account of a French diplomat's affair with a Peking Opera diva later revealed to be a man and a spy for the People's Republic of China. Winning mainstream accolades such as the Tony Award for Best Play of the Year in 1988, M. Butterfly has also been taken up by many Asian American and feminist critics as an example of politically subversive theater.¹ Chalsa Loo praises the play as a work of “complexity and brilliance,” in the way that it “deconstructs Giacomo Puccini's famous opera Madame Butterfly” (16), and Dorinne Kondo writes that “perhaps the most creative subversiveness of Hwang's play best emerges most clearly in contrast with the conventions of the opera Madame Butterfly, to which it provides ironic counterpoint. … Hwang reappropriates the conventional narrative of the pitiful Butterfly and the trope of the exotic, submissive ‘Oriental’ woman” (7). Robert Skloot concurs in claiming M. Butterfly to be “thoroughly subversive” by “confronting [audiences] with challenges to cultural and gender assumptions” (59). For Marjorie Garber, “The (de)construction or (de)composition of the fantasy of ‘character’ is precisely what is at work and on display in M. Butterfly” (143).

These responses mark the critical modality shared by wide-ranging commentators and the playwright, who himself calls his work a “deconstructivist Madame Butterfly.”² Through its self-conscious use of the “rue story” of Boursicot as the occasion for exploring and dismantling Western perceptions of Asians, the play has been presented and widely received as a “subversive” project that “deconstructs” dominant Orientalist discourses of which the Puccini classic is treated as paradigmatic.³ As such, M. Butterfly can be said to position itself, and to be commonly positioned by critics, within the field known as minority discourse.⁴ The widespread characterization of the play as “deconstructive” to mean “undermine” and “expose as a (social) construction” marks a convergence between a rhetoric of political oppositionality and the modality of celebratory postmodernism. However, we may want to pay closer attention to what particular dominant representation the play seeks to “subvert.”

A struggle between two readings of the canonical Western text to which M. Butterfly constitutes a response is the substance of the very first encounter between the two protagonists in the play. After viewing Song Liling's rendition of the Italian opera, the diplomat Gallimard's expression of admiration meets with the following response from the Asian performer:

It's one of your favorite fantasies, isn't it? The submissive Oriental woman and the cruel white man. … Consider it this way: what would you say if a blonde homecoming queen fell in love with a short Japanese businessman? He treats her cruelly, then goes home for three years, during which time she prays to his picture and turns down marriage from a young Kennedy. Then, when she learns he has remarried, she kills herself. Now, I believe you would consider this girl to be a deranged idiot, correct? But because it's an Oriental who kills herself for a Westerner—ah! you find it beautiful.

(Act 1, scene 6, p. 17)

Song criticizes Puccini's opera for perpetuating the image of the “submissive Oriental woman” whose counterpart is the emasculated Asian man, as exemplified by the hypothetical “short Japanese businessman” proposed as the preposterous object of desire. But if M. Butterfly seems to engage the problem of the feminine gendering of Asian ethnicity with which so many Asian American texts are concerned, critics may be overhasty in assuming that objections to the “submissive Oriental woman” proceed from politically noncontradictory standpoints.⁵ Nationalist discourses, for instance, often articulate resistance to colonial modernity through figurations of gender that construct women as the site of “tradition,” while colonial discourses may generate the idea of “white men saving brown women from brown men.”⁶ Gender, in other words, often serves as the site of contestation between groups that are not particularly feminist.

The particular image of “brown women” submissive to “white men” may not stem from the desire to liberate “brown women” but in fact register, in deeply misogynist ways, the colonial anxieties of “brown men.” Hwang's own account of the genesis of the idea of M. Butterfly is particularly revealing when he says, “I didn't even know the plot of the opera! I knew Butterfly only as a cultural stereotype; speaking of an Asian woman, we would sometimes say, ‘she's pulling a Butterfly,’ which meant playing the submissive Oriental number” (“Afterword,” 95). In Hwang's usage, in the implied status of the “we” who invoke the Butterfly metaphor, the metaphor clearly emerges as a term of reproach used by Asian American men against Asian American women. Hwang's conceptualization of the problem of “Butterfly,” furthermore, reflects an engagement with representation as false stereotype or myth, rather than as a discourse of power.

Yet the play's effort to allegorize the sexual drama between a white man and an Asian (wo)man as a story of geopolitical relations between East and West has led critics to discuss the play's contention with “Orientalism” in terms of power relations at the simultaneous registers of minority identity and of the nation. I will argue that it is precisely the difference between minority politics and geopolitics, as well as the difference between a refusal of cultural stereotype and an analysis of power or domination, that critical discussion around the play has tended to blur—by use of the concept-metaphor of gender. For this reason, it is important that we briefly review the terms in which M. Butterfly's gender politics are appraised.

Dorinne Kondo's account of a 1989 Asian American Studies Association panel discussion on M. Butterfly describes a critical debate that breaks down between supportive feminist critics on the one hand and hostile male critics on the other. Her account posits a consistent separation between feminist and male critics on the basis of their response to the figure of the Asian transvestite—a figure whose subversive interrogation of fixed, stable identity, she implies, is measured in its profound disturbance of male critics' sense of masculinity (25-27). Chalsa Loo, who presented a paper at this panel that was later published in Asian Week, ascribes a feminist perspective to the play for affording “the Asian American woman (who is acutely aware of racism, sexism and imperialism) vicarious satisfaction in telling off the chauvinist, colonialist male” (16). Although Loo embraces the play from a humanistic standpoint with which Kondo's critique of “substance-metaphysics” would appear to be at odds, her assertion that “it matters not to many feminists that Song Liling is a woman played by a man” (16) permits us to place her in line with antiessentialist feminist perspectives that have found reason to celebrate the play. Finally, that a significant feminist critic outside the field of Asian American studies altogether has alighted upon M. Butterfly for material for her work on transvestism, arguing that the play's transvestite scandal tells the “truth” about the constructedness of gender, further reflects the insertion of M. Butterfly into broad antiessentialist trends in feminism (Garber, 143).

The few existing attacks on the play for being antifeminist, on the other hand, seem only to fortify an antiessentialist celebration of the play by basing their arguments on a notion of femininity violated by the transvestite. Gabrielle Cody's complaint, for example, that Hwang “take[s] the female gender out of Butterfly by overfeminizing her” and that her “grotesque idealized femaleness” suggests a presence that, “in short, is not female” itself seems to operate from a feminist position scandalized by gender parody (26). Hence, although Marjorie Garber's reading also acknowledges the presence of a certain misogynist humor and concludes that by “focusing on male pathos and male self-pity, M. Butterfly is intermittently anti-feminist and homophobic” (141), these misogynistic traces are ultimately reconciled in her reading of the play as an example of antiessentialist gender performance. Rather than permitting the misogyny to present a contradiction to her assessment of the play's subversive gender politics, Garber integrates misogyny as an effect of male transvestite theater, which often implies that “a man may be (or rather, make) a more successful ‘woman’ than a woman can” (141). Furthermore, the antibutch humor of Song's put-down of Comrade Chin as “passing for a woman” seems to betray a fear of women and women's difference but, according to Garber, this fear actually reflects the “subconscious recognition” of the “artificial” nature of “woman” in patriarchal society and, concomitantly, the artificiality of “man” (142).

It is precisely the reading of the play in terms of gender performativity that enables critics, in different ways, to link gender and national politics in a double subversion of the binarisms understood to be constitutive of Orientalism. Garber focuses on the Asian transvestite as the scandal that stands at the “crossroads of nationalism and sexuality.” The single figure of the transvestite, in other words, serves as the vehicle for category crisis; one category crisis leads metonymically to another, and “as the figure of the transvestite deconstructs the binary of male and female, so all national binaries and power relations are put into question” (Garber, 130). Kondo likewise argues that “through its use of gender ambiguity present in its very title … through power reversals, through constituting these identities within the vicissitudes of global politics, Hwang conceals, reveals and then calls into question so-called ‘true’ identity, pointing us toward a reconceptualization of the topography of ‘the self’” (Kondo, 7). Readings of the play as gender performance thus form the basis of arguments on behalf of the play's political subversiveness at various levels of identity. Of these, Kondo's and Garber's are exemplary. My essay will take issue with their arguments, not out of a particular interest in asserting just a different reading of the play, but in order ultimately to signal wider problems within contemporary feminist and minority discourse theory revealed by M. Butterfly and its reception. A much more problematic view of the play gradually becomes more visible when we observe its staging in a different site and read it alongside the textual antecedents it is thought to subvert.

M. BUTTERFLY IN SINGAPORE

In the summer of 1990, M. Butterfly opened for a brief one-week run in Singapore as the showpiece of the state-sponsored festival of arts. Much discussion around the arts festival had been filling newspaper pages in the preceding weeks, in which readers were treated to lectures by the Ministry of Culture on the barrenness of a technocratic society to which the festival was to offer antidote and relief. The festival featured cultural events that ranged conspicuously from high to low, a demarcation that neatly coincided with “Western” and “local.” Playing in the most prestigious and formal concert halls, performances by Alvin Ailey and the Houston Symphony constituted the major events in the festival's calendar; around these foreign imports were scheduled a variety of performances by local artists dubbed “Festival Fringe” and available for free consumption in informal venues such as shopping malls and hotel lobbies. M. Butterfly, which closed, and in some sense represented the finale of, the festival, straddled perfectly this divide.

A production of Theatreworks, the only professional theater company in Singapore, M. Butterfly also received highly publicized consultation from the playwright himself, who was personally flown in during the rehearsal and planning stages of the production. A local production of a foreign script, M. Butterfly thus represented a collaboration and crossover between the foreign and the local—the Western and the Asian?—a fusion the festival overtly celebrated by according it pride of place, scheduling its performance for the Victoria Theater, the nation's most prestigious of institutional spaces of culture.

How are we to understand the selection of an Asian American play for the promotion of culture in Singapore, a place distinguished by extensive state vigilance over all forms of expression? Although its Economic Development Board expressly seeks the investment of information technologies and markets the country as the communications hub of southern Asia, the Singapore government subjects all books, magazines, music, and movies to political and moral censorship.⁷ In a context where “consent” is “manufactured” by the state, what gets seen, heard, or read therefore bears a direct relationship to what the state apparatus decides is ideologically appropriate. Publicity given Hwang, along with other popular Asian American artists such as Amy Tan, by the state-controlled Straits Times reflects a certain overt interest taken by the Singapore state apparatus in Asian American cultural icons.⁸ The constant media appearance of Asian Americans in the form of “success narratives in the West” indicates their potential serviceability for helping articulate an official nationalism.

The play's directors, Krishen Jit and Christine Lim, seem particularly attracted to the play's concern with questions of multiculturalism precisely insofar as it echoes the rhetoric of Singapore's particular national self-representation. Their message, inscribed within the playbill, extols:

How we perceive others is the reflection of our own prejudices, stereotypes, obsessions and fantasies. When we diminish others, we diminish ourselves. … David Hwang is telling us that is what happens when East meets West and when men meet women. He is also telling us that we can purge our distortions if at first we can expose them to ourselves. … We find his appeal for this kind of truth to be vivid and poignant in a multi-racial and post-colonial Singapore. In a small and less dramatic way, we too have struggled to reconcile problems that inevitably arise between people of various cultures.⁹

Official narratives of the nation construct Singapore as the site of East-West crossing, literalized through its historical basis as an entrepôt economy dependent upon a strategic location at the intersection of international trade routes. These narratives construct Singapore as a nation of diverse racial identities, the harmonious assemblage of which has been made possible only through the activity of the state. It is perhaps no accident, then, that Hwang's play, an allegory of an encounter between East and West, exercises particular resonance in a place where an official nationalist discourse of East-West crossing and multiracial identity has long been foundational.

The appearance of M. Butterfly in Singapore may seem at first to constitute mere testimony to our “postmodern” age of information, whose uninterrupted circuits allow for such continuity between Asian cultural nationalism and Asian American minority discourse. Yet the uncanny facility with which an ostensibly oppositional project from within one context travels into another, exercising altogether different and untold discursive effects, should perhaps give us at least a moment's pause. It is important to know that official nationalism in Singapore takes a particular form and emerges in a particular historical context. After an initial and highly successful drive toward Western development in the first fifteen years after independence, the government, in a turn toward touting “Asian values,” began by the mid-1980s to construct Western liberalism as the nation's most dangerous enemy. Drawing upon and contributing to growing Western public interest in the “economic miracle” of the so-called four tigers (South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore), the Singapore government, led by its former prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, represents one of the loudest advocates of authoritarian capitalism—presented as an attractive, more efficient alternative to the path of Western modernity, an alternative combining “Western economics” with “Eastern culture.” As a key cultural commodity deemed appropriate for the cultural education of deracinated Singaporeans, M. Butterfly appeared on stage in the context of Singapore's more recent double drive to draw in Western capital and to filter out “Western values.”

The interest the Singapore government might take during the late 1980s in a play that critiques the “West” from an “Asian” point of view could simply be read as an act of appropriation—that of an oppositional minority discourse by a cultural nationalist project forced to ignore the contradictions of its own position. Whether promoting its major airline in international markets through slogans like “Singapore Girl: you're a great way to fly” or attempting to articulate hegemonic forms of Chineseness most suited to internal political quiescence, the Singapore government is, after all, notorious for having discovered the economic and political dividends of promoting certain essentialist notions of ethnic identity. Discussing the tactics of an “invention of tradition” that manages to insert the nation-state into a narrative of Chinese racial history through a definition of idealized Chineseness that is simultaneously consonant with the requirements of a fully market economy, Geraldine Heng and Janadas Devan have called Singapore's promulgation of Confucian tenets an “internalized Orientalism.”¹⁰ Given the political complexity of its discursive effects once displaced beyond the U.S. context, what might M. Butterfly's Singapore appearance disclose about the particular terms of its Orientalist critique?

Since the play is conventionally viewed as an Asian American “response” to the “West,” of which Puccini serves as the canonical representative, its performance in Asia is particularly interesting. Staged outside Euro-America, the play's assumption of a Western performance context becomes more noticeable. Despite claims that the play “gives voice” to the Asian subject, its general strategy of defamiliarizing Orientalism from within depends upon structurally placing Gallimard at the center and Song at the margin.¹¹ The French diplomat Gallimard, for instance, directly addresses the audience in brief asides that give the viewers direct access to his point of view and that invite them to share in his desires for an Oriental butterfly; the Asian transvestite lover Song Liling, by contrast, neither communicates directly with the audience nor offers explanations for his own actions. In an interview, Hwang implies the kind of audience he has in mind when he says, “I assumed that many in the audience would be coming to the theater because they hoped to see something exotic and mysterious, but what exactly is behind the desire to see the ‘exotic East’?”¹²

Directorial changes to the Singapore production, however, appeared to respond to the question of what it means to stage a cultural event outside the majority frame from within which it was conceptualized. The stage set itself appeared far less lavish in its display of Oriental design motifs than in the New York and London productions, onstage Chinese viewers were added to the Peking Opera scene and provided noisy comic relief, and the length of the Peking Opera performance was significantly condensed. According to director Krishen Jit, such adjustments were made because “You can't fool an Asian audience with the Peking Opera. There are people out there who really know it. So we decided to cut down on that scene and use the Chinese audience as a distraction.”¹³ In other words, the Singapore production seemed to be registering signs of discomfort with the play's implication in certain techniques of Orientalist seduction.

Not all Orientalist aesthetic strategies were modified, however. In the manner of the New York and London productions, the Singapore production made use of certain visual icons and aural devices to symbolize the eruption of the historical events of the Cultural Revolution. Giant red banners, uniform human bodies mechanically marching to the sound of slow, ominous drumbeats—all provided aesthetic reinforcement for the dramatic representation of the Cultural Revolution's Oriental despotic character.¹⁴ Since the Singapore staging intervened against the play's Orientalist aesthetics on the subject of cultural “Asia” (the Peking Opera), its uncritical adoption of Orientalist tropes deployed against political “Asia” is worth remarking. It is not surprising that a play that demonizes the People's Republic of China should find its way onto the stage in a virulently anticommunist state.

Throughout the fifties and sixties during the Malayan struggle for independence, before the destruction of a powerful communist and trade-union movement with ties to China, the colonial powers particularly feared that a domino effect sweeping down from the north would turn Singapore into the “Cuba” of Southeast Asia. A partnership between the British government and the People's Action Party (PAP), which rules to this day, managed, through a combination of legislative sleights and police repression, to exclude the communists from power. From that period of internal struggle, to the immediate “postcolonial” period of dependency upon the British military base for employment, to the present one in which Singapore has proposed itself as the alternative to Subic Bay in the insurgency-racked Philippines, Singapore not only constitutes a prominent economic counterexample to Western underdevelopment of the “Third World”—it also has a place of importance on the geopolitical map, as the island fortress that helped stem the red tide that once threatened to engulf all of Asia.

The triangulation between the United States, Singapore, and China enacted by the Singapore staging of M. Butterfly thus bears particular pertinence to the geopolitical imaginary to which Singapore belongs and which is deeply constitutive of its national identity. Historically, the political struggle between communists and the PAP was figured as the alternative between pro-Chinese and pro-Western positions, with the period of postindependence political repression entailing the massive shutdown of Chinese-language schools, newspapers, and clan associations. Only after the complete elimination of internal resistance, only in the late 1970s and early 1980s did the government begin to reverse its pro-Western rhetoric, and to temper its advocacy of pro-Western development strategies with the call for a return to “Asian”—in particular, “Confucian”—values, and to Chinese-language learning. The disjunction between where Orientalist representation is refused and where it is reproduced in the Singapore staging of the Western text may be more than a mere acknowledgment of a formal gap between the cultural and the political. Here, it may be specifically indicative of the space for a politically conservative identity to adopt a cultural nationalist position.

A reading of the play only from within the critical frame of minority discourse precludes an understanding of how the Orientalist tropes of an American play can be used by one Asian nation-state to say something about another. At the same time that this Asian nation-state seems to be establishing identity with an Asian American subject position in a critique of the “West,” it is also establishing identity with the “West” in a critique of “Asia.” In my discussion of the narratological transformations of the Madame Butterfly convention that follows, I will argue for a reading of Hwang's text that allows us to see how M. Butterfly's transformation of Puccini inherently enables this culturally contradictory ambivalence. I would say that the very unaccidental appearance of M. Butterfly in Singapore's state-sponsored Arts Festival has something to do with the way in which the play fundamentally constructs the Orientalism it sets out to subvert. The liabilities of M. Butterfly's construction of the problem of Orientalism become even more visible when read alongside the “Western” texts to which it constitutes a response.

LOTI, LONG, AND PUCCINI

First performed in 1904 at La Scala, Madame Butterfly the opera derives from an 1898 American magazine short story of the same name by John Luther Long and from its one-act stage adaptation by David Belasco in 1900; Long's text, in turn, draws from the 1887 French novel Madame Chrysanthemum by Pierre Loti.¹⁵ A prolific writer whose many novels and stories are set in exotic Eastern locations from Turkey to Tahiti, Loti is often credited with popularizing Orientalist narrative conventions of intercultural romance within the Western literary imagination. In virtually all of Loti's stories, a Western traveler engages in a sexual adventure with a worshipful Oriental woman who elicits sensuous desire but not love. Ironically enough, it is precisely Loti's “Japanese” novel that runs counter to these Orientalist conventions.¹⁶

Madame Chrysanthemum narrates the tale of a French sailor who arrives in Japan with the intention of purchasing a wife for the duration of his ship's call to port. The arbitrary and almost accidental origin of his match with Chrysanthemum—she is noticed by his friend from among a group of women observing the intended, but failed, match with Jasmin—marks the lack of sentimental attachment within the relationship from its very initiation. While the narrator fluctuates between humorous indifference and physical loathing toward his bride, Chrysanthemum is herself shown to be impersonally deferential. Dramatic passion temporarily threatens to overcome indifference only when the hero suspects his best friend and wife of an incipient adulterous affair that ultimately proves fictitious. The dispersal of the narrator's jealous doubts leads him to project in Chrysanthemum hidden passionate attachment for himself and grief at his imminent departure. But when he revisits his house unexpectedly at the end, expecting to witness sorrow, he discovers her cheerfully counting out the money earned from the “marriage.” In a revelation that takes place at the French protagonist's comic expense, Loti's far from tragic narrative actually exposes the conscious economic relationship upon which this interracial “marriage” is based.

John Luther Long's American magazine story, “Madame Butterfly,” makes certain critical adjustments to Loti's narrative, including rewriting the French sailor as an American naval officer and renaming Madame Chrysanthemum. The sailor buddy who shows greater affection for the Japanese woman than does the protagonist is replaced by the compassionate American consul who functions as the conscience of his heartless compatriot. In Long's text, instead of being an inscrutable secondary character, the Japanese woman becomes the main character and the victim of tragic, unrequited love. While Loti's text ends with the sailor's departure, Long's story centers on the Japanese woman's lonely wait for her beloved's return, and introduces the significant plot feature of the birth of her interracial child. The story ends with Butterfly's suicide attempt when she learns of her husband's marriage to an American woman.

A collaboration between composer Puccini, librettist Luigi Illica, and dramatist Giuseppe Giacosa, the opera largely adopts the narrative of Long's short story, while following Belasco's play in ending with Butterfly's actual suicide. Perhaps the most striking feature of Puccini's Madame Butterfly lies in the significant alterations made to the original libretto as a result of the flop opening at La Scala, Milan, in 1904. The successful Paris performance of 1906, whose version of the libretto is established as the conventional one, reflects key changes made by the composers in response to what they considered awkward about the original. Critics have noted that almost all of these changes concerned the representation of the operatic “hero” Pinkerton, whose lines convey a character cruel in his treatment of Butterfly and weak in his inability to face her truthfully.¹⁷

Pinkerton deliberately avoids telling Butterfly that he can give up the lease on the house on a month's notice, and leads her to believe that the house will be paid for for nine hundred and ninety-nine years. He finds Butterfly's relations an “appalling horde,” bans them from the house, and then encourages her to adopt Christianity, which ensures her ostracization. Later in the story, the consul reflects that it was entirely like Pinkerton to take the “dainty, vivid, eager, formless material, and mould it to his most wantonly whimsical wish,” and having left her, “he had probably not thought of her again, except as the wife of another man” (Smith, 18). The Paris version's elimination of some of Pinkerton's most racially derogatory lines and behavior, as well as those of his American wife Kate, reflects the centrality of the representation of racial attitude to the problem of Madame Butterfly's “weak” operatic hero. The need to soften Pinkerton's character and to sentimentalize the interracial liaison signals the transgressive potential of this paradigmatic Orientalist narrative.

I want to argue that the narrative convention of an Oriental woman who commits suicide because of brutal treatment by a white man can incorporate a political critique. In the case of John Long's short story and the original Italian opera that followed it, the use of this convention for the stuff of high tragedy carried political implications whose discomfiting effects on European audiences of the time were measured by the libretto's continual, uneasy revision. The same narrative that proceeds according to an Orientalist ascription of Japanese female devotion to an American adventurer also hinges its tragic structure upon the dashing of that devotion. More than just meeting with betrayal, her devotion to Pinkerton is shown from the beginning to be always already founded upon a lie. This unfounded faith extends from Pinkerton the individual to a set of ideals represented by the United States in general. Her confidence in the strength of his marriage vows, for instance, is connected to her claiming of the United States as her country, which she believes, for reasons of gender politics, to be superior to Japan:

GORO and Yamadori:
She still thinks she is married.
BUTTERFLY:
I don't think it, for I know it …
GORO:
But the law says:
BUTTERFLY:
What's that to me?
GORO:
… that the wife who is deserted / Has the right to seek divorce.
BUTTERFLY:
That may be Japanese law … / But not in my country.
GORO:
Which one?
BUTTERFLY:
The United States.
SHARPLESS:
(Poor little creature!)
BUTTERFLY:
I know, of course, to open the door / And to turn out your wife at any moment, / Here, is called divorce. But in America that is not allowed.

(103)

Her enthusiasm for “America,” also symbolized in the moment when she instructs her child to wave the American flag, underscores the significance of the Americanization of the original French tale. The transformation of the French sailor into Lieutenant Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton signals a larger and important shift in the nature of the colonial relation that the “East-West” romance allegorically represents. Loti's is a travel narrative in which the Occidental visitor's relation to the foreign locale consists of the (sexualized) anthropological activities of observation, acquisition, and experimentation. The Italian opera, set in Japan, can still, of course, be read as an exotic tale. Assigning the role of protagonist to the Japanese woman, however, has the crucial effect of focusing the text away from representing Western experience of the exotic to representing Eastern desire or longing for the West. In the specific case of Puccini, Occidentalist desire takes the form of an emigration fantasy, one that is clearly peculiar to the ideological structure of American—as opposed to French—global power. Given Puccini's textual source, which is the site of the crucial transformation of Loti, the Italian opera can be read as a profoundly American text, and as such, the Japanese fantasy of emigration it articulates belongs in fact to an American discourse of immigration.

Reading the opera as a text that participates in an American discourse of immigration makes sense of the decision to turn what was originally a careless liaison in Loti into a reproductive union. The liaison's reproductive logic functions to enable the partial fulfillment of Butterfly's impossible desire through generational displacement. Ultimately, the biracial child is to be adopted by “America,” but only upon the necessary exclusion of “Japan”—doubly represented by Butterfly's death and the child's remarkable blondness. The historical context of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America witnessed a peak in anti-Asian racism, with white anxieties about the inflow of Asian immigrants expressed in the slogan of the “Yellow Peril” helping to enact policies such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the 1908 Gentleman's Agreement restricting the numbers of incoming Japanese laborers. As an expression of white American anxiety about Asian immigration, Madame Butterfly achieves a resolution that simultaneously closes and opens the door. The exclusion of Butterfly is ameliorated by the inclusion of a biracial child whose blondness erases the signs of racial difference and seems to preempt the process of assimilation. If the child's inclusion marks the moment of redemption, however, the mother's exclusion inescapably constitutes the moment of tragedy. Her sacrifice is necessary for the preservation of white America, but the dramatic power of her sacrifice stems precisely from its injustice. Her desire for America elicited only by American arrival in Japan, Butterfly is the victim of imperial deception. Blind to Pinkerton's evident attitude of racial superiority, Butterfly's tragedy consists of misconstruing relations of domination as those of openness and equality. Hence, the very same text that enacts the exclusion of “Asia” does so by exposing American principles of openness as a myth. As such, it is possible to see how the operatic text offers a stringent critique of American domination in the Pacific.

HWANG'S “SUBVERSION”

M. Butterfly plays upon the Puccini narrative by turning the tables on the Western man who thinks he has conquered an “Oriental butterfly.” Whereas the interracial affair in Puccini ends with the Oriental woman's death, in Hwang the interracial liaison takes place at the Westerner's expense. In this sense, the two texts are perfectly symmetrical: in Puccini an Asian woman's Occidentalist illusions lead to her suicide; in Hwang a Western man's Orientalist fantasy leads to his. By reversing the consequences of interracial sexual desire, M. Butterfly serves as a cautionary tale, a lesson in the potential pitfalls of Orientalist desire. Not only do Song and Gallimard switch fates, they also switch genders, and this gender-crossing, simultaneously a culture-crossing, is sartorially represented in Song's final assumption of an Armani suit and Gallimard's donning of a Japanese kimono. Although Song and Gallimard symbolically switch genders, however, they do not do so on the same register. For Song, the switch transpires on the level of “real” gender identity, an identity exposed, as it were, by the deliberate, slow process of unveiling that takes place between acts on stage. Gallimard's process of feminization, culminating in his assumption of the role and costume of Madame Butterfly, is metaphoric. His gender-crossing derives from a sexuality put into question by Song's gender disclosure. Ambiguity, I would argue, resides not in Song, whom we all “know” to be a “man,” but in Gallimard, and it involves not his gender, but his sexuality. Gallimard's symbolic regendering is an effect of his ambiguous sexuality.

Thus, in each of the two characters, homosexuality and transvestism intersect in different, but equally problematic, ways. In Gallimard, we are presented with a treatment of (homo)sexual desire that ends in the act of cross-dressing; in the case of Song we find the practice of cross-dressing in which the subject of desire is entirely suspended. Song's character seems to function as the dramatic device through which numerous other forces achieve expression—Gallimard, the Chinese state apparatus, and finally the author, who offers through Song's voice a metacommentary on the preceding events of sexual play. In the instance of Gallimard, (homo)sexual desire is reduced to an imperialist will to power; in the instance of Song, (homo)sexual desire is erased. In the way that it attaches the signs of effeminacy to (homo)sexual identity, M. Butterfly reflects a deeply problematic gender and sexual politics. The intermittent “homophobia” and “antifeminism” that Garber cannot help noticing is hardly a side effect of an otherwise politically subversive male transvestite theater, but the product of a play whose ironic twists actually depend upon enforcing the congruence of gender and sexual identity in which “male” remains associated with power, and “female” and “homosexual” with weakness and defeat. Precisely because cross-dressing is the critical vehicle that enables the reversal of power between the two characters, that reversal of power mobilizes significations of masculinity and femininity that reproduce the way in which power relations are conventionally gendered.

At the level of geopolitics, the play's strategy of reversal with regard to the two terms “East” and “West” also reflects a conceptualization of power that requires serious interrogation. It suggests to us in the first place that what Hwang particularly deplores in the Puccini opera is that, in Kondo's words, “West wins over East, Man over Woman, White Man over Asian Woman” (Kondo, 10). The trial scene in France at the end serves as a kind of reckoning and offers the play's interpretation of the conditions of possibility for Gallimard's mistaking of Song's gender identity:

SONG:
You expect Oriental countries to submit to your guns and you expect Oriental women to be submissive to your men. That's why you say they make the best wives.
JUDGE:
But why would that make it possible for you to fool Monsieur Gallimard? Please—get to the point.
SONG:
One, because when he finally met his fantasy woman, he wanted more than anything to believe that she was, in fact, a woman. And second, I am an Oriental. And being an Oriental, I could never be completely a man.
JUDGE:
Your armchair political theory is tenuous, Monsieur Song.
SONG:
You think so? That's why you'll lose in all your dealings with the East.

(Act 3, scene 1)

The representation of geopolitical relations of power by the sporting or military metaphor of winners and losers provides some insight into the terms in which the play addresses the problem of Orientalism. If what Hwang objects to in Puccini is that the West “wins,” then it is not surprising that the response should present a scenario in which the East “wins” instead. This structure of winning and losing expresses itself, as we have already seen, in problematically conventional ways, through gender and sexual signification. The feminizing effect of Song's gender disclosure upon Gallimard follows from M. Butterfly's proposal that Orientalism functions to secure Western masculinity. Just as his affair with Butterfly marks a rise in Gallimard's masculine confidence as lover and as diplomat, the exposure of his conquest as pure fantasy once again throws his masculinity into jeopardy. The problem, however, is that M. Butterfly attempts not just to dramatize the effects of Orientalist desire, but to naturalize its origins. Orientalist fantasy in M. Butterfly serves to secure Western masculinity because the West is shown as “actually” emasculated.

The play begins with scenes of Gallimard's adolescent experiences of (hetero)sexual failure, and insinuates that Gallimard's Orientalist desires derive from an original condition of sexual inadequacy—to which his final emasculation therefore only symbolically enacts a return. This story transpires at the parallel levels of sexual and political drama: just as Gallimard was always already emasculated, his foreign policy predictions on Vietnam are also proved to be woefully “wrong.” Hwang's response to Orientalism consists of a double assertion of intrinsic Asian masculinity that takes its revenge against the feminizing imperative of Western discourses at the level of love and of politics. The play's linking of the levels of sexuality and politics has the effect not of complicating each by implicating it in the other, but of reducing each to the other—(homo)sexual desire is reduced to a greater reality of political power and political power as a reaction to sexual inadequacy.

What are the consequences of representing the Western state as intrinsically weak? The historical instances of Vietnamese victory against the United States and the resurgence of Chinese anti-Western nationalism during the period of the Cultural Revolution serve as a backdrop to a parable about a Westerner's reversal of fortune. Especially troubling about the play's representation of anti-imperialist Asian nationalism is that, on the one hand, it seems overly sanguine in imagining that certain instances of militarily successful Asian anticolonial resistance have mounted enough historical weight to tip the scales of Western imperialism. On the other hand, the play is also politically derisive of such anticolonial movements. It caricatures the Cultural Revolution and its representatives in the construction of the character of Comrade Chin, whose androgyny is also the target of antifeminist humor. Song's miming of a traditional Oriental butterfly is juxtaposed to the sartorially and gesturally unfeminine Comrade Chin, who is now “what passes for a woman in modern China” (act 2, scene 4). In fact, whether by ridiculing contemporary Chinese women's struggles against traditional standards of femininity, or through remarks such as Gallimard's about finding “better Chinese food” in Paris than in China, the play seeks humorous mileage from establishing a connection between political movements in Asia and a fall from cultural “authenticity.”

In this sense, the play's assertion of Asian masculinity can hardly be read as an avowal of nationalist resistance to Western—or feminist resistance to patriarchal—domination. On the contrary, its assertion of “actual” Asian masculinity actually seeks to expose Asian submissiveness as a myth, and to demystify Western power as a fantasy. According to the logic of “actual” Western emasculation, Asian nationalist resistance carries no political purchase, and any direct representation of Asian politics in the play thus assumes a reductive and absurdist form. In fact, the places in which the play portrays Asian politics are precisely those of extreme farce. Among the three secondary female characters, who are all in some sense caricatures, Comrade Chin alone cannot be read against the grain of her comic reduction. Gallimard's wife Helga is the caricature of a shallow and racist white woman, but her final abandonment generates pathos and a reproach of Gallimard's position. Renée, the Swedish exchange student with whom Gallimard has a brief fling, functions to convey the absurdity of the sexually liberated woman, but she ceases to be attractive precisely because she exposes Gallimard's phallic inadequacy by deflationarily referring to his penis as a “weenie.” The single Chinese woman in the play, who also happens to represent the Asian political subject, is the only character who presents no implicit critique of Gallimard, and against whose homophobia, unpleasant stupidity, and political repressiveness the Western male subject position and the Western state achieve relative validity.

As some readers have uncritically observed, M. Butterfly is indeed a revenge fantasy.¹⁸ By fulfilling “the desire of Asian American women to be able to ‘stick it to 'em’” (Loo, 16), M. Butterfly enacts a reversal that keeps the binary terms of East/West and female/male in place, and that actually renders invisible the structure of power that constitutes them. By reversing the gendering of ethnicity, the play reflects a concern with Orientalism as a problem of cultural stereotyping or myth and therefore as a problem whose rectification involves restituting the masculine as the sign of the “human truth” of Asian identity. Hwang's afterword clarifies that his critique of Orientalism has very little to do with “East” and “West” as markers of materially differential locations:

M. Butterfly has sometimes been regarded as an anti-American play, a diatribe against the stereotyping of the East by the West, of women by men. Quite to the contrary, I consider it a plea to all sides to cut through our respective layers of cultural and sexual misperception, to deal with one another truthfully for our mutual good, from the common and equal ground we share as human beings. … For the myths of the East, the myths of the West, the myths of men, and the myths of women—these have so saturated our consciousness that truthful contact between nations and lovers can only be the result of heroic effort.

(100)

There are obvious limitations to assigning authority to authorial intention. Hwang's reading of his own play, a reading that subordinates a political critique to a universal humanist reflection, is worth considering only in its resemblance to other readings. In particular, we are reminded of the Singapore directors' message: “If we have done our job well, you will find no heroes or villains in this play. No one character in David Hwang's drama can be singled out for praise or for blame. … When we diminish others, we diminish ourselves.”¹⁹

ANTIESSENTIALIST FEMINISM AND MINORITY DISCOURSE

Readings that celebrate the play's subversiveness do so on the basis that it exposes the constructedness of gender identity, and therefore other kinds of identity. My own reading has argued that if we conceptualize the problematic of Orientalism in terms of power, rather than in terms of identity, we find the play reinscribing the binarisms it ostensibly sets out to undo. The current feminist preoccupation with the problem of essentialism, converging with “post-Marxist” theoretical developments in general, should be understood as the outgrowth of the need to challenge earlier theoretical formulations for their racial, sexual, geographic, and class omissions.²⁰ However, the radical critique of what was the starting point of the feminist project—the attempt to define “woman”—appears to have altogether displaced its end point: the emancipation of women. Although antiessentialist feminist theorizing emerged out of the need to broaden and complicate a political agenda founded on naturalized assumptions about identity, the concern with identity categories, identity as category, seems to have hegemonized the content of the feminist political agenda itself. Thus, I would hold that although this form of feminist theory is rightly critical of identity politics, it has actually failed to move us beyond the frame of identity-based politics.²¹

The isolated act of demonstrating the discursive constitution of identities can be construed as adequately “political” only if we homogenize the dispositions of, and differences in power between, various kinds of discursive formations. To reintegrate the question of conditions into a discourse analysis requires acknowledging the priorities necessary to building what looks like an external (though not necessarily temporarily prior) frame of reference within which to place discourses, but “post-Marxist” theorists have been reluctant to run the risk of being accused of reductionism or exclusionism that attends committing to a set of political or conceptual priorities. The incoherence into which Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's influential model of open-ended articulations descends exemplifies the costs that accompany the refusal to accept the burden of staking priorities. In the first place, their model of multiple articulations presents so vague a geometric figure for relating oppressions that it lends itself to category confusions and slippery parallelisms of all kinds, as we will see in Garber and Kondo. In the second place, the logic of their argument for a “radical democracy” that establishes a theoretical, and by implication a developmental, partition between authoritarian societies and advanced capitalist ones, only to which the “democratic subject position” is appropriate, reflects the foreclosure of an internationalist praxis.²²

The textual readings performed by Marjorie Garber and Dorinne Kondo on M. Butterfly indicate the limitations of identity-based approaches when placed within an international frame. Garber's treatment of the transvestite as a figure of gender and sexual subversion leads her to posit a conceptually parallel argument with regard to national binaries. The levels of nationalism and sexuality are linked through establishing the activities of transvestism and espionage as structurally cognate: both involve border crossings. “These border crossings,” she writes, “… present binarisms in order to deconstruct them. As the figure of the transvestite deconstructs the binary of male and female, so all national binaries and power relations are put in question” (131). The first instance of national border crossing lies in Gallimard's conflation of China and Japan, but this is read by Garber, quite rightly, as a reflection of Gallimard's Orientalist perception. Garber then proceeds to point out a second instance of the conflation of national qualities, this time between China and France. Gallimard's discovery of “better Chinese food” in France and the eruption of French Maoist demonstrations are read by Garber as examples of the circulation of signs in a “global cultural economy” whereby “all constructions are exportable and importable” (130). While the instance of Gallimard's conflation of Japan and China is a “bad” example of border crossing—indeed, an instance of Orientalism in operation—this conflation of Chinese and French national qualities is presumably “good.” Presumably, it constitutes a transgression by putting “all national binaries and power relations in question.”

What does it mean to propose national crossing between France and China as a transgressive scandal? Following the work of the subaltern historians, cultural critics everywhere are trying to counter hegemonic nationalist discourses by undertaking critiques that expose the nation as an “imagined community.”²³ Garber repeatedly refers to the “crisis of nationalism and sexuality troped on the transvestite figure” (125) and to the “crossroads of nationalism and sexuality” (127). Yet at stake here is in fact not the subject of the nation, much less nationalism, but the inter-national relationship between two countries of unequal and uneven development. The uncritical reference to the “global cultural economy” of which Garber suggests French-Chinese national crossing is a function reflects the way in which the attempt to model global relations upon the binary relations of—in this case, gender—identity entirely occludes the questions of imperialist power and global capitalism. In fact, it sanctions them. In her reading, the global cultural economy of late capitalism actually enables national crossing, and to that extent, we might read the slip as symptomatic of how contemporary identity-based theories are themselves a part of the culture and practices of late capitalism they are unable to critically address.²⁴

Dorinne Kondo's celebration of M. Butterfly's both sexually and globally transgressive politics also depends upon assuming the possibility of simply homologizing categories of “gender,” “race,” and “nation.” Kondo, for instance, writes:

Hwang de-essentializes the categories, exploding conventional notions of gender and race as universal, ahistorical essences or as incidental features of a more encompassing, abstract “concept of the self.” By linking so-called “individual” identity to global politics, nationalism, and imperialism, Hwang makes us see the cross-cutting and mutually constitutive interplay of these forces on all levels. M. Butterfly reconstitutes selves in the plural and shifting positions in moving, discursive fields, played out on levels of so-called individual identities, in love relationships, in academic and theatrical narratives, and on the stage of global power relations.

(26-27)

As this quote shows, Kondo actually believes herself to be engaging with the question of Orientalism in a social and political sense. Yet her argument is disturbingly not so different from Garber's in the way it invokes an unelaborated “linking” of individual, national, and global entities, whose relationship to each other ultimately depends upon a conceptual parallelism. Kondo expressly questions the adequacy of “a simple calling into question of fixed gender identity,” but on the reductive basis that “deconstructive analyses of identity” result in “a fixed meaning … always [being] deferred in a postmodern free play of signifiers” (25). Her celebration of Hwang for offering a “power-sensitive analysis” (26) seems to be based on the idea that this devolves from embracing “selves in the plural.” Hwang is to be praised because he “de-essentializes the categories, exploding conventional notions of gender and race as universal, ahistorical essences.” As against “refigurations of identity as an empty sign” (25), Kondo presents us with the alternative of “complex, shifting ‘selves’ in the plural” (26); as against the “postmodern” emptying of meaning, we are offered an overabundance of meaning. The claim that this resulting multiplicity is somehow contestatory conceives power relations as binary relations whose “deconstruction” is to be effected by de-essentializing the individual terms of which they are composed.²⁵

It is only Kondo's concluding comments that fully expose the extent to which the capacity to homologize the global and the individual derives from a theoretical position blind to its own national frame. “Hwang's distinctively Asian-American voice,” Kondo writes, “reverberates with the voices of others who have spoken from the borderlands, those whose stories cannot be fully recognized or subsumed by dominant narrative conventions, when he speaks eloquently of the failure to understand the multiplicity of Asia and of women” (28). This plea for the recognition of identity's heterogeneity, the plea familiarly articulated from the standpoint of a postmodern minority politics, must fundamentally be understood as conditioned by its location. Its subsequent transposition out of that location into the international arena—the extension of the deconstruction of a topography of closure onto geopolitical terrain—threatens to be depoliticizing when the logic of Kondo's argument leads her to uphold Hwang for suggesting that East and West should not “form closed, mutually, exclusive spaces where one term inevitably dominates the other” (29). Set within the space of geopolitics, Kondo's antiessentialist argument appears little removed from Hwang's liberal humanist avowal. The linkage between the different registers of relations, instead of effecting the politicization of the personal, ends up abolishing a notion of power in any register. If the problems in the love relations between a white man and an Asian (wo)man reflect the larger problems of East-West relations, we are told that East-West power relations can be, in Hwang's terms, reconciled, or in Kondo's, “deconstructed.” In the end, it would seem, the antiessentialist political project, despite its ostensible antihumanism, lands us not so far afield from a liberal multicultural identity politics. Both propel us toward demanding the recognition of “our” heterogeneity, which often homogenizes the differential locations, the conditions of possibility, or the usefulness of that demand.

ORIENTALISM AND CONTEMPORARY ASIAN CULTURAL STUDIES

Setting M. Butterfly within a genealogy of Orientalist romantic conventions allows us to perceive Orientalist form historically, to allow for different kinds of Orientalist tropes and for historically shifting kinds of power relations between East and West. All too often, Edward Said's theorization of European colonial relations with the Middle East has been unimaginatively hypostasized and at the same time loosely extended to a heterogeneity of Oriental sites.²⁶ The Orientalist romantic convention to which M. Butterfly responds is in fact not singular, but plural and ambivalent. It may be important to note, for instance, the ways in which Loti's Japanese novel resists the Orientalist romantic conventions Loti was instrumental in popularizing. Not only does it expose the economic relation on which cross-cultural marriage is based, refusing the possibility of “love,” but Madame Chrysanthemum also refuses to take bodily desire for granted. In observing three geisha girls performing for Japanese customers in a neighboring room, Loti's protagonist remarks upon the unnatural allure of “Japanese woman” to Western eyes. Viewing the performing geishas from behind, the narrator expresses the fear that they may turn around and reveal “faces which might destroy the enchantment.”²⁷ Existing only in performance (gesture and ritual behavior) and in outward signs (costume and headgear), Japanese femininity can be read as the sign, in Loti's text, for artifice itself.

We may choose to read Loti's text as telling us the “truth” about gender as (always and everywhere) a construction, or explore the particular historical dispensations of a given Orientalist construction. The former approach would make the same discoveries in Loti's text as it does in Hwang's. The latter approach might use the reading of the artificiality of Loti's “Japanese woman” in order to argue how the site of gender registers fin de siècle Western discomfort with Japanese modernity, a modernity of which the impossiblity of Western power/knowledge/desire in Japan is the sign.²⁸ Ironically, despite the many aspects of Madame Chrysanthemum's nonconformity to Orientalist convention, its diminutive representation of Japan is said to have informed the imagination of the Russian court, which disastrously underestimated Japan's military strength.²⁹ The operatic staging of an aestheticized and tragic version of the original French text just nine days after the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War could therefore also be read as a fantasy of Japanese submissiveness at perhaps the most famous early moment of East-West military reversal.

For Dorinne Kondo to suggest, therefore, that Hwang's 1988 play reflects the disjunctures of a moment when power relations have shifted but the “West” continues to perceive the “East” as essentially weak (29) overlooks the way in which the constantly evolving figure of Madame Butterfly has long embodied Western perception of Japanese power. Indeed, the discursive impossibility of assimilating Japan to the image of a submissive and weak Orient, the construction of Japan's Oriental exceptionalism, seems to underlie the figure of Madame Butterfly.³⁰ The failure to recognize the heterogeneity of Orientalist discourses—the heterogeneity of the construct “the Orient”—may very well lead us to think that valorizing the late twentieth-century “rise of Japan” disrupts Western hegemony rather than participates in a discursive formation that may well be a decisive and long-standing component of that hegemony.

In another sense, Hwang's version of Madame Butterfly, performed against the backdrop of Vietnamese and Chinese anticolonial nationalisms, represents more than just a repetition of Western perceptions of the “Asian challenge” since the Russo-Japanese War. As my essay has argued, the historical occasion of M. Butterfly also marks the limitation of a prevailing critical discourse whose preoccupation with essentialism reflects a politics profoundly circumscribed by a national frame. The difficulties of extending postmodern minority discourse onto international terrain, however, may only make visible its inherent liabilities for minority oppositionality itself. We must question what is at stake in a politics currently grounded upon demonstrating the constructedness of identity, whether with regard to ethnic minorities or women. The ostensibly paradoxical humanism disclosed by certain types of antiessentialist projects' demand for recognition of “our” heterogeneity reflects the profoundly liberal sentiment that often underwrites multiculturalist politics—especially when, in the instance of an author's apologia and a state-sanctioned message, we notice that the reading that posits this demand functions as the alternative to a political reading. Madhava Prasad's critique of the way in which the subalternist intervention has “led to its appropriation by a kind of politics that … regards celebration of the other as the only possible source of a new politics” can perhaps be extended to certain trends within the minority discourse project here.³¹ “The current tendency,” Prasad writes of subalternist-inspired approaches, “is to find new and multiple subjects of fragmented histories, so that history itself is divided into any number of independent, self-propelled trajectories, each with its own share of the ‘homogeneous, empty time’ of capitalism” (67). In their introductory notes “Toward a Theory of Minority Discourse,” Jan Mohamed and Lloyd do insist upon the “class basis of discrimination and the systematic economic exploitation of minorities that underlie postmodern culture” (10), but their critique of pluralism insofar as it may be “mendacious” and “disguises the perpetuation of exclusion” leaves room for subsequent critics to recuperate “genuine” pluralism as the final, limited objective of a minority politics.

M. Butterfly's response to Orientalism as fundamentally a problem of the false representation of Asian identity seems to structurally require that it erase the critique of imperialism present in Puccini. Kondo's argument exemplifies the way in which the antihumanist critique of totality and of essence can simply result in a pluralist claim that is often interchangeable with the desire to overturn stereotypes. The belief in the political subversiveness of questioning binary identities alone actually rests upon conceptualizing power in reductively binary terms. A minority discourse project that proceeds along these presuppositions will have difficulty theorizing Orientalism beyond a problem of East-West relations at a moment when the practitioners of Orientalism are getting even more heterogeneous, its form more varied, and its location and movement more dispersed. Orientalism constitutes a discourse of power about the “East,” implicated in the globalizing logic of capital. If, however, nineteenth-century capital expansion took the form of Western imperial domination, which turned various parts of Asia into the administered colonies and semicolonies of the West, the uneven and unequal development of Asia that now includes such disparate economies as Japan, China, and Vietnam makes it ever more impossible to assume that Asian countries exist in the same relationship to the “West” or, for that matter, to each other.

One of the consequences of the uneven and unequal development of capitalism in Asia is that we must avoid positing any homogeneous relationship between Orientalist discourse and the geographical location of its articulation. Orientalist fantasies are deployed by and pitched to a variety of subjects in different sites, many of which are themselves “Asian.” The way Thai agencies sell sex tours to Japanese customers or the way the Malaysian development board markets the country's female labor to Japanese multinationals, for example, are prime examples of the use of Orientalist discourses by, and their direction toward, Asian subjects. This does not mean that Westerners still do not constitute the major audience/market for Orientalist representations of Asia, but the extent to which Asian governments or comprador elites themselves profit from constructing various kinds of essential representations of Asian identity requires that we detach our comprehension of Orientalism from the binding constraints of East-West terms. The bipolar conceptualization of Orientalism is as inadequate as the unidirectionality of the relationship between the two terms. That an authoritarian capitalist state like Singapore does not find M. Butterfly subversive suggests how the play articulates a kind of Asian rejoinder to the “West” in a register that does not in the least threaten Western capital. At a time when capital is no longer strictly “Western”—and, in the context of Southeast Asia, largely Japanese—an Asian rejoinder to the “West” may in fact be altogether beside the point.

A historical-materialist approach to Orientalism presumes the recognition that identities are constructed and in heterogeneous ways, but does not make that recognition a political end in itself. Only by investigating the various, and often contradictory, interests invested in the construction of different identities can we hold out a challenge to hegemonic formations. To insist that we attend to the material conditions that form all kinds of identity does not preclude the need to think through the mutually constitutive nature of identities.³² Indeed, it requires it, because a historical-materialist approach proceeds from an antiessentialist view of identity—refusing any unchanging gendered form of race or raced form of class—while retaining a notion of the political still measured by social change. In this sense, the liminality of Asian Americans as a minority identity within a contemporary discursive formation that includes the production of “the model minority” and “the Asian economic miracle” can, instead of being disabling for constructing our oppositionality, actually serve as the lever for a critique of minority discourse as a whole.³³ Insofar as that which makes Asians signify obtrusive danger from beyond U.S. borders also makes them invisible as minorities within, the particularly visible porousness of the relationship between Asians and Asian Americans should be used to help us think beyond the national frame. Indeed, it is precisely the national conditioning of identity-based approaches that is responsible for generating oppositional projects that can prove dangerously reactionary in different contexts.

If Asian American and Asian Studies work toward eliminating their own disciplinary borders,³⁴ and given a persistent politicization of the shared object of study, critics within this field may find themselves particularly well placed to contribute to discussions of the global economies of race and gender, as well as the contradictory and always shifting identitarian features of capital. After all, that post-Fordism should exercise a particular preference for the labor of Asian women has not yet been satisfactorily theorized as an integral component of capital logic, while the implications of this development for theories of gender oppression have barely made an impact on the current direction of feminist theory.³⁵ It is the “nimble fingers” attached to these women's bodies that we must keep in view in any attempt to rethink the contemporary political significance of Madame Butterfly.

Notes

1. Major press coverage of Hwang includes: “David Hwang: Riding the Hyphen,” New York Times Magazine, March 13, 1988, and “Seductive ‘M. Butterfly,’” Los Angeles Times Calendar, July 5, 1991. For critical praise for M. Butterfly, see Chalsa Loo, “M. Butterfly: A Feminist Perspective,” Asian Week, July 14, 1989; Robert Skloot, “Breaking the Butterfly: The Politics of David Henry Hwang,” Modern Drama 33:1 (March 1990): 59-66; Dorinne Kondo, “M. Butterfly: Orientalism, Gender and a Critique of Essentialist Identity,” Cultural Critique 16 (fall 1990): 5-29; Marjorie Garber, “The Occidental Tourist: M. Butterfly and the Scandal of Transvestism,” in Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer, and Patricia Yaeger, eds., Nationalisms and Sexualities (New York and London: Routledge, 1992). One of the few negative responses to the play I have come across is Gabrielle Cody's “David Hwang's M. Butterfly: Perpetuating the Misogynist Myth,” Theater 20:2 (spring/summer 1989): 24-27.

2. David Henry Hwang, “Afterword,” in M. Butterfly (New York: Plume, 1986), 95.

3. Nowhere does the specific term “Orientalism” itself get used in the play to describe the issues at stake in the interracial sexual drama, nor does Hwang's anecdotal account of the genesis of the idea for M. Butterfly include reading Edward Said's Orientalism. However, extratextual evidence that supports reading the play in terms of Said's critique of Western representation of the East can be found in Hwang's 1989 Introduction to FOB and Other Plays. Hwang writes: “While in London recently preparing the West End production of M. Butterfly, I wrote an article for The Guardian about Orientalism, defined by the scholar Edward Seyd [sic] as a view of the East as mysterious, inscrutable, and ultimately inferior” (Introduction, FOB and Other Plays [New York: Plume, 1990]). In her essay on M. Butterfly, Dorinne Kondo writes: “Hwang—in a move suggestive of Edward Said's Orientalism—explicitly links the construction of gendered imagery to the construction of race and the imperialist mission to colonize and dominate” (24-25).

4. The term “minority discourse” is given articulation by Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd, who write: “An emergent theory of minority discourse must not be merely negative in its implications. Rather the critique of the apparatus of universal humanism entails a second theoretical task which the recovery of excluded or marginalized practices permits” (“Toward a Theory of Minority Discourse,” which introduces two special issues on the theme “The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse” in Cultural Critique 6 and 7 [spring-fall 1987]).

5. In a study of literature by Chinese immigrant and American-born writers, Wong makes the point that the concern with the gendering of ethnicity is specific to works by American-born Chinese writers, while first-generation writing tends to focus on the ethnicizing of gender. See Sau-Ling Wong, “Ethnicizing Gender: An Exploration of Sexuality as Sign in Chinese Immigrant Literature,” in Reading the Literatures of Asian America, ed. Shirley Geok-Lin Lim and Amy Ling (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992).

6. The phrase comes from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 297.

7. Banned materials include old Beatles favorites such as “Yellow Submarine” and some albums by the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, and Elton John, often because song lyrics contain references to drugs. Magazines banned on account of sexual immorality include not just Playboy, but Cosmopolitan. Unable to prevent foreign transmissions from penetrating the nation's airwaves, the government has banned satellite-reception dishes so that the only news programs available are those the Singapore Broadcast Corporation (SBC) chooses to broadcast. See Stan Sesser, “A Reporter At Large: A Nation of Contradictions,” New Yorker, January 13, 1992.

8. As an example of the big press accorded Hwang in Singapore even before the local arrival of M. Butterfly, see Alan Hubbard's “Mr. Butterfly Takes Flight,” Sunday Times, June 11, 1989. The casting of Singaporean actor Glen Goei in the London West End production helped trigger early interest in a play that could not (yet) be seen in Singapore.

9. From playbill for Singapore Theatreworks production of M. Butterfly, 1990.

10. The term is particularly appropriate because state efforts to promote Confucian ideology as the “authentic” content of the citizen-subject have derived from the knowledge base of American academic institutions. Work by scholars from the East Asian Languages and Literatures departments of universities like Harvard and Columbia is used to authorize the government's case; they are invited to design educational textbooks and to participate in the Institute of East Asian Philosophy, founded specifically for the purpose of promoting Confucian scholarship. See Geraldine Heng and Janadas Devan, “State Fatherhood: The Politics of Nationalism, Sexuality and Race in Singapore,” in Nationalisms and Sexualities, ed. Parker et al.

11. Skloot makes a similar point when he writes that the play operates by forcing audiences into complicity with “the discovery, dismantling, and re-establishment of theatrical illusion” (59).

12. From John Louis DiGaetani, “M. Butterfly: An Interview with David Henry Hwang,” Drama Review 33:3 (fall 1989): 141-53.

13. Author's interview with director after the performance.

14. The term “Oriental despotism” can be traced to eighteenth-century European texts of political economy to characterize India, and particularly, China. Karl Wittfogel's influential Oriental Despotism is an exemplary contemporary text that attributes an inherent despotic tendency to China as a “hydraulic society”; see Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957). The aesthetic strategies used by M. Butterfly to represent the Chinese communist state bear a striking similarity to those used by Miss Saigon to represent the demonic rise of Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam. The similarity is particularly ironic given the widespread recognition that Miss Saigon, a musical produced after M. Butterfly, is an updated version of the very Madame Butterfly convention Hwang's play critiques. In Miss Saigon, an American GI in Vietnam gets involved with a local prostitute with a heart of gold, whom he is forced to leave behind in the panic of American withdrawal. She bears his child, longs for his return so that he can take her to America, and refuses an important offer of marriage. In the meantime, the American has married a white American woman, with whom he travels to Thailand, where his former Vietnamese lover lives in a refugee camp. When she discovers that he has remarried, she commits suicide so that her child may be adopted by the American couple. The hidden similarity between this modern version of Madame Butterfly and its Asian American parody could be productively examined by also taking into account Hwang's stance on Miss Saigon. Although the musical was later criticized by Asian American groups for its content, the initial protests—led by Hwang and actor B. D. Wong, who played Song Liling in the Broadway production of M. Butterfly—revolved around the demand for greater inclusion of Asian American actors.

15. Critics differ over whether or not to treat Belasco's play as distinct enough from the Long short story to constitute a separate textual influence on the opera. Compare Arthur Groos, “Lieutenant F. B. Pinkerton: Problems in the Genesis of an Operatic Hero,” Italica 64:4 (winter 1987): 654-75, and Julian Smith, “Tribulations of a Score,” in the English National Opera Series edition of Madame Butterfly (London: John Calder, 1984). For the purposes of my argument, Long's remains the more important of the opera's two sources, as it is the text that critically transforms the French novel into an American narrative.

16. Aziyade, the novel set in Turkey, is exceptional in almost an opposite sense. While his novel about Japan represents the most indifferent extreme of exotic love, the novel about Turkey represents the most deeply invested. For a discussion of Loti's special attachment to the subject of Turkish women, see Irene Szyliowicz, Pierre Loti and the Oriental Woman (London: Macmillan, 1988).

17. Both Groos and Smith agree that the weakness of the unconventional hero in this opera accounts for its initial failure.

18. Chalsa Loo praises M. Butterfly for allowing “women who have felt the sting of male abandonment and betrayal [to] silently rise in applause as Butterfly's death is avenged” (16). The inconsistent reading, however, is the one by Kondo, who celebrates Hwang for, on the one hand, subverting or displacing essential dualisms, and, on the other hand, for reversing them. Her critique of Puccini for representing the victory of West over East, and for the “tragic—but oh so satisfying—denouement: Butterfly, the little Asian woman, crumpled on the floor” (10), suggests that, despite her poststructuralist critique of humanism and her political critique of imperialism, Kondo, like Loo, basically objects to the stereotype of Asian/female weakness.

19. Playbill, Theatreworks production of M. Butterfly, Singapore.

20. By essentialism-preoccupied theory, I refer to the influential work of Diana Fuss, Judith Butler, and Chantal Mouffe. Michele Barrett's work—as seen in the trajectory from Women's Oppression Today to its apologetic new Introduction in the revised edition, and finally to The Politics of Truth—exemplifies the shift from Marxist feminism to discourse theory. Barrett is responding to Hazel Carby's accusations against her for racial occlusions in her treatment of the family. Within Marxism, it is worth noting that the critique of totality on the basis of its essentialism authorizes itself by pointing to, among other things, discussions on the “subject” of feminism. In the key text that makes the argument for a post-Marxism, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe point to theoretical developments within feminism that have problematized the idea of a single mechanism of women's oppression, which “opens up” an “immense field of action … for feminist politics” (Hegemony and Socialist Strategy [London: Verso, 1985], 116-18).

21. Teresa Ebert refers to this trend as a ludic postmodern feminism, against which she proposes a resistance postmodern feminism. See Teresa Ebert, “Ludic Feminism, the Body, Performance and Labor: Bringing Materialism Back into Feminist Cultural Studies,” Cultural Critique 23 (winter 1993): 5-50.

22. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 131. It is no accident that Mouffe's later work—on citizenship—should follow increasingly nation-state-centered directions. For example, see Chantal Mouffe, “Feminism, Citizenship and Radical Democratic Politics,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992). For a critique of the looseness of their theoretical model, see Norman Geras, Discourses of Extremity: Radical Ethics and Post-Marxist Extravagances (London: Verso, 1990).

23. The term comes from Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983).

24. Efforts to link questions of sexuality and gender with questions of the nation bear great potential for breaking down artificially enforced distinctions between the public—the realm of work and the state—and private, to which issues concerning women have been thought to be restricted. How nationalist discourses articulate the nation through figurations of gender, and how on the other hand, the most apparently “private” domains of sexual or reproductive choice are ideologically interpellated, are crucial in the way they help extend our understanding of the constitutive relation between individual and collective identities, and power. But this is not what Garber does. Her linkage of nationalism and sexuality consists of a conceptual parallelism, not even an “intersection,” itself a popular and overused concept; her argument also has nothing to do with questions of power.

25. In her critique of Michel de Certeau's reification of the opposition between the World Trade Center and the street, Meaghan Morris is making a similar argument when she writes: “‘The Tower’ here serves as an allegory of the structural necessity for a politics of resistance based on a bipolar model of power to maintain the imaginary position of mastery it must endlessly disclaim” (Meaghan Morris, “Great Moments in Social Climbing: King Kong and the Human Fly,” in Sexuality and Space, ed. Jennifer Bloomer and Beatrix Colomina [New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992], 13).

26. An example of the simple application of Said's definition of Orientalism to another set of discourses about another site is Rolf Goebel's “Constructing Chinese History: Kafka's and Dittmar's Orientalist Discourse,” PMLA 108:1 (January 1993): 59-71.

27. Pierre Loti, Madame Chrysanthemum (London: KPI Limited, 1985), 41. To the extent that the representation of “Japanese woman” receives any embodiment, she is represented as a “darling little fairy” (42), whose appeal rests not upon sexual fullness but a prepubescent asexuality.

28. Szyliowicz notes Loti's particular dislike for Japan (Pierre Loti and the Oriental Woman, 33).

29. See William Schwartz, The Imaginative Interpretation of the Far East in Modern French Literature (Paris: H. Champion, 1927).

30. In his examination of Japanese and American representations of each other recorded during the first Japanese embassy to the United States in 1860, Masao Miyoshi notes American rhetorical approval of the Japanese that depends upon establishing their difference from Chinese coolies. The San Francisco Daily Alta California declares, “The countenance of these people wore a far more intelligent look than any Chinese that we have seen.” Marking Japanese difference from other Asian races, moreover, often converged with postulating Japanese identity with the “West”: for example, the Daily Evening Bulletin writes, “Their dress bears some resemblance to that of richer Chinese, but exhibits a taste more in harmony with our own” (Masao Miyoshi, As We Saw Them [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979], 67).

31. Madhava Prasad, “On the Question of a Theory of (Third World) Literature,” Social Text 31/32 (1992): 64.

32. Sau-ling Wong's analysis of Chinese immigrant literature is an excellent example of work that moves beyond positing the simultaneous and mutually determining relation between all categories by seeking to make careful and precise distinctions in the way ethnicity and gender constitute each other. In an argument that does not shy away from distinguishing the conditions under which different categories may assume analytical priority, Wong hypothesizes that first-generation writing focuses on the ethnicizing of gender, whereas works by American-born writers reflect the concern with the gendering of ethnicity (Wong, “Ethnicizing Gender,” 124).

33. In the double issue of Cultural Critique devoted to the study of minority discourse, Sylvia Wynters's article on the “disenchanting” dimensions of minority discourse, without explanation or further discussion, positions “Asian” on the side of the “Caucasian.” “Asian” and “Caucasian,” as owners of “capital-as-moveable wealth,” together form the hyphenated majority term against which “negroid peoples” are defined (Sylvia Wynters, “On Disenchanting Discourse: ‘Minority’ Literary Criticism and Beyond,” Cultural Critique 7 [fall 1987]: 233). Whether we read Wynters as critically or uncritically placing “Asian” within the majority term, this grouping must be taken seriously as symptomatic of a larger discursive formation that considers Asian Americans a dubious minority. The most significant policy reflection of this lies in the way Asian Americans were positioned in the affirmative action debates of the 1980s, and their continuing disqualification from major national and local minority fellowships. For a discussion of the problematic marginality of Asian Americans and a critique of the pursuit by Asian American writers of “molecular micropolitics,” see E. San Juan, “Beyond Identity Politics: The Predicament of the Asian American Writer in Late Capitalism,” American Literary History 3:3 (fall 1991): 542-65. Interestingly, San Juan ends his critique of identity politics by invoking M. Butterfly as a “provisional example of the ‘and/or’ strategy of disruption.”

34. My thoughts on many of these questions owe much to stimulating discussions with Nikhil Pal Singh. For an excellent analysis of the need to connect Asian American and Asian Studies, see Sucheta Mazumdar, “Asian American Studies and Asian Studies,” in Asians and Asian Americans: Comparative and Global Perspectives, ed. Shirley Hune et al. (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1991), 29-44.

35. It has been more than a decade since the publication of Annette Fuentes and Barbara Ehrenreich's Women in the Global Factory (1983), which made famous the Malaysian government investment brochure touting the “manual dexterity of the Oriental female.” Work that has brought together gender and political economy has developed largely within the social sciences. See, for instance, Swasti Mitter, Common Fate, Common Bond (London: Pluto Press, 1986). With a few exceptions, such as the work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, however, feminist theory seems to have moved farther and farther away from theorizing gender in connection with global inequalities.

An early version of this essay was delivered at the Modern Language Association in 1991. Many thanks to King Kok Cheung for supporting the initial project and to Geraldine Heng for taking me to see M. Butterfly in Singapore. I am indebted to Joseph Cleary, David Pickell, and Alys Eve Weinbaum for their rigorous criticisms and suggestions. I also wish to thank Jean Howard, Qadri Ismail, Nikhil Pal Singh, and Sau-ling Wong for commenting on drafts of this essay.