SOURCE: Kehde, Suzanne. “Engendering the Imperial Subject: The (De)Construction of (Western) Masculinity in David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly and Graham Greene's The Quiet American.” In Fictions of Masculinity: Crossing Cultures, Crossing Sexualities, edited by Peter F. Murphy, pp. 241-54. New York: New York University Press, 1994.

[In the following essay, Kehde argues that M. Butterfly functions as a powerful critique of imperialism by exposing the underlying gender-based structure of imperialistic thinking.]

By the time of his death this month at the age of eighty-six, Greene had become a kind of Grand Old Man of the left, and The Quiet American stood as his anti-imperialist masterpiece.

—Richard West, “Graham Greene and The Quiet American”

Richard West's summary judgment¹ described a text so different from the one I remembered that it sent me back to reread Greene's novel set in Vietnam at the moment when, unnoticed by the American public, the U. S. military was about to replace the French forces being driven out by the Vietminh. Written by a member of the governing classes,² who during the Second World War had engaged in espionage in Africa for the British government, the novel is narrated by a character who never scrutinizes his own subject position. Here Greene's imperial attitudes, embedded in a web of colonial and gender discourses, are considerably more problematic than West's formulation suggests.

A more powerful critique of imperialism is David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly, which lays bare the processes of Western male engenderment supporting the structures of imperial power. As a Chinese-American and heir to a double culture that straddles Western-Oriental alterity, Hwang is admirably situated to undertake such a critique. The play offers a useful paradigm of imperialism by exposing and elaborating the premises on which it is based.

In the New York Times report of a French diplomat accused of spying, who had lived for twenty years with a Chinese lover without noticing she was a man, Hwang saw an emblem of the imbrication of gender and colonial discourses. In M. Butterfly he lays bare the connection between Western ideas of masculinity and the rationale for imperialism by situating his critique in a rewriting of Puccini's opera. Hwang initiates his deconstruction by a gender reversal, casting his female lead with a male actor from the Beijing opera. This man, Song Liling, acts as other for René Gallimard, who projects on his lover a fantasy of femininity reflecting his own self-image—an image of the man he thinks appropriate for his class, race, and nationality. Song Liling identifies the roles in Gallimard's “favorite fantasy” as “the submissive Oriental woman and the cruel white man.”³ Gallimard, says Hwang in the Afterword, “fantasizes that he is Pinkerton and his lover is Butterfly. By the end of the piece, he realizes that he had been Butterfly, in that the Frenchman has been duped by love; the Chinese spy, who exploited that love, is therefore the real Pinkerton” (95-96). The role identified as feminine and “Oriental” in Puccini can be played by a white Frenchman; the “dominant man” can be played by a Chinese. Further, although the structure of the play does not emphasize this reversal of gender expectations to the same degree, women can also play the dominant role, sexually, as does Isabelle, Gallimard's first lay; intellectually, as does Renée, the Danish schoolgirl who interrogates Gallimard on the rationalization for male power systems; and politically, as does Comrade Chin, Song Liling's spymaster. By describing the play as his “deconstructivist Madame Butterfly” (95), Hwang explicitly aligns it with theoretical preoccupations, thus, in Judith Mayne's words, “submitting theory to the test of narrative.”⁴

Gallimard's fascination with the scenario of Madame Butterfly centers on the masculine power manifested by Pinkerton. Conflating Chinese and Japanese under the sign of Western alterity, he observes that “Oriental girls want to be treated bad” and congratulates himself that when he leaves Beijing, “she'll know what it's like to be loved by a real man” (6), who, the play proceeds to make clear, must be white.

For Gallimard, masculinity has always been primarily associated with sexual dominance. As a boy of twelve he had become excited by his uncle's girlie magazines—not so much by lust, as he now recognizes, but by the power he imagined himself to exert over the exposed women. When he meets Song Liling, desire and power become inextricably imbricated. The position that allows him “to abuse [her] cruelly” (36) soon comes to seem “natural,” to be built into the structure of the universe. He says, “God who creates Eve to serve Adam, who blesses Solomon with his harem but ties Jezebel to a burning bed—that God is a man” (38). Thus he essentializes the engenderment that has been constructed by the contingencies of power.

But the abusive relationship he thinks to enjoy with Song Liling depends on other factors besides the expectations of Western male-female sexual relationships. Gallimard would never dare treat his wife or his girlfriend in such abusive ways—perhaps because he knows he could never make them suffer as he imagines Song Liling suffers. It is her Oriental nature, he believes, to submit to his domination. Edward Said, noting that the Orient is one of the West's most persistent images of the other, has demonstrated the historical growth of the discourse of Orientalism, which he sees as “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.”⁵ Further, he maintains that “European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self” (20). The long tradition of Orientalism that the French and British in particular have enjoyed allows Gallimard, unchallenged, to make pronouncements like “Orientals will always submit to a greater force” (46). This dominance is not accorded to him as an individual but as a function of group entitlement. He specifically denies his personal qualifications: “We, who are not handsome, nor brave, nor powerful, yet somehow believe, like Pinkerton, that we deserve a Butterfly” (10). His sense of entitlement to a submissive Oriental Butterfly comes from his membership in the governing class of a Western imperial power.

The metaphor of man as the West, woman as the Orient that hovers in the margins of the text is not constant, vehicle and tenor being subject to reversal and recirculation. During the course of the play, the relationship between man and woman enacted between Gallimard and Song Liling comes to represent the relations between the decolonized and the imperial nations. Colonization thus entails feminization of the colonized, enforced by the masculine imperialist. This mechanism is underscored by Gallimard's feminization of Song Liling. Western imperialism has “feminized” the Third World the better to exploit it. Song Liling voices this analysis: “The West thinks of itself as masculine—big guns, big industry, big money—so the East is feminine—weak, delicate, poor” (83). The Western will to power over Asian nations parallels Gallimard's masculine bullying of the submissive Oriental “woman.” Vietnam in 1961, when the French had retreated and the United States had not yet openly committed troops to Indo-China, serves as the model for Asian colonial ventures in general. Gallimard expects the United States to take over Vietnam without opposition after the French leave because, he says, “Orientals simply want to be associated with whoever shows the most strength and power” (45). As Charlotte Bunch, among others, has pointed out, what starts out as colonization of women ends up as colonization of the world.⁶

The relationship between Gallimard and Song Liling thus exhibits the stereotypical signs of both male/female and imperialist/colonized relationships. As Homi Bhabha suggests, stereotyping, a fixed form of difference, exists for the production of the colonized as a fixed reality that is at once other and yet entirely knowable.⁷ Thus Gallimard's stereotyping comes from his intense need to establish difference between himself and Song Liling. Conscious that he is modeling his lover on Madame Butterfly, he nonetheless seems oblivious that he is inventing a character for Song. As Bhabha says, the closer the resemblance between the colonizer and colonized, the more closely the colonizer subjects the colonized to surveillance in order to discover difference (164). By fixing his gaze on Song—by keeping him under surveillance—Gallimard can avoid scrutinizing his own subject position.

Gallimard's understanding of his relations with Song is determined by his notions of the colonial situation in a classic case of the triumph of hope over experience. As Bhabha theorizes,

the construction of the colonial subject in discourse, and the exercise of colonial power through discourse demands an articulation of forms of difference—racial and sexual. Such an articulation becomes crucial if it is held that the body is always simultaneously inscribed in both the economy of pleasure and desire and the economy of discourse, domination and power.

(150)

However, in M. Butterfly the “racial and sexual” are conflated; the economy of “pleasure and desire” is imbricated with the economy of “discourse, domination, and power.”

The operant tool of this imbrication is the penis/phallus—the conflation of which, although resisted by some Lacanian theorists, is demonstrable in Lacan's work and, in any case, is manifest in Hwang's play. Gallimard has to read Song as woman, who signifies phallic lack. By concealing his penis Song can carry Gallimard's discourse. Throughout the play, various characters draw attention to the penis in both valorized and unvalorized states, from the anonymous Frenchman's suggestion of “misidentified equipment,” to Gallimard's “How's it hangin'?” A young Danish woman meditates on “this little … flap of flesh.” She continues:

No one knows … who has the bigger … weenie. So, if I'm a guy with a small one, I'm going to build a really big building or take over a really big piece of land or write a really long book so the other men won't know, right? But see, it never really works, that's the problem. I mean, you conquer the country, or whatever, but you're still wearing clothes, so there's no way to prove absolutely whose is bigger or smaller. And that's what we call civilized society. The whole world run by men with pricks the size of pins.

(55)

Gallimard refuses to listen to a “schoolgirl who would question the role of the penis in modern society” (58). One might perhaps conclude that his downfall stems from precisely his failure to theorize the penis—ironically, to give the function of the phallus in the symbolic register too little attention.

The trajectory of Gallimard's narrative shows the construction of (Western) male subjectivity on the establishment of sameness as well as difference. Gallimard's relationship to other men is based on what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls homosociality, the order of “male homosocial desire,” of the “potentially erotic” (1) which marks “the structure of men's relations with other men” (2). She pointedly refuses to essentialize, however, historicizing the particular formulation of homosociality by concentrating chiefly on “the emerging pattern [in English culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries] of male friendship, mentorship, rivalry [which] was in an intimate and shifting relationship to class [and no element of which] can be understood outside of its relation to women and the gender system as a whole.”⁸ Although her study Between Men mainly confines its examples to the British novel of the mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, her perceptions are generally applicable to the power structures Hwang posits as the factors engendering Gallimard, who appears to have been raised in a middle-class professional French family and trained to the civil service in much the same way as his historical counterpart in Britain. Gallimard's retrospective interrogation of his sexuality is marked by a strong homosocial component. During a replay of a scene from his student years, a friend invites him to a swim party with this description: “There's no moon out, their boobs are flapping, right? You close your eyes, reach out—it's grab bag, get it? Doesn't matter whose ass is between whose legs, whose teeth are sinking into who” (8). The language of pressure to engage in aggressive, anonymous group sex suggests that the most important feature is the participation of other men.

Marc, the boyhood friend at whose father's condo this group sex took place, appears as a voice “everywhere now” (32), reinforcing throughout Gallimard's imprisonment the unacknowledged premises that have constructed Gallimard's relations to other men and to women, premises that in short have engendered him. These, the premises of homosociality, are constructed on (major) sameness as well as on (minor) difference, on the acquisition and maintenance of power on “our” side as an extension of self. The exchange of women, Sedgwick points out, is one of the major ways in which relations between men are secured (179). Just such an exchange has taken place: The image of Marc demands a return on his gift of Isabelle, whom he persuaded to initiate Gallimard into sex. Gallimard, however, pinned in the dirt under her, thought only, “So this is it?” The power relations implicit in his inferior position as much as the physical discomfort of having his buttocks pounded into the ground seem to have severely restricted his enjoyment.

The acquisition of Song Liling, the ostensibly lovesick lotus blossom he delights in humiliating and neglecting, advances Gallimard in the French colonial service. The ambassador to China, impressed by Gallimard's sexual swaggering, transfers the vice-consul and promotes Gallimard. Retrospectively Gallimard understands how the ambassador's reaction reveals the operations of the homosocial order: “Toulon … approves! I was learning the benefits of being a man. We form our own clubs, sit behind thick doors, smoke—and celebrate the fact that we're still boys” (46). As suggested by Lacan's dictum that the phallus is veiled, echoed here by the schoolgirl's meditation on the “weenie,” any given homosocial order is felt to be in flux; the hierarchy of sameness, unlike the hierarchy of difference, can never be presumed permanently fixed.

The discourses of gender and colonialism whose operations Hwang sought to expose are omnipresent in Greene's The Quiet American with no critique of gender stereotypes and little of imperialist assumptions, certainly without any acknowledgment that there might be some connection between them. Like Gallimard, Fowler reads his Vietnamese lover as doubly other in her gender and nationality but, unlike him, for Fowler that fixed difference is not the focus of his most earnest scrutiny. The major strand in Fowler's engenderment—the one that occupies him most consistently, driving him at last to complicity in murder—is the homosocial, which in the colonial setting is maintained by both gender and colonial discourses. The construction of Fowler's subjectivity depends primarily on his surveillance of signs of sameness in Pyle; he needs to scrutinize all suggestion of similarity in order to focus on difference. The overt emphasis on the homosocial order throughout Greene's public school and Oxford education must have made its primacy seem natural, much in the way, satirized by Hwang, that Gallimard comes to see man's domination of woman as mandated by the universe itself.

Sedgwick's study of homosociality notes René Girard's work on “the relation of rivalry between the two active members of an erotic triangle. … The bond that links the two rivals is as intense and potent as the bond that links either of the rivals to the beloved.” Girard's analysis focuses on the “male-centered novelistic tradition of high European culture” (Sedgwick, Between Men, 21), a tradition to which The Quiet American clearly belongs. The rivalry that forms between Fowler and Pyle runs conspicuously along the opposed axes of sameness and difference. Seen alongside the constant surveillance this rivalry demands, the construction of Phuong as doubly other is static—always-already present, it is sited in a latent nostalgia. In Bhabha's terms, Phuong is a stereotype of the exotic. Fowler mounts a satiric critique against Pyle that sweeps from his conduct as a U.S. economic adviser to his understanding of Phuong's character, intellect, and values—matters on which Fowler feels eminently qualified to pontificate. He sneers at Pyle's reasons for the ostensibly humanitarian American presence in French Indo-China, pressing for a scrutiny of the concept of democracy, which, assuming that government depends on the consent of the governed, has been a reasonably stable component of modern concepts of liberty. He mocks the simplistic evocation of the ideal by noting the express wish of Phuong, his mistress and eventually Pyle's fiancée, to see the Statue of Liberty. He attempts to call into question the idea of liberty promulgated by Pyle. Holed up in a watchtower waiting for the Viet Cong to attack, he calls across to the two Vietnamese guards, “La liberté—qu'est ce que c'est la liberté?”, eliciting a remonstrance from Pyle. “You stand for the importance of the individual as much as I do.”⁹ Fowler, however, objects to Pyle not only as an individual but also as a representative of the United States, whose citizens he resents as a class: “I was tired of the whole pack of them with their private stores of Coca-Cola and their portable hospitals and their too wide cars and their not quite latest guns” (31). In short, he falls back on the unexamined assumptions of privilege due nationals of a European imperial power.

In the “natural” way one understands the hidden hierarchies of one's own culture, Fowler knows how to negotiate the power structures of the multicultural homosocial order of Saigon. Lying in his bed smoking opium, he refuses to arise to greet the (Vietnamese) police officer who summons him to the Sureté. He is “fond of” and dependent upon Dominguez, his (male) Indian assistant who, like a well-trained American secretary (female) mediates the local culture for him. He recognizes the legal power of Vigot at the Sureté, who investigates Pyle's death but treats Fowler reciprocally as a comrade, just as Fowler treats Trouin, the pilot who takes him on a bombing raid, or the French officers he gambles with on trips up-country.

Such an amicable relationship between the two major Orientalist powers is a comparatively recent historical development. Said describes their intense late nineteenth-century competition for imperial acquisition, pointing out that the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 to carve up Arabia between them—which, ultimately determining national boundaries in the Middle East, led to the present unrest—was a deliberate attempt to control this rivalry. The Quiet American suggests that it disappeared with the collapse of both empires and, perhaps equally important, the appearance of the United States on the imperial scene. This appearance, constituting an assault on powerful members of an existing homosocial order, minimizes the focus on difference and fosters perceptions of sameness between the French and British.

Fowler mounts a verbal attack on American involvement in Vietnam in an attempt to maintain his own position in the homosocial order. Privately and publicly Fowler denies involvement, defining himself as a reporter rather than a correspondent: “I wrote what I saw. I took no action—even an opinion is a kind of action” (28). Denying that he himself has any “mental concepts” (94), he lays claim to an impossible objectivity, the hypothetical “view from nowhere.” Under Pyle's questioning, he admits his sympathy toward old-style imperial colonialism: “I'd rather be an exploiter who fights for what he exploits, and dies with it” (96). In the narrative economy, he figures the British attitude toward the European colonial presence, the disengagement that Captain Trouin attributes to the whole nation: “We are fighting all of your wars, but you leave us the guilt” (151). There is historical support for Trouin's position: the British encouraged the reconquest of Vietnam in 1945, providing arms to the French soldiers interned by the Japanese during World War II. In spite of his pretence of disengagement, Fowler claims membership in the club of “the old colonial peoples” (157).

The impulse to typify, which Bhabha perceives as a ubiquitous tool in the colonial's kit, plays a large role in Fowler's management of his world. Early in the novel, Phuong's function as a symbol of Vietnam is specified; she is “[le] pays qui te ressemble” (14). Successful with the labels woman and Oriental, he tries to use the same technique with American although, as his constant scrutiny suggests, he feels less secure in his attempt to constitute a white man as a “fixed difference.” He positions Pyle as “the quiet American” of the title, the man full of ironies but without ambiguities, who belongs to “a psychological world of great simplicity, where you talked of Democracy and Honor without the u as it's spelt on old tombstones, and you mean what your father meant by the same words” (90). Falling back on a trait associated with America from the time of Columbus, Fowler repeatedly comments on Pyle's innocence. His implication that there is an American character historically consistent and impervious to contingency essentializes Pyle.

This savage stereotyping comes from Fowler's intense need to repress his knowledge of sameness and establish difference between himself and Pyle. Invested as he is in the position of (ex)colonial disengagé, he must at all cost avoid noticing the resemblances between their situations. By fixing his gaze on Pyle—by keeping him under surveillance in his role of reporter—he can avoid self-scrutiny. However, Fowler is quite aware of the similarity in their colonial empowerment: the Vietnamese “don't want our white skins around telling them what they want” (94). In a racist conflation of the peasants and their animals, he tells Pyle that “in five hundred years … small boys will be sitting on the buffaloes. I like the buffaloes, they don't like our smell, the smell of Europeans. And remember—from a buffalo's point of view you are European too” (95). In order to prove Pyle wrong, Fowler insists on both their common imperial status and the continuity of Western imperialism.

In spite of Fowler's frenzied attempts to establish and maintain difference, the similarities between Fowler and Pyle are brought into focus by their common attraction to Phuong. Until Pyle declares his interest in her, Fowler regards him as “a prize pupil” (24). In a classic demonstration of the structure of the homosocial, Fowler's posture toward Pyle is paternal, with the familiarity an older man from an older culture feels free to use toward a younger one. He interrogates Pyle and berates him about the simplistic nature of his mental operations, his dependence on romantic abstractions (though Fowler's cynicism itself is merely an inversion of romanticism). When the dialogue goes in unexpected directions, Fowler blames these turns on Pyle. He complains that “my conversations with Pyle seemed to take grotesque directions. … Was it because of his sincerity that they so ran off the customary rails? His conversation never took the corners” (104); that is, it never follows the direction laid down by the paternal speaker, the acknowledged superior in the homosocial order. Their relationship is well established by the time Pyle becomes a rival for Phuong—a development as much a product of that relationship as a response to her. Their contest for Phuong echoes the contest between European and American imperialism: it is a question of who has the biggest resources at his disposal (Hwang's Danish schoolgirl could provide a Lacanian insight here). Pyle can offer her “security and respect” (78). Because he possesses “the infinite riches of respectability,” he can marry her, whereas Fowler, whose wife refuses to divorce him, offers only a temporary home. Fowler becomes so obsessed with Pyle that he reflects, “It was as if I had been betrayed, but one is not betrayed by an enemy” (140). This perception gestures toward the structure of his relationship with Pyle but does not acknowledge it. Only with Pyle's death—in which Fowler tells himself he must connive because Pyle's endorsement of terrorist activities endangers the civilian population—and the consequent disappearance of Pyle's threat to Fowler's domestic peace can Fowler acknowledge his affection for Pyle. Pyle's death forces Fowler to ponder the similarities from which he has averted his gaze: “Was I so different from Pyle? … Must I too have my foot thrust in the mess of life before I saw the pain?” (186).

The Oedipal nature of the homosocial relationship¹⁰ with its antifilial outcome is underlined by Fowler's observation that “the sight of Oedipus emerging with his bleeding eyeballs from the palace at Thebes would surely give a better training for life today” (182)—better than the American movie articulating Pyle's fantasy, in which the hero rescues a girl, kills his enemy, and leads a charmed life. In Fowler's reinscription of the Oedipus myth, the father triumphs in the ritual agon.

Quite capable of understanding that he is “inventing a character” (133) for Phuong (as he has for Pyle without acknowledgment), Fowler is nonetheless oblivious to his part in her expropriation. Abjuring “mental concepts” and thus construing his environment in material terms, he thinks of Phuong much as the drunken Granger does, as “a piece of tail” (36). He muses “she was the hiss of steam, the clink of the cup, she was a certain hour of the night and the promise of rest” (12), but his characteristic thought of her is of “the soft hairless skin” when he goes off to sleep with his hand between her legs—in which position, not so incidentally, he formulates his last idea about Pyle, which is inextricably imbricated with his idea of himself: “Am I the only one who really cared for Pyle?” (22). His irritated response to Pyle's concern for Phuong's best interest shows his perception of Phuong: “‘If it's only her interests you care about, for God's sake leave Phuong alone. Like any other woman she'd rather have …’ the crash of a mortar saved Boston ears from the Anglo-Saxon word” (59). In short, in Fowler's psychological economy, Phuong is only a cunt to be had for the asking without any obligation on his part to arouse or fulfill desire.

Fowler does not scrutinize any aspect of male engenderment beyond the parameters of homosocial rivalry; he does interrogate the sign man, but only as regards American usage. He pretends not to understand what Granger means by “a man's man” (66) or by the compliment “Anyway you're a man” (36) to an acquaintance who accompanies Granger on a quest for girls. Fowler, himself no stranger to brothels, once again averts his gaze from self-scrutiny in order to persist in his perpetual monitoring of difference in similarity.

Articulating no regrets for the British empire itself, Fowler needs only the homosocial colonial situation. Gallimard, stripped of all support for his engenderment, forced to recognize that he is object in Song Liling's narrative as well as subject of his own, has at last no site from which to position his subjectivity. Fowler, however, can continue to exist as long as he is supported by the colonial situation, a white man still comfortably engendered in a homosocial order empowering white men bent on careers of privilege and exploitation.

But the ideology of privilege is veiled from its beneficiaries. Fowler must remain oblivious to the deep structures of gender differentiation upon which imperialism, as Hwang so eloquently shows, ultimately rests. Thus the features of imperial rule rooted in the female imaginary, which are critiqued in M. Butterfly, appear as “nature” in The Quiet American. Although Greene does suggest that the rivalry of imperial nations, specifically that of Britain and the United States, can be read through the lens of the family romance, there is no hint that he recognizes the way in which imperialism subsumes the colonized into already existent structures of gender relations. Although the defining characteristics of the imperial subject fingered by Hwang are evident in Greene, the destructiveness of the model seems merely contingent, an accident. In no way does Greene address the gender assumptions underlying the justification of imperial power. Indeed, Fowler's cynicism barely covers the traces of Greene's nostalgia for the power configurations of nation and gender prevalent before the Second World War. Benedict Anderson speaks to this situation: “It is always the ruling classes … that long mourn the empires, and their grief always has a stagey quality to it.”¹¹ This observation nicely conveys the tone of The Quiet American, which throbs with an urgent desire to seize the day when the sun is already sinking fast.

Notes

1. Richard West, “Graham Greene and The Quiet American,” New York Review of Books 24 (May 1991): 49.

2. Greene, born into an upper-middle-class professional family, was a member of the governing classes. His father was headmaster of Berkhampsted School, where Greene himself was educated before he went up to Oxford. At both, but particularly at school, the attitudes and values appropriate to a citizen of the empire would have been inculcated: “The public schools … were geared to the empire's needs. Many of the ideals they aimed at, the qualities they worked to instill in their wards—notions of service, feelings of superiority, habits of authority—were derived from, and consequently dependent upon, the existence of an empire: of colonial subjects to serve, feel superior to, and exert authority over”; from Brian Porter, The Lion's Share: A Short History of British Imperialism, 1850-1970 (London: Longman, 1975), 103.

3. David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly (New York: Plume, 1989), 17. Subsequent references will be in parentheses in the text.

4. Judith Mayne, “Walking the Tightrope of Feminism and Male Desire,” in Men in Feminism, ed. Alice Jardine and Paul Smith (New York: Methuen, 1987), 70.

5. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), 20.

6. Cited in Arthur Brittan, Masculinity and Power (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 83.

7. Homi K. Bhabha, “The Other Question: Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism,” in Literature, Politics and Theory (New York: Methuen, 1986), 164.

8. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1985) 1-2.

9. Graham Greene, The Quiet American (1955; reprint, New York: Penguin 1962), 97.

10. Sedgwick, Between Men, 22.

11. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983; reprint, 1991), 111.