Asian American Players: Masculinity, Literature, and the Anxieties of War
Autor Audrey Wu Clarken Limba Engleză Paperback – 9 sep 2024
The player is a womanizer, a trickster, a gambler—but can Asian American men fully participate in this kind of masculinity? In Asian American Players, Audrey Wu Clark showcases how the literary figure of the Asian American player unsettles the hegemony of white American masculinity through mimicry, even as that masculinity socially and politically alienates him. She examines gendered and racialized US militarism through works written during major postmodern American wars, investigating how books by John Okada, David Henry Hwang, Chang-rae Lee, Frances Khirallah Noble, and Viet Thanh Nguyen (re)fashion Asian American masculinity in ways that ultimately mimic masculinist American foreign policy and military strategies during corresponding wars. She unearths a dual picture of Asian American players: as traces of the anxiety of America’s quest for empowerment and continued military and industrial dominance in the international arena and as those tarred as inferior and disloyal outsiders within this mirrored global dominance. She thus finds new inroads into understanding US imperialism and militarism and identifies ways that key literary figures have written against insidious tropes.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780814258811
ISBN-10: 0814258816
Pagini: 204
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 20 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
ISBN-10: 0814258816
Pagini: 204
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 20 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Recenzii
“In this dense deep dive into Asian American literature Clark (US Naval Academy) examines the intersectionality of race, gender, and sexual identity in a culture long burdened and warped by rampant US imperialism and white hegemonic masculinity. …In Clark’s analysis, all of this plays out against the backdrop of post-1945 US imperialism, which continually feeds and reinforces cultural norms based on certain types of masculine behavior deemed socially acceptable, perhaps even essential to the system writ large. … Summing up: Highly recommended.” —A. Kingston, CHOICE
“This study contributes to interdisciplinary thinking in postcolonial literature and Asian American studies, and perhaps more importantly, it engages with gender as performativity on national and individual stages.” —Pamela J. Rader, Rocky Mountain Review
“Asian American Players makes innovative contributions to Asian American literary scholarship both in its historicizing approach—in which Clark contextualizes texts in relation to not the war they talk about but the war at the time of writing—and by centering underexamined Asian American cisgender masculinity.” —Belinda Kong, author of Tiananmen Fictions Outside the Square: The Chinese Literary Diaspora and the Politics of Global Culture
“Clark reads Asian American literary production through the geopolitical lenses of four major wars—the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, and the War on Terror—to persuasively demonstrate how Asian American literature indexes the evolving yet remarkably stable masculinist ethos undergirding post–World War II American wars and how Asian American players can be read as a corollary of American capitalism and military dominance.” —Tina Chen, author of Double Agency: Acts of Impersonation in Asian American Literature and Culture
Notă biografică
Audrey Wu Clark is Associate Professor of English at the United States Naval Academy. She is also the author of The Asian American Avant-Garde: Universalist Aspirations in Modernist Literature and Art.
Extras
As this study shows, Asian American “player” masculinity is the poached mimicry of normalized white hegemonic masculinity. Critic Martin Summers argues that white “hegemonic masculinity—or the dominant cultural ideals of what it means to be a man—becomes the terrain on which all marginalized, or subordinated, masculinities are constructed and performed.” That is to say, masculinity often—but not always—implies domination, and since 1945, a specific kind of masculinity has dominated: that of the player imperialist. In the ideology of player imperialist masculinity, in order to play others, a player must believe himself, at least at some point, to be the best.
US imperialism began to operate as a form of playerism after 1945, when the US emerged from World War II victorious and as the geographically unaffected world leader; this timeframe was also when neoliberalism, described by such political figures as Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek starting in 1938, coincidentally emerged with what has become Keynesian economics in its defense of free-market capitalism. Distinguishing neoliberalism from classical liberalism, in which the government “is hands-off and/or aims to offset market effects such as unemployment, resource depletion, or pollution,” political scientist Wendy Brown has famously argued that “neoliberal rationality disseminates the model of the market to all domain and activities—even when money is not at issue—and configures human beings exhaustively as market actors, always, only and everywhere as homo oeconomicus.” Historian Suzanne Kahn adds that neoliberalism was synonymous with the market-driven, “breadwinner liberalism”—which favored “a breadwinner father and homemaker mother” in the “idealized nuclear family”—that dominated the mid-twentieth century. Historically championed by white, hegemonic (that is, straight and cisgender) men, the neoliberal player, which both challenged and reaffirmed the patriarchal nuclear family, has characterized US war-making since 1945; this discursive figure has followed the model of the free market in terms of playing others, that is women and gendered (Asian and Middle Eastern) nations of color—for his own profit and to win, or defeat others. Brown goes on to argue that “liberal democracy has also carried—or monopolized, depending on your view—the language and promise of inclusive and shared political equality, freedom, and popular sovereignty.” In this way, the US, as a neoliberal player, has seduced certain Asian and Middle Eastern nations since 1945 precisely through the promise of democratic inclusion. In US fiction, the feminized Asian American player performs this gendered citizenship and ultimately reveals the promise of inclusion to be a bluff, an offer that continues to be held beyond his reach.
US imperialism began to operate as a form of playerism after 1945, when the US emerged from World War II victorious and as the geographically unaffected world leader; this timeframe was also when neoliberalism, described by such political figures as Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek starting in 1938, coincidentally emerged with what has become Keynesian economics in its defense of free-market capitalism. Distinguishing neoliberalism from classical liberalism, in which the government “is hands-off and/or aims to offset market effects such as unemployment, resource depletion, or pollution,” political scientist Wendy Brown has famously argued that “neoliberal rationality disseminates the model of the market to all domain and activities—even when money is not at issue—and configures human beings exhaustively as market actors, always, only and everywhere as homo oeconomicus.” Historian Suzanne Kahn adds that neoliberalism was synonymous with the market-driven, “breadwinner liberalism”—which favored “a breadwinner father and homemaker mother” in the “idealized nuclear family”—that dominated the mid-twentieth century. Historically championed by white, hegemonic (that is, straight and cisgender) men, the neoliberal player, which both challenged and reaffirmed the patriarchal nuclear family, has characterized US war-making since 1945; this discursive figure has followed the model of the free market in terms of playing others, that is women and gendered (Asian and Middle Eastern) nations of color—for his own profit and to win, or defeat others. Brown goes on to argue that “liberal democracy has also carried—or monopolized, depending on your view—the language and promise of inclusive and shared political equality, freedom, and popular sovereignty.” In this way, the US, as a neoliberal player, has seduced certain Asian and Middle Eastern nations since 1945 precisely through the promise of democratic inclusion. In US fiction, the feminized Asian American player performs this gendered citizenship and ultimately reveals the promise of inclusion to be a bluff, an offer that continues to be held beyond his reach.
Player imperialism, although racialized and politicized by whiteness and hegemony, is a simulacrum mimicked by Asian American players. The Asian American male player in the context of post-1945 US war-making in and against Asia and the Middle East, regions toward which he might defensively feel akin, demonstrates how player imperialism has pervaded the global ethos during this historical period, particularly since it is predicated on perpetuating the cycle of the victim and victimizer. This idea of the player is simultaneously sexual and scheming, interpersonal and geopolitical; the Asian American mimicry of what I am calling player imperialism poses a threat to its authority by mimicking or performing it.
As the epigraph of this book suggests, the player has been a historically high (dramatic performer, actor) and low (gambler) cultural figure whose meaning was conflated with that of a “womanizer” after World War II. The Oxford English Dictionary records the first usage of player in this sense in 1968 and traces it to the turn of the twenty-first century. Even though the OED designates player as an especially prevalent slang term among African Americans, this study indicates that the idea of the player has informed the ideology of white American imperialism since 1945, which, in turn, has influenced all US citizens. The term player is now a common concept and term that the larger American, including Asian American, popular low and high cultures have absorbed. In this way, the player, which lies at the confluence of popular low and high cultures—a trademark of postmodernism—represents postmodernism and its multiple significations. The OED generally defines the “player” in slang as a man who embarks on serial sexual conquests for empowerment.
As the epigraph of this book suggests, the player has been a historically high (dramatic performer, actor) and low (gambler) cultural figure whose meaning was conflated with that of a “womanizer” after World War II. The Oxford English Dictionary records the first usage of player in this sense in 1968 and traces it to the turn of the twenty-first century. Even though the OED designates player as an especially prevalent slang term among African Americans, this study indicates that the idea of the player has informed the ideology of white American imperialism since 1945, which, in turn, has influenced all US citizens. The term player is now a common concept and term that the larger American, including Asian American, popular low and high cultures have absorbed. In this way, the player, which lies at the confluence of popular low and high cultures—a trademark of postmodernism—represents postmodernism and its multiple significations. The OED generally defines the “player” in slang as a man who embarks on serial sexual conquests for empowerment.
Cuprins
Introduction Asian American Players
Chapter 1 Playing the Korean War: Domestic Containment and the Bluff of Melancholic Asian American Masculinity
Chapter 2 Playing the Vietnam War: Remasculinization and the Rhetoric of Polarity
Chapter 3 Playing the Odds of the Virtual Gulf War: World Police and Family Man
Chapter 4 Playing the Endless War: The Simulacra of Illegitimacy after 9/11
Conclusion The Anxieties of Postmodern Wars
Chapter 1 Playing the Korean War: Domestic Containment and the Bluff of Melancholic Asian American Masculinity
Chapter 2 Playing the Vietnam War: Remasculinization and the Rhetoric of Polarity
Chapter 3 Playing the Odds of the Virtual Gulf War: World Police and Family Man
Chapter 4 Playing the Endless War: The Simulacra of Illegitimacy after 9/11
Conclusion The Anxieties of Postmodern Wars
Descriere
Showcases how the literary figure of the Asian American player unsettles the hegemony of white American masculinity through mimicry and reveals how that masculinity drives US militarism.