Asian American Players: Masculinity, Literature, and the Anxieties of War (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780814215449)

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.

Author: Audrey Wu Clark
ISBN-10: 0814215440
ISBN-13: 9780814215449
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
Language: English
Published: 07/20/2023
Pages: 204
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.06lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.63d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 03/01/2024