M. Butterfly Critical Essay | Critical Essay by James S. Moy

Critical Essay by James S. Moy

SOURCE: Moy, James S. “David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly and Philip Kan Gotanda's Yankee Dawg You Die: Repositioning Chinese American Marginality on the American Stage.” Theater Journal 42, no. 1 (March 1990): 48-56.

In the following essay, Moy compares representations of Asian characters in M. Butterfly to those in Yankee Dawg You Die, by Philip Kan Gotanda, arguing that while both playwrights attack stereotypical Anglo-American representations of Asians, their plays ultimately reinforce these stereotypes.

One thinks one is tracing the outline of the thing's nature over and over again, and one is merely tracing around the frame through which we look at it. … A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.

—Wittgenstein

The point of intersection of the popular unconscious and the self-conscious, seriously intended work of art has always...
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