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...