David Henry Hwang’s Post-Racial Aesthetics in Late Capitalism: A Transversal Butterfly with Prosthetic Agency in M. Butterfly

This paper examines how Butterfly functions as a prosthetic prop to ramp up the affective capacities of both Asian and white subjects to become creolized in the late-capitalist US culture in David H. Hwang’s M. Butterfly. Hwang’s interpretation of Butterfly is invested in casting off entrenched Orientalist discourses all too prevalent in the United States history. However, despite considerable scholarly attention directed to the play, less focus has been paid to the character trajectories concerning how the performative ontology of their race, gender, and sexuality are both effected and affected by the different settings of time and space in it. This new historicist approach helps situate the play within the larger question of Asian American representation in the Cold War context and its related political economy during the second half of the 20th century, a point that this paper investigates through Marc and Renee who reify the libidinal economy of capitalist biopower and an anti-authoritarian precursor of neoliberal capitalism, respectively. Thus, this study shows how Butterfly is teased out as something creolized at the intersections of the different shifting identities of race, gender, and sexuality—a prosthetic prop to enable the “misfit” subjects to claim agency beyond their ontological limits against the American regime of heteronormativity and white supremacy. The embodiment of Butterfly as transversal and creolized serves to materialize Hwang’s aspirations to create an affective model of the American identity, not hyphenated, but more representative of what the US is becoming in terms of post-racial aesthetics.