Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-xbtfd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-02T18:42:58.196Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 6 - Cold War Fiction

The Flower Drum Song’s Political Education

from Part I - Transitions Approached through Concepts and History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 May 2021

Victor Bascara
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
Josephine Nock-Hee Park
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
Get access

Summary

This chapter explores the expressive possibilities of the early Cold War era by reconsidering C. Y. Lee’s pathbreaking 1957 novel, The Flower Drum Song. Adapted into a Broadway musical in 1958, a Hollywood production in 1961, and then revived on stage in 2002, Lee’s breezy tale has been a source of fascination and vexation for Asian American audiences for decades. This chapter’s reading resituates Lee’s novel within postwar US–Asian relations and the position of Asian America in the early Cold War period in order to reconsider The Flower Drum Song as an exhibit of the narrowed political parameters of the Cold War consensus. In focusing on the political machinations featured in Lee’s novel – and not its afterlives – this chapter reads a critical opening for Asian American expression, but on straitened political terms. At the heart of The Flower Drum Song is a political education that reasons through the necessity of anticommunism; and though the astonishing success of The Flower Drum Song and its adaptations has been taken as evidence of successful domestic incorporation, the exigencies of the postwar political order are on full display in the novel, which both obeys and ironizes Cold War strictures of thought and feeling.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×