El-Tawassol التواصل
Volume 32, Numéro 4, Pages 20-29
2026-09-30
Love Under Suspicion: Espionage, Romance, And The Racialized Body In Asian American Cold War Fiction
Authors : Souhali Hichem .
Abstract
This paper examines the interplay of espionage and romance in Asian American Cold War fiction, focusing on Hwang’s M. Butterfly, Chang’s Lust, Caution, and Nguyen’s The Sympathizer. Drawing on Orientalism, gender performativity, colonial mimicry, and surveillance power, it argues that the spy-lover figure destabilizes identity categories fixed by imperial discourse. These texts deconstruct binary logics—East/West, masculine/feminine, loyal/treacherous—upon which Cold War anxieties depend. Rather than merely reflecting those anxieties, they actively subvert them. In doing so, Asian American Cold War fiction restores complexity to racialized bodies distorted by Orientalist fantasy.
Keywords
Espionage ; Romance ; Cold War ; Orientalism ; Performativity ; Counter-discourse
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