A transnational vision of The King and I: On American culture and policy in David Henry Hwang’s Soft Power

ABSTRACT

This article takes Soft Power, David Henry Hwang’s “musical within a play”, to foreground the importance of transnational appreciation in an era of superpowers. Hwang offers an alternative vision of world order by critically engaging with debates surrounding the rise of China and the Confucian concept of self-cultivation to expose the arrogance of western culture and narrow-mindedness of unilateral foreign policy. The article identifies Hwang’s strategy as “reciprocal criticism” – utilizing other cultures for self-critique without establishing superiority but rather encouraging mutual improvement – and highlighting performativity: it does not merely describe issues but creates a new reality through the re-imagining of The King and I, an orientalist musical, into a contemporary piece of theatre that elevates Asian American voices. Significantly, Soft Power reveals that any potential solution to the current global crises, such as climate change, regional conflict, and racial inequality, requires transnational visions capable of negotiating different ways of seeing.

KEYWORDS:

• Asian American theatre
• Chinese diaspora
• soft power
• transnationalism
• reciprocal criticism
• postcolonial playwriting

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Janet Wilson and Paul Veyret (Journal of Postcolonial Writing editors), Jonathan Locke Hart, Shirley Wu, and the two anonymous readers for their constructive comments. The author extends her appreciation to Ban Wang for his invaluable guidance during the early development of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. I thank King-Kok Cheung (2016) for alerting me to her use of Asian American writing as reciprocal critique in Chinese American Literature without Borders.

2. Special thanks to David Henry Hwang for providing the PDF version of the unpublished Public Theater Opening Night draft of Soft Power and for granting permission to quote from it (David Henry Hwang, email message to author, November 25, 2023).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Zhiyun Zhao

Zhiyun Zhao received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and master’s degree from Stanford. She is a PhD student in the School of Arts at Peking University. Her research interests include performance theory, Asian American studies, and sound studies. She has presented her works at Peking University International Doctoral Student Forum of Art Studies and Seventh Annual Trans-Asia Graduate Student Conference.