earticle

영어

Faced with a cold war of ideology and a need to establish strong alliances with Asian countries, in order to confront the expansion of communism, the American government of the 1940s and ’50s recognized the need to change its image concerning domestic racism and re-educate its citizenry toward tolerance. Reflecting this contextual Cold War need, two works of post-war travel literature and their Broadway musical adaptations evidenced the evolution of a dominant cultural narrative of “American” identity, revising and expanding the definition of “American” to include Asians. James Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific (1947) and C. Y. Lee’s The Flower Drum Song (1957), as well as their Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein musical adaptations South Pacific (1949) and Flower Drum Song (1958), contributed to the emerging Asian American identity. Utilizing Raymond Williams' framework of cultural process as the dominant, the residual, and the emergent, this research explores the emergent cultural acceptance of Asian American Identity through the analysis of the four pieces of travel literature.