Abstract
This research explores and examines how Chinese-American postmodern playwright David Henry Hwang questions the westerners’ oriental myth of inferiority, emotionality, meekness, passivity, superstition and traditionalism and remythologizes subverting the hierarchical binary between the west and the east superiorizing the easterners and the east in his play M. Butterfly. His politics of subversion succeeds presenting French diplomat Rene Gallimard’s suicide in M. Butterfly with realization of blindness by emotion due to tactful deception by Chinese opera girl, Song Liling, who is actually a male spy, which is reversal to Japanese opera girl, Madam Butterfly, Cio-Cio San’s suicide due to deception of American soldier Pinkerton in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. The study uses Said’s notion of Orientalism as a western discourse and myth, Foucouldian concept of discourse and Gramsci’s idea of western cultural hegemony to reimagine myth. It is found that Hwang challenges mythical discursivity through counter-mythical reimagining in order to reestablish the sidelined eastern myth of rationality. This research is historically significant for its contribution in subversion of meta-narratives and establishment of mini-narratives of through counter-storytelling.