Title

A Real American Wife, A Japanese Object: Puppetry and the Orient in Minghella’s Madam Butterfly

Authors

Tobi Poster-Su

Files

Description

In Anthony Minghella’s celebrated 2005 production of Madam Butterfly, three white men manipulate the small, fragile body of Sorrow (Cio-Cio-San/Butterfly’s child), and, in a dream sequence, Cio-Cio-San herself–this paper explores how the production uses puppetry to represent the racialized Other, and how this might subvert, reinforce, or make visible Orientalist views of the East within the source text.

Publication Date

2023

Publisher

University Of Connecticut

City

Storrs

Keywords

puppet, representation, race and ethnicity, opera, theater

Disciplines

Arts and Humanities | Asian American Studies | Ethnic Studies | Other Theatre and Performance Studies | Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies | Theatre and Performance Studies

Recommended Citation

Poster-Su, Tobi, "A Real American Wife, A Japanese Object: Puppetry and the Orient in Minghella’s Madam Butterfly" (2023). Representing Alterity through Puppetry and Performing Objects. Edited by John Bell, Matthew Isaac Cohen, and Jungmin Song.
https://digitalcommons.lib.uconn.edu/ballinst_alterity/5