Postcolonial bodies as agents of deconstruction in M. Butterfly and Jack Maggs

This project puts into conversation two postcolonial texts that "write back" to Western canonical works: David Henry Hwang's play M. Butterfly and Peter Carey's Jack Maggs. It focuses specifically on the figures of colonized subjects who are pulled from their marginalized positions in Madama Butterfly and Great Expectations, respectively, and centralized in their own texts. Both texts reconstruct the underlying imperial binary of colonizer/colonized that form the foundations for the canonical works. By doing so, the texts seek to exploit and perform this hierarchical relationship to deconstruct it from the inside, out. The figures of colonized subjects are given the power to resist, and even reverse, the binaries through their ability to alter, manipulate, and disguise their bodies. But this only takes them so far; while Hwang and Carey demonstrate the efficacy of deconstruction through the apparatus of the postcolonial body, they simultaneously show its limits in providing an alternative to the imperial binary structure. It is only through Mercy Larkin, a minor yet crucial character in Jack Maggs, that Carey offers Maggs a path toward decolonization.