“Asian American Players makes innovative contributions to Asian American literary scholarship both in its historicizing approach—in which Clark contextualizes texts in relation to not the war they talk about but the war at the time of writing—and by centering underexamined Asian American cisgender masculinity.” —Belinda Kong, author of Tiananmen Fictions Outside the Square: The Chinese Literary Diaspora and the Politics of Global Culture
“Clark reads Asian American literary production through the geopolitical lenses of four major wars—the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, and the War on Terror—to persuasively demonstrate how Asian American literature indexes the evolving yet remarkably stable masculinist ethos undergirding post–World War II American wars and how Asian American players can be read as a corollary of American capitalism and military dominance.” —Tina Chen, author of Double Agency: Acts of Impersonation in Asian American Literature and Culture
“In this dense deep dive into Asian American literature Clark (US Naval Academy) examines the intersectionality of race, gender, and sexual identity in a culture long burdened and warped by rampant US imperialism and white hegemonic masculinity. …In Clark’s analysis, all of this plays out against the backdrop of post-1945 US imperialism, which continually feeds and reinforces cultural norms based on certain types of masculine behavior deemed socially acceptable, perhaps even essential to the system writ large. … Summing up: Highly recommended.” —A. Kingston, CHOICE