ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at American racial identity politics and at the fallout of the American intervention as imaged in the 1989 film directed by Brian de Palma, Casualties of War. It discusses the popular misconceptions concerning the act of rape, which, far from being a sexual act, is one of violence, and takes on particular significance during the act of war. De Palma has found the one verifiable incident which metaphorically parallels the development of a national sensibility, in Vietnam, in Korea and probably in the Occupied East generally. The chapter analyses the trope of rape in de Palma's Casualties of War as it expresses the growing sensibility of the Vietnamese people to the trauma of occupation. It explains the evidence of Minjung theology, and especially of the Asian sentiment of Han, in Casualties of War, as it appears in an unexpected reversal.
