Tropic Of Orange

In this short blog I would like to briefly discuss the presence of globalization in Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange. As Frederick Jameson writes in Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, outlining perhaps the single inescapable quality that all post-modern texts contain. He says “every position on postmodernism in culture- whether apologia or stigmatization- is at one and the same time, and necessarily, an implicitly and explicitly political stance on the nature of multinational capitalism today” (3). That is to say, capitalism has circumnavigated and conquered the entire globe. Its effects on the individual are life defining and ethereal. It is impossible to escape its influence. The narration which describes the migration of the Tropic of Cancer is brought on due to economic motivations. It is the force of capitalism which acts like a magnet for cities, bringing people from all over the globe who have come in search of economic opportunity but have quite often been confronted with poverty and alienation upon arrival. Because the novel describes Las Angeles in the 1990’s, it is by default also describing the effects that late capitalist, globalized economies bring upon populations.

Yes, globalization brings with it cultural diversity, a dramatic increase in the amount of foreign restaurants one can eat at, a wide variety of music from all over the world, but not everything that comes with globalization is good news. With it comes it comes legal persecution, discrimination, fear, and poverty. Or, as Claudi Sadowski-Smith describes in her book Border Fictions: Globalization, Empire and Writing at the Boundaries of The United States, “Emi’s graphic death at the hands of police during the homeless riots and Rafaela’s rape by the drug and organ smuggler Hernando in Mexico symbolize the kinds of violence that women often face in the global economy” (64). Drugs are being smuggled through every corridor. Baby hearts are being carried surreptitiously across the world. Little boys, in search of fortune and freedom, jump off ships in the middle of the ocean to avoid capture. They are all in search of a new home and they have arrived, here, in America, and have found the ground to be unsteady; elastic. The opportunism they have chased have led to dead ends, the x on the map turns out to have already been dug up by the time one gets there.

Much of the novel takes place on one of the highways of Los Angeles which has been completely shut down due to accidents caused by the orange. Although it is in the heart of the city, it is full of derelict cars and the disenfranchised of the city have taken up shelter in the lanes. In many ways, this stretch of the highway is a limbo. There is no commerce or capitalism in the highway. Every thing is free, everyone is getting along, and even broadcasting their opinions and stories. This is the place where the homeless, the immigrant, and powerless and can come together. But as the novel shows, this type of world is an anomaly and something that can not last long in this globalized system.