Abstract
In Tropic of Orange (1997), Karen Tei Yamashita builds an expansive narrative on the premise that the Tropic of Cancer shifts mysteriously from its actual latitude, barely north of Mazatlán, México, to that of L.A.’s latitude: from 23.43692° north of the Equator to 34.0522° N. By doing so, Yamashita literally takes that which is “south of the border” and repositions it in a hub of neoliberal hegemony; that is, she takes what is below (“sub-”) and puts it on top (“-vert”). I read such a literal and magically realistic move as an allegorical template that guides the novel in its entirety, but more specifically, in its repositioning of women from their spaces of relegation to spaces animated by their resistances to such relegation; from spaces of dependency to spaces characterized by feminine influence. This essay examines three strategies through which feminist subversions may be accomplished according to Yamashita’s textual template: The first follows Susan Fraiman’s theory of Extreme Domesticity (Fraiman 2017) as it tracks how subservient spaces of home and household can become sites of nonconformity; the second takes its cue from the cinematic strategies of “space-off” and “reversal” as examples of how marginal or negative spaces can be leveraged against the male gaze (c.f. José Rodríguez Herrera’s analysis of Sarah Polley’s film adaptation of Alice Munro’s “The Bear Came Over The Mountain,” Herrera 2013); and the third engages my own notion of a spatial virtuality (“that which is present without being local,” Munro 2014) as a mode of resistance that culminates, ultimately, in “a condition of literature,” that is to say, a condition in which Tropic of Orange refers to the conditions of its own making instead of referring to the conditions that create it (ibid.). My tripartite method thus highlights and celebrates the domestic, cinematic, and technological spaces of Yamashita’s writing, respectively, just as it articulates how these spaces might also be read as subversively feminist and feminizing. But it also meditates formally and contextually, as Tropic of Orange’s condition of literature implies, a sort of ablated feminist narratology, even as it works toward feminist narratological ends.
Highlights
To read Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange (Yamashita 1997) as a novel that “responds to neoliberalism,” as does Rachel Greenwald Smith in Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism (Smith 2015, p. 24), is to illuminate the conditions that give rise to it; to read it as responding to these neoliberal conditions “in ways that go beyond ”, as Smith does, is to join scholars ranging from Caroline Rody to Rachel Adams in noticing that going beyond means that, as a response, Tropic of Orange doubts neoliberalism’s foundational premises
By suggesting that Tropic of Orange goes beyond both representationalism and individualism, Rody and Smith bring to light the possibility that Yamashita’s novel actively and affectively undoes the subjectivizing forces of neoliberalism that Adams claims is being critiqued
I read such a literal and magically realistic move as an allegorical template that guides the novel in its entirety, but in its repositioning of women from their spaces of relegation to spaces animated by their resistances to such relegation; from spaces of dependency to spaces characterized by feminine influence
Summary
To read Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange (Yamashita 1997) as a novel that “responds to neoliberalism,” as does Rachel Greenwald Smith in Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism (Smith 2015, p. 24), is to illuminate the conditions that give rise to it; to read it as responding to these neoliberal conditions “in ways that go beyond ” (ibid., emphasis added), as Smith does, is to join scholars ranging from Caroline Rody to Rachel Adams in noticing that going beyond means that, as a response, Tropic of Orange doubts neoliberalism’s foundational premises. Which to view how a condition that is overwhelmingly read as normative and subjectivizing might instead be trans-ed into the extremizing effects of affective performance Such is the case in Tropic of Orange, where Rafaela Cortes manages a Mexican renovation project for an L.A.-based journalist (Gabriel) on her terms, where Buzzworm enacts a sort of feminine masculinity in his management of an old house inherited from his grandmother, and where a “new millennial homelessness,” to borrow Fraiman’s phrase (Yamashita 2010), or a feature film (e.g., Tropic of Orange), and do so in such a way that the contours of the choice of making a visual spectacle into a novel can be ideologically traced. domesticity expresses neoliberalism, since private space is managed like the commercial public; both are articulated by the same idiom. She is forced into the body of the jaguar, but by following through on her mode of spacing-off and reversing, she forces the body of the jaguar into her
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