The ends of America, the ends of postmodernism

Emi's death might stand in for the novel's rejection of the superficiality and relentless irony of postmodern aesthetics that her character represents. Rather than categorizing Tropic of Orange as a work of postmodern fiction, I would argue that the novel is more aptly described as a reaction to and an effort to move beyond its experimental precursors. Indeed, despite certain similarities with earlier works of experimental fiction, Tropic of Orange was unrecognizable to the major publishers who had been printing the work of high postmodernists like Pynchon since the 1960s. Even editors who appreciated the well-established conventions of postmodern literary experimentation declared it to be--in Yamashita's words--"too experimental and [they] didn't want the politics" (qtd. in Gier and Tejada). Yamashita eventually placed her novel with the small nonprofit Coffee House Press, which is dedicated to publishing the work of underrepresented authors. Yamashita and her work may have been inscrutable to publishers for several reasons. Although she describes herself as an Asian American writer, she does not fit easily into conventional understandings of this category. She began her literary career in Latin America, where she intended to write an oral history of Japanese women immigrants living in Brazilian agricultural communes. After becoming frustrated with conventional historical and ethnographic forms, she turned to fiction as a more appropriate means of capturing the "truth" of her subjects. Since her return to the US, Yamashita has written fiction, poetry, and performance pieces that consistently tie the history and culture of Asian America into the broader framework of the Americas and the planet. (8) Her work is part of the explosion of ethnic American writing that has changed the contours of fiction in the US since the late 1980s, but it also expresses the more global, multiethnic perspectives of a generation that is refashioning older understandings of identity and politics. Although some critics include this kind of writing in the rubric of postmodern fiction, its reception by publishers is evidence that it represents a significant departure that calls out for a new category altogether.

In Tropic of Orange, the Cold War vision of the globe that so dominates the texts of high postmodernism is replaced by other geopolitical cleavages. The novel's imagined geographies are informed by the massive demographic and perspectival shifts introduced by contemporary globalization and linked to the long history of conquest and colonization in the Americas. Whereas the genealogy of the Tristero/Trystero in The Crying of Lot 49 is rooted in the history of transatlantic immigration, Tropic of Orange emphasizes the violence and destruction wrought by earlier European arrivals on the American continent. Its vision of America's future is tied to Latin America and Asia. Archangel, a supernatural figure who appears in the guises of migrant worker, streetcorner prophet, performance artist, and Mexican wrestler, is the primary link to the hemisphere's bloody past and the promise in its future. His performances and spontaneous "political poetry" remind audiences of another American history formed by New World slavery, thefts of land, failed uprisings, and revolutions. As its epigraph explains, Tropic of Orange is also about "the recent past; a past that, even as you imagine it, happens." Published in 1997, the novel alludes to a "recent past" that includes many events of global significance--the signing of NAFTA, the war on drugs, the tightening of immigration restrictions--that are felt with particular intensity in Southern California because of its proximity to the US-Mexico border.