The ends of America, the ends of postmodernism

As students and teachers of contemporary literature know well, fiction is often one step ahead of cultural studies, particularly when it comes to representing the agency of those who are typically depicted only as demographic abstractions. Tropic of Orange is about the way that populations from many different national and economic backgrounds come together in Los Angeles, where they variously champion, are victimized by, or simply live in the circumstances of globalization. In keeping with Yamashita's interest in oral history, the novel aspires to channel multiple voices, particularly those that have historically been silenced or marginalized. To say that Tropic of Orange provides the ingredients for the "account of globalization" Denning is calling for is not to claim that it represents its moment more accurately than does The Crying of Lot 49, but rather to underscore the extent to which the two works belong to different chapters in literary history. These novels are an ideal pair because each translates the cultural and political dilemmas of its time into the aesthetic and thematic innovations of narrative fiction. Any attempt to define what makes Yamashita's moment distinctive will require different forms of literacy, historical knowledge, and attention to emergent sensibilities that break from earlier understandings of "the contemporary."

One promising avenue in Americanist literary history is the recent realignment of the field's geographic parameters to reflect multiple Americas that are more mobile and expansive than the borders of the US nation-state. As we have seen, Yamashita's imagined geographies are informed by a heightened awareness of how America is being transformed by the massive demographic and perspectival shifts wrought by globalization. Since the 1990s, many critics have proposed that nation-bound categories of literary study be replaced by alternative geographical frames such as the Caribbean, the Americas, the Black, the trans- or circum-Atlantic, the Pacific Rim, continents, hemispheres, and worlds. (10) In Americanist literary study, such creative remapping has helped to bring attention to underrepresented authors, yielded innovative combinations of authors, and shed fresh light on well-known works. In a parallel development, many works of contemporary US fiction recognize a planet that is tied together through the increasing interpenetration of economies, cultures, and kinship. If postmodernism is governed by a sense of paranoia, which suggests that these connections may be figments of an individual imagination, the literature of globalization represents them as a shared perception of community whereby, for better or worse, populations in one part of the world are inevitably affected by events in another.

If the postmodern vision of global geography is filtered through Cold War divisions and anxieties, contemporary US fiction takes other spatial and ideological imaginaries as its setting. It draws on a global archive of literary traditions in its search for innovative formal strategies. Of course, for over a century modernism and then postmodernism have relied on allusions to multiple languages and traditions. But contemporary US fictions tend to frame such borrowings differently, in terms of the contact among people and cultures resulting from globalization. It seems premature to say exactly what the reigning thematic and aesthetic sensibilities of the era of American literary globalism will be, given the difficulties of defining any form of cultural expression at the moment of its emergence. What this kind of comparative reading can accomplish most productively is to generate a more precise understanding of literary postmodernism, one that does not encompass anything and everything but sees it as a set of innovative narrative responses to the cultural conditions of its time. What better place to start identifying its successor than California, whose constantly shifting landscapes and populations have given rise to some of America's most apocalyptic nightmares, as well as its fondest utopian hopes for the future?