The ends of America, the ends of postmodernism

My provisional name for this chapter, American literary globalism, is intended to identify a constellation of authors who are reacting against the stylistic and conceptual premises of high postmodernism and responding to the intensification of global processes that were emergent during, but muted by, the phenomenon of Cold War. (3) These include the unprecedented integration of the world's markets, technologies, and systems of governance; surprising and innovative new forms of cultural fusion; and the mobilization of political coalitions across the lines of race, class, and other identitarian categories. For some, the perceived ubiquity of transnational corporations and increasing commodification of the world's cultures gave rise to fears about the impending demise of literary innovation. As Jonathan Franzen lamented in a controversial 1996 article:

    The world of the present is a world in which the rich lateral dramas
    of local manners have been replaced by a single, vertical drama, the
    drama of regional specificity succumbing to a commercial generality.
    The American writer today faces a totalitarianism analogous to the
    one with which two generations of Eastern bloc writers had to
    contend. To ignore it is to court nostalgia. To engage with it,
    however, is to risk writing fiction that makes the same point over
    and over: technological consumerism is an infernal machine,
    technological consumerism is an infernal machine. (43)

But while Franzen was decrying the numbing effects of global consumer culture, contemporary fiction in the US was being transformed by an infusion of new writers whose distinctive responses to the conditions of globalization were hardly in danger of making "the same point over and over." Many of these authors--Jhumpa Lahiri, Sandra Cisneros, Chang Rae Lee, Junot Diaz, Ruth Ozecki, Jessica Hagerdorn, Gish Jen, Bharati Mukherjee, Susan Choi, Oscar Hijuelos, Edwidge Danticat, and many others--were either the children of migrants or were themselves migrants who had come to the US as a result of the global upheavals of the past two decades. Relatively unburdened by the legacies of Euro-American modernism or the politics of the Cold War, their fiction reacts against the aesthetic sensibilities of high postmodernism while providing American literature with a new set of genealogical, geographic, and temporal referents.

In what follows, I read Yamashita's Tropic of Orange as a novel that revises many of the themes and strategies employed by Pynchon in The Crying of Lot 49. I take these two novels as representative texts that might stand in for the larger shift from postmodernism to globalism as a dominant conceptual and thematic force in contemporary American fiction. I measure the distance between these categories in terms of their very different treatments of California and its environs, places that have so often been taken as a barometer of the American, and global, future.