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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 January 2021
“‘Between Ownership and the Highway’: Property, Persons, and Freeways in Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange” examines the place of the Los Angeles freeway system in the creation and maintenance of the egalitarian communities imagined in the novel. As I show, the freeway serves as an instrument for the economic growth, securitization, and increased powers of the state. Thus, in misusing the freeway, the migrants, narcotraffickers, and homeless stage a resistance to the freeway as metonym for modernity, efficiency, progress, and economic advancement. However, given that the threat posed by the ascendance of the homeless in particular must be understood through discourses regarding the public threat of unlawful migration and narcotrafficking, the homeless represent a population critical both to unmaking the extant state and replacing it with a more equitable society. I reanimate discussions of the novel by proposing that rather than examine transnational migration, and the mutations of time and space figured so prominently in the text as the novel's primary mode of critique, scholars instead turn their attention to the homeless encampment atop the LA freeway system as the boldest insight into how a new political system might be conceived.
1 In his seminal work Wealth of Nations (1776), published on the eve of US independence, Smith writes, “every man thus lives by exchanging, or becomes in some measure a merchant, and the society itself grows to be what is properly a commercial society.” Smith, Adam, The Wealth of Nations (London: Penguin Books, 1979), 126Google Scholar. De Tocqueville, Alexis, in Democracy in America (London: Penguin Books, 2003; first published 1835)Google Scholar, was struck by the importance of property and trade in the creation of American democracy. In putting Smith alongside Tocqueville's work, I mean to show that in the American imagination, commercial liberty facilitates a uniquely American form of egalitarianism.
2 Brigham, Ann, American Road Narratives: Reimagining Mobility in Literature and Film (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press), 3Google Scholar.
3 Yamashita, Karen Tei, Tropic of Orange (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1997)Google Scholar.
4 Janet Kaye, New York Times Book Review, 4 Jan. 1998.
5 See Adams, Rachel, “The Ends of America, the Ends of Postmodernism,” Twentieth Century Literature, 53, 3, After Postmodernism: Form and History in Contemporary American Fiction (Fall 2007), 248–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wallace, Molly, “Tropics of Globalization: Reading the New North America,” symploke, 9, 1 (2001), 145–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lee, Sue-Im, “‘We Are Not the World’: Global Village, Universalism, and Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange,” MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 52, 3 (Fall 2007), 501–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rody, Caroline, “The Transnational Imagination: Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange,” in Ty, Eleanor and Goellnicht, Donald C., eds., Asian North American Identities: Beyond the Hyphen (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 130–48Google Scholar; Chuh, Kandice, “Of Hemispheres and Other Spheres: Navigating Karen Tei Yamashita's Literary World,” American Literary History, 18, 3 (Autumn 2006), 618–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Crawford, Chiyo, “From Desert Dust to City Soot: Environmental Justice and Japanese American Internment in Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange,” MELUS: The Society for the Study of the Multi-ethnic Literature of the United States, 38, 3 (Fall 2013), 86–106CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Song, Min Hyoung, “Becoming Planetary,” American Literary History, 23, 3 (Fall 2011), 555–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sze, Julie, “‘Not by Politics Alone’: Gender and Environmental Justice in Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange,” in Carr, Glynis, ed., New Essays in Ecofeminist Literary Criticism (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2000), 29–42Google Scholar.
6 See Hsu, Ruth, “The Cartography of Justice and Truthful Refractions in Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange,” in Lim, Shirley, Gamber, John, Song, Stephen, and Valentino, Gina, eds., Transnational Asian American Literature: Sites and Transits (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 75–99Google Scholar; Zhou, Xiaojing, “Mapping the Global City and ‘The Other Scene’ of Globalization: Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange,” in Zhou, Cities of Others: Reimagining Urban Spaces in Asian American Literature (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014), 258–89Google Scholar.
7 Yamashita quoted in Hsu, 90.
8 Adams's work on the novel, for example, identifies the LA freeway system as a cultural site that stands in for the global city, but it does not fully look to the ways in which different populations inhabit these exceptional legal spaces to create new and unaccounted for disruptions of the state. Adams, 250. One rare exception is Wald's, Sarah D. “‘Refusing to Halt’: Mobility and the Quest for Spatial Justice in Helena María Viramontes's Their Dogs Came with Them and Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange,” Western American Literature, 48, 1 (Spring–Summer 2013), 70–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Wald's “Refusing to Halt” focusses on the promises and pitfalls of mobility, suggesting that Their Dogs Came with Them and Tropic of Orange explicitly link “newer modes of neoliberal economic development,” made possible in part through the violent process of constructing the infrastructure of the freeway to “older forms of conquest and colonization.” Ibid., 70.
9 This approach is certainly indebted to the field of critical geography, which looks to space as a site of cultural production and social relation.
10 In her chapter on Tropic of Orange, Jolie A. Sheffer writes that the encampment atop the freeway “gestures toward the possibility of a multiracial alliance of the disenfranchised, who help to create systems of value outside the logic of profit and loss.” Sheffer, Jolie A., Understanding Karen Tei Yamashita (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2020), 61CrossRefGoogle Scholar. However, while Sheffer is attentive to the place of the freeway in the creation of this communal and egalitarian encampment, the chapter is less interested in an exploration of the encampment in relation to the regulatory state, a topic at the heart of this article.
11 Yamashita, 140.
12 After all, the transnational narcotrafficker, like an early modern pirate, is a figure that represents both the epitome of the promise of free-market capitalism, and a figure inimical to the very idea of the regulatory body called the state.
13 Yamashita, 120.
14 Indeed, this is a frustration expressed even in María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, The Squatter and the Don, originally published in 1885. Burton critiqued the corrupt politicians who eagerly broke the state's laws or who legislated with the interests of the monopolies in mind rather than the populace.
15 A topic taken up in Ngai's, Mae M. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004)Google Scholar.
16 It is no surprise, then, that the freeway system and the suburbanization of the US were also a response to white flight from urban centers. As Eric Ávila has written in his work on the cultural history of the LA freeway system, “the freeway did not cause white flight, but it did sharpen the contrast between white space and nonwhite space in the postwar urban region by creating a conduit for capital flight away from downtown and by wreaking havoc upon the inner-city communities of East and South Central Los Angeles.” Ávila, Eric, “The Folklore of the Freeway: Space, Culture, and Identity in Postwar Los Angeles,” Aztlan, 23, l (Spring 1998), 14–30, 16Google Scholar.
17 Wald, 73.
18 Ávila, Eric, The Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 7–8Google Scholar. For works looking specifically at the LA freeway system see Banham, Reyner, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001)Google Scholar; and Soja, Edward W., The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996)Google Scholar.
19 Yamashita, 81.
20 Ibid., 83.
21 Earnie Grafton, “Increased Border Security Has Made Warning Signs Like This One on I-5 Largely Unneeded,” San Diego Union Tribune, 10 April 2005, at www.utsandiego.com/uniontrib/20050410/news_1n10signs.html.
22 Yamashita, ii.
23 Ávila, “The Folklore of the Freeway,” 25. For more works tackling the question of spatial justice in the city, particularly as it comes to bear on BIPOC, see Bullard, Robert D., Johnson, Glenn S., and Torres, Angel O., eds., Highway Robbery: Transportation Racism & New Routes to Equity (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Harvey, David, Social Justice and the City (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009)Google Scholar; Mitchell, Don, The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space (New York: Guilford Press, 2003)Google Scholar; and Soja, Edward W., Seeking Spatial Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
24 Yamashita, 145.
25 Ibid., 200,
26 Ibid., 201.
27 Ibid.
28 Joshua Weiner, “Industrial Aesthetic: The Tire Sculptures of Betsabée Romero and Chakaia Booker,” broad strokes, 10 June 2019, at https://blog.nmwa.org/2019/06/10/industrial-aesthetic-the-tire-sculptures-of-chakaia-booker-and-betsabee-romero.
29 Edward M. Gomez, “Betsabeé Romero, Mexico City at Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso,” Art in America Magazine, 4 June 2010, at www.artinamericamagazine.com/reviews/betsabe-romero.
30 Ibid.
31 Yamashita, 201.
32 Ibid., 146–47.
33 Julián Aguilar, “Bill Seeks to Designate Drug Cartels as Terrorists,” Texas Tribune, 21 April 2012.
34 Ibid.
35 In discussing the interesting position of the narcotrafficker within a political and criminal category, I am deliberately excluding the War on Drugs, which, as scholars have argued, was not a war between states, but rather an ideological tool of neoliberal expansion in Latin America implemented by Richard Nixon in 1970.
36 Yamashita, 155–56.
37 Ibid., 156, emphasis mine.
38 Ibid., 13, emphasis mine.
39 Ibid., 123.
40 Gerry, Sarah, “Jones v. City of Los Angeles: A Moral Response to One City's Attempt to Criminalize, Rather than Confront, Its Homelessness Crisis,” Harvard Civil Rights–Civil Liberties Law Review, 42, 1 (Winter 2007), 239–51, 240Google Scholar.
41 Schultz, Elizabeth, “The Fourth Amendment Rights of the Homeless,” Fordham Law Review, 60, 5 (1992), 1003–33Google Scholar, 1005.
42 Yamashita, 120–22.
43 Ibid., 238.
44 Daniel Politi, “Tanker Truck Speeds into Thousands of George Floyd Protesters on Minneapolis Bridge,” Slate, 31 May 2020, at https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/05/tanker-truck-george-floyd-protesters-minneapolis-bridge.html.