Becoming Planetary

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It should go without saying that the start of the twenty-first century has been marked by huge improvements in travel and communication technologies that shorten distances and make everyone more acutely aware of what Rajini Srikanth describes as “the past memory and future promise of connections with other lands” (37). That is, even if one does not travel or go anywhere, distances have shrunk, and the world has become, as a result, more intimate. This compression of the world along vectors of time and space has put an enormous pressure on contemporary writers so that the narratives found in their works ubiquitously jump from location to location, ceaselessly occupy one perspective and then another, switch between the first-person singular to a free indirect speech that bounds from character to character without respect for nationality or language, and jumble past events with present occurrences. Unusual among writers who are interested in trying to capture a simultaneity of social experience made possible by time-space compression are narratives resolutely staying within a given moment, ones following the action of a character in a chronologically transparent succession of events uninterrupted by shifts in perspective, breaks in the text, flashbacks, and analepses.

As Rachel Adams has pointed out, “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” (268). Calling this an “American literary globalism,” one which supersedes a prior era’s dominant literary aesthetic loosely known as postmodernism, Adams enumerates who she thinks are its outstanding contributors:

Many of these authors—Jhumpa Lahiri, Sandra Cisneros, Chang Rae Lee [sic], Junot Diaz [sic], Ruth Ozecki [sic], Jessica Hagerdorn [sic], 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.

(251)

The novel that stands out most for Adams as exemplifying the move from postmodernism to an American literary globalism is Karen Tei Yamashita’s third novel Tropic of Orange (1997), which imagines Los Angeles as a meeting place between the national and global. Interestingly, Adams has little to say about Yamashita’s earlier two works, both of which were just as determinedly global in perspective but located in Brazil, which in turn acts as the (quite literal) magnetic center, the place which people migrate toward and imagine the world from.

Turning to these earlier novels, one finds the same interest in the themes and formal experiments that mark off the phenomenon Adams elucidates from an older aesthetic movement but with an important difference: the globalism evoked in Yamashita’s earlier novels pushes America into its margins, its influence felt from a distance and, when mentioned at all, made a single strand of a more complex text. By doing so, Yamashita’s first novel, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990), in particular imagines what shifting and porous borders characterized by time-space compression might look like if the US is not at the center, dominating that moment. Just as important, the novel not only calls attention to the ways that globalization knits together the experiences of far-flung populations but also, and with even more urgency, how the novel puts all these populations in danger as global capitalism relentlessly exploits both bodies and environments. Because Through the Arc of the Rain Forest is set outside the US, and determinedly a part of the global south, the novel seems somehow more acutely aware of this connection. The novel thus offers a way to think about time-space compression that at once encourages a geographically non-American perspective and that...