Belonging to the Network: Neoliberalism and Postmodernism in Tropic of Orange

Tropic of Orange rethinks postmodernism, its relationship to neoliberalism, and the political implications of a form of collectivity modeled on the World Wide Web. In Yamashita’s novel, the network is the privileged figure for the ontological condition of the neoliberal world order and for a mode of postnational belonging endowed with the potential to instigate radical change. As the novel struggles with this potential, it prefigures and significantly complicates the controversial vision of postmodern politics that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri began elaborating three years after the novel came to press.