earticle

영어

In Tropic of Orange (1997), a sansei writer Karen Tei Yamashita discusses the comprehensive transnational imagination, dealing with discourses about the US-Mexico border and Asian American issues within the frameworks of globalization and migration. In her writing, she uses an outstanding metaphor, which is the movement of the Tropic of Cancer into Los Angeles through an orange. The Tropic of Cancer is an invisible line of latitude passing through Mexico, so its movement symbolizes the expansion of US-Mexico borderland where cultural hybridity and migrants’ identity are established. Therefore, this metaphoric movement also implies the multicultural landscape of Los Angeles is caused by the migration from the south. In this work, she explores this changing landscape of Los Angeles through the lives of the seven characters of different ethnic and class backgrounds. However, she neither criticizes the globalization phenomenon nor what the future of Los Angles might be. Rather, she is just bringing into the light those who have been invisible in Los Angeles even though they are playing a central part in the changes of this global city. In this regard, this paper will focus on two things; the landscape of Los Angeles and what it means to live in Los Angeles. This paper will first analyze the structure of Los Angeles that segregates migrants from the white middle class in the process of the development of capitalism, because this structure makes the real landscape of Los Angeles invisible. Then, the investigation of “what it means to live in Los Angeles”, will examine the ways that each character is searching his or her identity through the methods of globalization like electronic media and consumption.