Global Weirding and Paranoid Worlding in Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange

Abstract:This essay argues that Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange deploys an aesthetics of global weirding. Yamashita's novel relates a series of increasingly bizarre phenomena that occur across Los Angeles in a single week. Tying these occurrences together is the motif of the orange, a strange fruit whose persistent presence in the novel provides the key to the conspiratorial cartographies of climate change's globally weird effects. Tropic of Orange ultimately deploys the orange as a tropic figure that conceptualizes the multiple scales of the ecoapocalypse as one predicated on the paranoid faith that everything is connected.