Date of Award
2024
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy in English
Specialization
English Literature
Department
English
First Advisor
Ryan Trimm
Abstract
This project examines city space as a material and conceptual process within contemporary California. Concretized in differing figurations, my work investigates the urban as a distinct praxis reimagining subject and space. If California is truly a “non-canonical” landscape as Krista Comer argues, its vision of “Westness” must offer an alternate geography that, while gesturing to the West as an historical event, departs from dominant narratives to envision a counter-site somehow “west of West.” My first chapter looks to Tommy Orange’s There, There (1996). Evoking Deleuze’s theorization of the Fold, I read the novel’s depiction of Oakland as a folded configuration enacting a uniquely “urban Indian” affective-aesthetic praxis. There, There complicates definitions of home, tradition, and Indigeneity, offering a paradoxically rooted mobility. The novel’s focus on continuity and hybridity asks we reconsider the divide between tradition and the contemporary and adopt an Indigenous orientation to the settler-colonized West. My second chapter investigates racialized city space in Nina Revoyr’s Southland (2003). The chapter argues the novel’s lingering ambiguity reveals a larger inability to reconcile dominant spatio-social organization in relation to marginalized populations. Attending to archeology an investigative process, my chapter argues looking at character alone is not enough - their perspectives only a parallax view of a much larger and more complex city. Southland’s neighborhoods as fundamentally unstable, situated on a racial fault-line whose geologic activity resists the covering-over of history, connecting the originary violence of settler colonialism and racial categorization to modern structures of ghettoization and exception. My final chapter looks to Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange (1997) to examine the U.S.-Mexico border as a complex process that, while abstracting is first and most crucially material. In concretizing the border as a mobile and mobilizing string, the novel reveals a complex politics confronting the “borderless world” of neoliberal globalization. At its core, my work investigated ways cities of the West engage with the tensions spatialized in the urban that stem from the convergence of histories, narratives, and orientations. I argue that these tensions can never be resolved, as they are fundamental aspects of social space. California is simultaneously rupture and creation, culturally and geologically; my work ultimately seeks to investigate and reconcile these concerns separate from totality or synthesis.
Recommended Citation
Turken, Diana, "THIS COULD BE HEAVEN OR THIS COULD BE HELL: FIGURATIONS OF URBAN LIFE IN CONTEMPORARY CALIFORNIA" (2024). Open Access Dissertations. Paper 1650.
https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/oa_diss/1650