This chapter takes an interdisciplinary approach to explore the thematic concern
of Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange, mostly from the perspectives of
ecocriticism and cultural studies. As a third-generation Japanese American writer,
Yamashita tends to write with a mission to represent the diasporic experiences of
Asian and Latino immigrants in the United States, with a focus on their revelation
of a fluid sense of self and their inclination to mediate between two distinct
cultures. The increasing impact of globalisation poses new challenges to these
immigrants in their efforts to cope with the problems of displacement and
assimilation in the course of migration and inhabitation, which are among the
main issues raised in Tropic of Orange. Yamashita’s diasporic worldview is
explicitly divulged by her depiction of seven characters who represent prototypes
of a universal phenomenon of border-crossing and displacement in Los Angeles
and Mexico in the 1980s. This chapter points out the negative impact of corporate
globalisation on local people, which is reflected in the blurred boundary between
aspects of consensual reality and the concepts of space and time, along with the
confusion of individual, ethnic, and cultural identifications. What Yamashita
delineates is a teletopia without sense of time and place, with the features of
displacement and hybridity exemplified by the seven characters in Tropic of
Orange.