{"id":629,"date":"2009-04-15T00:25:34","date_gmt":"2009-04-15T05:25:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/?p=629"},"modified":"2009-04-15T00:25:34","modified_gmt":"2009-04-15T05:25:34","slug":"tropicana-of-orange","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/?p=629","title":{"rendered":"Tropicana of Orange"},"content":{"rendered":"

Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange <\/em>seems to me a smorgasbord of postmodernism qualities: shifting point of view, issues in globalization and consumerism, media saturation, a mixture of genres (magical realism, film noir, disaster fiction, etc.).\u00a0 Indeed, as I read Tropic of Orange<\/em>, a number of other texts came to mind.<\/p>\n

It was one of those days when [Emi] just felt like a little adrenaline high for real-life horror.\u00a0 Maybe because it was disaster week.\u00a0 So far she had been to a fire, to the scene of a robbery, and had chased the NewsNow<\/em> van chasing cops involved in a two-hour car chase that started in Burbank and ended up in Whittier.\u00a0 But the thought of seeing mangled bodies in a car wreck suddenly churned about in her stomach.\u00a0 She could always see it on TV.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Perhaps it is becuase we just read Mao II <\/em>not too long ago, but this passage (and many others in the novel) feels like it could be in one of Don DeLillo’s novels.\u00a0 The idea of this ultra-saturation in media; Emi has an obsession with disaster footage like Mao II<\/em>‘s Karen.Yamashita’s dialogue also feels a bit DeLillo-ian with its peculiar wit and humor.<\/p>\n

Tropic of Orange<\/em>‘s structure reminded me of another American author often associated with postmodernism (also female, also a minority [Native American]).\u00a0 Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine <\/em>is told through many different characters, whose stories and lives collide and contest with one another.\u00a0 Like Yamashita, Erdrich also employs elements of folklore and magical realism.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Side note: In the spirit of disaster oranges, I heard about this recent product marketing debacle from a friend.\u00a0 Earlier this year, Tropicana changed their ‘classic’ straw-in-orange\u00a0 logo to a new image.\u00a0 Tropicana enthusiasts, however, were not so pleased with the new look, and Tropicana saw a substantial drop in sales over only a matter of months.\u00a0 One of the popular reasons for the mass- disapproval was that the carton looks ‘cheap,’ too much like the generic-food brands.\u00a0 Consumers said that they might as well buy the generic orange juice if their Tropicana was going to look generic itself.\u00a0 Subsequently, Tropicana has decided to bring back their classic carton design.\u00a0 I chuckled when I heard the story.\u00a0 Has the consumer gone from buying food because it tastes good to buying food because its container looks good?\u00a0 Has the image of the orange juice surpassed the juice itself?\u00a0 I think we can attribute some of this to a nostalgic demand.\u00a0 I thought this was a tiny bit postmodern and appropriately orange.\u00a0 I only hope McDonald’s doesn’t decide to freshen up their logo…we could be looking at World War III.<\/p>\n

\"The
The Real Disaster Orange<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange seems to me a smorgasbord of postmodernism qualities: shifting point of view, issues in globalization and consumerism, media saturation, a mixture of genres (magical realism, film noir, disaster fiction, etc.).\u00a0 Indeed, as I read Tropic of Orange, a number of other texts came to mind. It was one of … Continue reading Tropicana of Orange<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[80],"tags":[7,82,84,83,63,71,81,72],"class_list":["post-629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-week-13-tropic-of-orange","tag-delillo","tag-erdrich","tag-love-medicine","tag-magical-realism","tag-mao-ii","tag-tropic-of-orange","tag-tropicana","tag-yamashita"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=629"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":658,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629\/revisions\/658"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}