Lines and Layers, Grids and Maps

Summary

In many ways Karen Tei Yamashita’s third novel challenges the ideas and standards defining Asian American literature, thus contributing to critical deconstruction of this increasingly disputed category. The novel’s phantastic complexity as well as the hybrid ethnicity of its characters suggest an affinity to the concept of the rhizome as developed by the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. With its emphasis on decentralization as well as permanent growth and change the idea of the rhizome seems to be an apt reflection of the ongoing processes of change and subversion in the existing social and political order of postcolonial societies. The article aims to analyze aspects of reference to the concept of the rhizome that can be found in Yamashita’s novel on different levels.