Claiming the Right to the City: Representations of Los Angeles in the Works of Boyle, Tobar, and Yamashita

The increasing role of the "city" in today's neoliberal policies of global accumulation, capital and wealth has received considerable attention among many urban scholars. This is because the commodification, gentrification and privatization of urban spaces pose not only great challenges and difficulties but also opportunities for the urban dweller. At the right time and place urban consciousness can raise awareness and give rise to the creation of new types of spaces -- spaces that can function as sites of contestation and resistance. This dissertation offers an in-depth study of three Los Angeles novels, T. C. Boyle's The Tortilla Curtain (1995), Hector Tobar's The Tattooed Soldier (1998), and Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange (1997) in order to display the processes of capitalist production of space and urban everyday life that have given rise to various forms of spatial resistance, particularly, the subversive act of claiming the right to the city. First formulated by Henri Lefebvre, the right to the city is far more than the individual right to access urban resources regardless of one's ethnicity, gender and class. It is the reimagining of the city as a powerful site of contestation that holds vast potential for revolutionary action and change. In this formulation, art and literature, cooperating with everyday resistance and creative experimentation in the city, can interrupt the hegemonic spatial organization of late capitalism and open up possibilities for a revolutionary future. The spatial framework of T.C. Boyle's The Tortilla Curtain, Hector Tobar's The Tattooed Soldier, and Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange is centered upon urban politics to deal with the compelling issues of immigration, homelessness, and social justice in the city of Los Angeles. The novels render Los Angeles as a strategic site of global capitalism as well as a contested space of resistance against power structures. By advancing the idea of the right to the city as a common ground for resistance against oppressive forces, all three writers imagine the city as having the redemptive power to change lives and bring social change. Tracing the urban tension that accumulates below the city as a reverberation of neoliberal urbanization processes, these texts coalesce around an urban consciousness that searches for a creative and revolutionary urban life against the segregating and alienating logics of capitalist city. Departing from Lefebvre's idea that art and literature bring new dimensions to urban studies in imagining alternative forms of urbanism and everyday life, the dissertation analyzes the spatiality of these three literary works in order to forge closer ties between urban studies and literary criticism and contribute to the ongoing scholarship of the right to the city. Keywords: City, Space, The Right to the City, Production of Space, Los Angeles, Urban consciousness, Resistance, American Literature, Henri Lefebvre, T.C. Boyle, Hector Tobar, Karen Tei Yamashita