Cosmopolitan Patriotism In Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic Of Orange

Karen Tei Yamashita is one of the most prominent Asian-American writers in recent years.Her works not only break through traditional boundary concepts and national identities,but also emphasize the necessity of building multilingual and multicultural communities.With Characteristic of world literature and cosmopolitan patriotism,Tropic of Orange creates new narratives of race and space in Los Angeles.It evolves around seven distinct and interrelated characters and seven story lines that happen in seven days around the summer solstice,including traffic jam and freeway community,mystical symphony,distorted time and space,border issues of smuggling and immigration,poisonous orange alert,illegal human organ harvesting and wrestling championship.From the perspective of national responsibility and global responsibility in cosmopolitan patriotism,this thesis compares and analyzes the protagonists’ different attitudes and practices towards these two responsibilities when faced with the same international problems.Based on Kwame Anthony Appiah’s theory of individual responsibility differentiation,this thesis is divided into three parts:anti-cosmopolitanism and patriotism,priority to global responsibility,and priority to national responsibility and balancing two responsibilities.This thesis not only defines the main characters in Tropic of Orange according to cosmopolitan type,but also analyzes their advantages and disadvantages.It aims to show that balancing national responsibility and global responsibility is the proper way to solve the current international contradictions in this multicultural world.