Worlds at the End: Los Angeles, Infrastructure, and the Apocalyptic Imagination

by Pacharee Sudhinaraset

Overview

Worlds at the End attends to a body of literature that renders Los Angeles’s infrastructure, or its material foundations, as central to the rise and consolidation of colonial life. Pacharee Sudhinaraset employs a women-of-color feminist methodology to examine Indigenous, Black, Asian American, and Latinx literary works about apocalypse and the end times.

Worlds at the End analyzes destruction, rupture, and continuance through texts ranging from Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange, which considers racial colonial infrastructure, to the work of Diné poet Esther Belin, which illuminates how the separation between the Indian reservation and LA is part of a broader infrastructural network of termination. And she unpacks Octavia Butler’s post-apocalyptic novel, Parable of the Sower, where LA’s freeways and roadways are routes of forced migration, colonization, and flight.

Tearing down existing institutions that marginalize people of color and moving past them, Worlds at the End highlights the imaginaries of those subjugated, racialized, and made other, for whom modernity, freedom, and progress meant violence, brutality, and relegation to the status of devalued surplus populations. As Sudhinaraset deftly shows, the apocalypse marks moments of historical and spatial transition, offering stories of doomsdays that will give rise to resurgence and regeneration.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781439925515
Publisher:	Temple University Press
Publication date:	11/01/2024
Series:	Critical Race, Indigeneity, and Relationality
Pages:	250
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Pacharee Sudhinaraset is Assistant Professor of English at New York University.

Editorial Reviews

“A timely, ambitious, and original project with meticulous and sophisticated readings of a range of literary texts engaging with Los Angeles writ large. Sudhinaraset traces multiple trajectories of devastation and resilience, mobilizing a women-of-color feminist analytic to do so. Rigorously researched and convincingly argued, Worlds at the End is a deeply ethical and generous book that resolutely refuses despair while facing head on the multiple catastrophes of capitalist extraction and colonial violence.”—Grace Hong, Professor of Gender Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of Death beyond Disavowal: The Impossible Politics of Difference

“Worlds at the End offers a timely and dazzling meditation on worldmaking and worldbreaking political projects by writers of color at the turn of the twenty-first century. Identifying a group of Asian American, Indigenous, Black, and Latinx writers thinking within and through an ‘apocalyptic imagination,’ Pacharee Sudhinaraset shows how literary production conjures up realities that defy state governance and neglect, racial capitalism’s extension of western settler colonial expansion within the metropole, and the material persistence of chattel slavery’s dehumanization. Stretching the analysis and politics of women-of-color feminisms, Sudhinaraset shows how these apocalyptic  imaginers envision radical new socialities across racial difference, illuminate histories of ecological disfigurement otherwise obscured by Los Angeles’s palimpsestic built environment, and adumbrate life-chances for surplus populations that, to paraphrase Audre Lorde—and Sudhinaraset in turn—were never meant to survive.”—Victor Mendoza, Associate Professor in the Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies Program and the Departments of Women’s & Gender Studies, English, and American Culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and author of Metroimperial Intimacies: Fantasy, Racial-Sexual Governance, and the Philippines in U.S. Imperialism, 1899-1913

From the Publisher