Lines of Transit, Migration, Mobility: Cripping the Freeway Fictions of Karen Tei Yamashita and Octavia E. Butler Available to Purchase

Taking up the infrastructure of transportation, this chapter turns to the California freeway fictions of Octavia Butler and Karen Tei Yamashita in order to articulate the relationship of infrastructural divestment to coerced migration, so-called free trade, and the myth of the parasitic noncitizen immigrant. In so doing, it connects the book’s disability analysis of dependency and major welfare reform to the narratives and practices of globalization, focusing on the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement. It argues that Butler’s 1993 novel Parable of the Sower and Yamashita’s 1997 novel Tropic of Orange prompt reflection on three infrastructural narratives: (1) the open road story and its fantasy of unfettered freedom; (2) global capitalism’s dependence on exploited immigrant labor; and (3) the alternate webs of survival and interdependence dreamed into being by neurodivergent visionaries.