Homo sacer in the city: spatial politics of exclusion in j. g. ballard’s empire of the sun

Abstract

James Graham Ballard is an author who is known as one of the keen observers of the social and accompanying spatial shifts taking place in the 20th century. Although his oeuvre is filled with “ballardian” science fiction, his mid and late career is also marked by such autobiographical and semi-autobiographical works as Empire of the Sun (1984), The Kindness of Women (1991) and Miracles of Life (2008). The gated-communities, with which Ballard had been preoccupied throughout much of his career, have globally become one of the significant components of the urban spaces today. The proliferation of these communities has been creating a widening gap between those inside and those outside, to an extent that citizenship can no longer continue to be an overarching term for all of the urban dwellers. This paper aims to examine the birth of gated-communities and their impact on the public space of the city in Empire of the Sun. Set in Shanghai, the birthplace of J. G. Ballard, the novel relates a fictional account of Ballard’s childhood in Shanghai on the eve of World War II and in the Lunghua Civilian Assembly Camp during the war. This paper will firstly deal with the impact of Ballard’s post-war fictions, with regard to spatial politics, on Empire of the Sun, a semi-autobiographical novel. Secondly, it will aim to demonstrate how the spatial paradigm which situates homo sacer, a person who can be killed with impunity according to Roman law, outside the city has shifted towards a new understanding in which homo sacer is situated within the city after the establishment of the gated-communities in the novel. It will be concluded that Empire of the Sun testifies to the disintegration of the city as a public space as a result of the introduction of homo sacer into the urban space.