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.
