The essay argues that Perdido Street Station, in response to shifts in the capitalist world system, attempts to develop a narrative form that responds to the radical shifts in space and subjectivity embedded in that transformation. By doing so, it points to the historical limitations of the concept of heterotopia developed by Foucault and, in turn, to a transgressive understanding of hybridity dependent on that concept. Instead, the novel is defined by a series of mutually implicated but oppositional terms that define the antagonistic terrain of the city. The novel cannot imagine a line of flight from the complex structures of domination and consent contained in the structures of postmodern capitalism; it richly captures a set of possibilities contained in that stalled dialectic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
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