(Mahidol University International College)
Folding Cities: Quotidian Complicity and Structured Ignorance
This chapter attempts to define and explicate “quotidian complicity,” a term intended to express the way that modern life is shaped and enabled by a multitude of relationships, many of which are unequal, but the nature of which often remains unrecognised due to the length of the causal chains separating the complicit party from the exploited individual or group. It discusses three fictions that explore quotidian complicity through their use of the trope of folding: Hao Jingfang’s Folding Beijing (2015), China Mieville’s The City and the City (2009) and Linda Grant’s A Stanger City (2019) all use folds in urban space to show how proximity and visibility do not necessarily correlate. While a fold brings together two otherwise distant points, it also hides other surfaces from view, and in this way the negative effects of particular behaviours remain hidden from view. This “structured ignorance” is shown in the three texts to result from external factors and from the complexity of the networks and length of causal chains in which modern individuals tend to be embedded; however, they also show it to be produced, at least in part, by the agency of individual characters. All three texts begin by representing the quotidian complicities resulting from this ignorance as inevitable, and the possibility of acting counter to these forces as hopeless. However, through the arc of each narrative, the fictions finally insist that agency can be exercised, with effort and will, to overcome structured ignorance and hence to avoid quotidian complicity in specific, individual cases, although all are more pessimistic with respect to the possibility of wider, structural change.
Alignment and the Rhetoric of Complicity in Post-9/11 Fiction
This chapter discusses the relationship between complicity, rhetoric and affect through an analysis of Amy Waldman’s The Submission (2011) and Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire (2017). It begins by noting that complicity can take the form of rhetorical acts, such as inciting and encouraging, but that the concept of complicity is also a persuasive rhetorical tool in itself. While its rhetorical power can perform a useful, counter-hegemonic function, the two novels show how the affective power of the fear of complicity, and specifically of being perceived as complicit by association with particular censured groups (such as radical Islam in the aftermath of 9/11) can lead to a harmful oversimplification of public discourse. In short, rhetorical frameworks constructed around the fear of complicity are polarising, and for this reason a rhetoric of complicity can itself produce further wrongdoing.