San Diego: Stitching Up the Globe

Abstract

The chapter introduces some of San Diego’s (2003, Royal Lyceum Edinburgh) most relevant themes including the aerial age, global mobilities, precarity and disease and briefly unpacks the signifier “San Diego”. It then argues that what really captures David Greig’s imagination in San Diego, which crucially includes the author’s alter ego as character, is the idea that the entire globe is “our town”, and that is the concept he attempts to make “real” in San Diego, both by questioning who is included or not in the “our” and what that “town” comprises. The chapter’s argument is that San Diego painfully and beautifully stitches up the globe through a series of aesthetic strategies that illuminate the globe dwellers’ lives as thoroughly interconnected. Stitching-up formally articulates the idea that “our town” is indeed the whole globe as one single space.