I. ALL THAT CHANGES REMAINS THE SAME? THE CATFISH INDUSTRY

Economic, racial, and social geographies represented in The Oxygen Man map troublesome issues linked to land ownership and labor disputes as part of the reality of catfish farming as practiced in the Mississippi delta. A sense of the history of the changing catfish industry is therefore crucial for understanding the unjust geographies offered by a novel that squarely addresses the racialized dynamics of the plantation system endemic to the space of the US South, but also reflective of uneven hierarchies of power in the global South, stretching beyond the novel's literal scope.Footnote ¹⁴ Published in 1999, close to the crest of the Mississippi catfish industry and its multimillion-dollar business, the novel follows the transformations of a socioeconomic landscape historically associated with cotton production and row crops. The history of a plantation economy where slaves, then sharecroppers, planted and tended cotton provides a backdrop to the delta as an impoverished, isolated, and racially “backward” place where grave inequalities persist. Although the novel touches only briefly on cotton production, various references to the “cotton patch” mark the persistence of racial exploitation and labor injustice. When Ned's boss Mack proclaims that “you can't take the cotton patch out of them,” meaning his black laborers,

The Delta land, suggests Ned, is a palimpsest on which the catfish ponds are only the latest configuration in an environment grown increasingly poisonous to its residents.Footnote ¹⁶ Across this space Yarbrough traces the legacies of colonial aggression, slavery, and Jim Crow, suggesting that between 1973 and 1996 less has changed than Americans had hoped it might, given the promise of the legal, political, and social revolutions of the civil rights movement.

Catfish production began at virtually the same moment, in the 1960s in Mississippi and Arkansas, and quickly spread to neighboring southern states.Footnote ¹⁷ The first farms attempted to raise fingerlings (or baby catfish) to stock ponds with a move to food fish farms by 1965.Footnote ¹⁸ Initially, “a farmer might have had one or two ponds he fed by walking along the levee, carrying a pail full of feed and broadcasting it out on the water by hand. By 1990, catfish had become a sophisticated megabucks aquabusiness,”Footnote ¹⁹ and today catfish is the leading aquacultural product produced in the United States.Footnote ²⁰ In the novel, we learn that in June of 1973, an early moment in the history of catfish farming in the delta, Mack's father began to dig catfish ponds with the idea to market catfish specifically to African Americans who had left the delta for Detroit and Chicago. Although catfish was originally a “southern food” produced for the local market, its production and consumption quickly exceeded regional boundaries. In Catfish and the Delta, Richard Schweid writes that “the nation's consumption of pond-raised, grain-fed catfish grew from virtually none in 1965 to about 400 million pounds a year in 1990.”Footnote ²¹ The dramatic growth of the industry in the 1980s and 1990s reflects the boom time for catfish raised in the Mississippi delta, with the height of production in this top-producing state reaching over 385 million pounds from 420 farm operations covering a total of 105,000 water acres in 1999.Footnote ²² The value of sales in Mississippi was at its height in 1998 at approximately $307 million.Footnote ²³ More recently and beyond the scope of Yarbrough's novel, between 2002 and 2013, the US has seen a 55 percent drop in both catfish acreage and catfish processed,Footnote ²⁴ with a significant negative economic impact on the state of Mississippi.

Yarbrough's decision to discuss the catfish industry close to its height in 1996 gives us a glimpse at a vertically integrated industry where large farms dominate and laborers are paid very little for their work while enduring demanding labor conditions. In the novel, the strike at the “Southern Prime” processing plant reflects historical fights over wages and human dignity in the industry in the early 1990s. According to the Monthly Labor Review of March 1991, workers (predominantly African American women) at the actual catfish processing plant Delta Pride fought for an increase in the average hourly wage of $4.05 over the course of the contract agreement, additional leave and break time, and “the establishment of unlimited bathroom breaks (previously limited to only six restroom breaks a week).”Footnote ²⁵ Some people described the working conditions there as a “plantation culture” rife with sexual harassment and demeaning treatment.Footnote ²⁶ By addressing the actual labor conditions of the catfish industry, Yarbrough's novel critiques the continued wage exploitation as it relates to spatial dispossession and injustice; it also hints not only at ingrained racial but also gendered injustice. The division of labor finds men in the fields and working on catfish ponds (where the central conflict in this novel occurs), and women in the processing plants and at home largely out of sight. Yarbrough's African American characters who work the ponds on Mack Bell's catfish farm repeatedly protest this unjust labor geography, for instance when Larry sarcastically speculates that Mack must have a guilty conscience: “I bet he's been worrying about paying us too little and making us live out here with the fish.”Footnote ²⁷ This sense of injustice reemerges when Larry talks to Ned before driving Mack Bell's tractor into the water:

The search for justice in a spatial economy based on labor exploitation and social disenfranchisement is also clearly articulated by Larry's African American neighbor Q. C., who is forced from his tenant home and job because Mack suspects him of having cut the diesel line that ruined the fish pond. “I been living on this place all my life,” he says, and “[d]on't own a piece of it, maybe, but if there was any justice, a little corner'd be mine.” Ned's reply reveals his own awareness of the profound inequalities that structure his life as well: “If there was any justice, more than a corner'd be yours, Q.C.”Footnote ²⁹ Yarbrough's social critique of spatial injustice is most explicit here as the novel aims straight at the delta's white landholding class and beyond that at the nation's unfulfilled democratic project. Although admittedly the machinations of the global economy remain beyond the scope of the novel and the thinking of its characters, a critical look at the development of the catfish industry allows us to see the entanglement of local labor practices with the forces of twenty-first-century globalization.

Despite Yarbrough's focus on the small town of Indianola and its economic microcosm, agriculture in the Mississippi delta had always been part of a national and global marketplace, dating back to the antebellum economy's dependence on cotton. The 1970s were a prosperous time for large cotton, soybean, and rice producers in the delta, but the value of row crops dropped from $737 million in 1979 to a mere $181 million just a few years later in 1981, according to Schweid.Footnote ³⁰ The drop in corn and soy prices that occurred during the anti-Soviet grain embargo in the late 1970s reveals the vulnerability to and dependence of local agriculture on global politics and larger ecological systems.Footnote ³¹ When delta farmers increasingly transitioned to aquaculture during this time, their business caused the collapse of the river fishing industry on the upper Mississippi in New Boston, Illinois, and surrounding areas. Randy Ziegenhorn, who “explores the complex social and economic forces that have reshaped local economies and the ecology of the river itself,” shows that communities far apart from each other and “unknown to one another” can engage in “an unequal game of trade.”Footnote ³²

Spatial justice is therefore never purely “local” but interconnected with other locales, as the continuing history of the catfish industry shows. The US catfish industry began to struggle in 2002 when Vietnamese fish farmers began importing to the US a type of catfish known as basa or tra. The Vietnamese product was $1.25 cheaper per pound than US catfish and import rates skyrocketed from 2 percent in 2002 to 23 percent in 2010.Footnote ³³ This caused the introduction of laws and tariffs, including antidumping orders seeking to protect the domestic industry, labels and language denoting genus and species names separating domestic from foreign fish, and tighter inspection regulations. Though these new economic troubles of the “catfish wars” lie outside the time frame of Yarbrough's novel – one half of which takes place in 1996 when catfish farmers in the delta still prospered as the lowly bottom feeder became popular on American tables – the global economic interdependence of labor geographies is again at stake. Today, farm laborers on one of the largest catfish farms in the Mississippi delta are H2 visa workers from Mexico who are increasingly replacing the African American workforce still depicted in The Oxygen Man.Footnote ³⁴ Globalization has not, then, as once feared, eradicated the particularities of southern place; on the contrary, it has accelerated our need to understand places more clearly in all their specificity and develop ways for reading their interconnection.

II. SPATIAL INJUSTICES IN YARBROUGH'S DELTA

Unable to anticipate the global undercurrents of today's catfish industry, Yarbrough structures the spatial dimensions of his novel as largely localized and dependent on twentieth-century dynamics of racial violence, class prejudice, and gender inequality. Place in The Oxygen Man is carceral.Footnote ³⁵ The novel opens with a reference to a classmate being jailed at Parchman, Mississippi's notorious maximum security prison, built literally on the remains of a plantation and thereafter managed in its spirit, with inmates, a vast majority of them African American, laboring in the prison's fields.Footnote ³⁶ Yarbrough's characters have no particular faith in the workings of the justice system, however. The novel's female protagonist, Ned's sister Daze, who often feels “penned” in her room by her brother's unwanted presence,Footnote ³⁷ reflects that “[s]o many people she'd known had gone to jail. So many more who should have hadn't.”Footnote ³⁸ In the novel, justice works according to an age-old regional formula that bypasses the institutionalized workings of the law in favor of racially motivated vigilantism, what one character calls “Southern justice.”Footnote ³⁹ When, following multiple acts of sabotage on the part of the African American workers whose requests for equitable pay are uniformly rejected by the white landowners, a knot of white men plan the execution of one of the offending laborers, the reader could be anywhere among the pages of “southern” writing, tracking straight back to Thomas Dixon's The Clansman (1905) and the more famous movie based on it, The Birth of a Nation (1914), with its cinematic glorification of the Ku Klux Klan. All we are missing is the flaming cross, present here in its darkly comic avatar, the hot tub set afire by the workers while their boss man is on guard for the plots of their resistance elsewhere, one of several signs that this story may finally be a new one only told within the guise of the old. But mostly fate seems to trump anything like justice, lurking secondarily in the landscape itself and in the deep gene pools of the people living on it. Out cruising the 1970s countryside with her boyfriend, Denny Gautreaux, the banker's son, Daze notes how the Mercedes they are driving catches the attention of convicts working outside the County Farm before reflecting that

Doomed from the beginning, Daze imagines living out an inescapable fate that she can accept or rage against but not resist, caught in the predetermined grooves of her existence as she moves through the southern landscape. Implicit here is the fact that Daze and Denny's fates are not only class-bound, but also gendered: Daze is assumed to be a slut and Denny a successful businessman.

Yarbrough's characters, then, are consistently imprisoned in social spaces not of their own making. For instance, Mack Bell, the landowner and aqua farmer, lives in a “big white house” he had inherited from his father; “Rockers stood on the veranda, and every now and then Mack would sit in one of those rockers and drink a mint julep, though he hated anything sweet.”Footnote ⁴¹ Caught in a frame that could be featured in Southern Living, even Mack is mildly uncomfortable performing his role, making the beverage choice expected of him as the white southern patriarch. His workers, conversely, inhabit less expansive space across from the catfish ponds themselves in “identical houses that stood in a row along a gravel road, no more than twenty feet separating each house from the other,”Footnote ⁴² obviously reminiscent of plantation quarters and mirroring the arrangement of the ponds themselves. Ned lives in a modest home that had belonged to his parents, once vulnerable, for example, to being flooded by the runoff from ditches draining the land of the area's large farms, literally marooning Ned, his sister Daze, and their mother Vonnie, in their working-class home and metaphorically in their compromised lower-class whiteness.

Yarbrough's careful attention to the demarcation of space, beyond housing patterns, is striking.Footnote ⁴³ We learn how the geography of race and class maps onto the educational system: black students attend public school and white students (even poor ones on scholarship like the Roses) attend private Indianola Academy at the precise moment when segregation academies were springing up all over the Deep South as residents could no longer ignore federally mandated desegregation. That the academy Ned and Daze attended in the 1970s is still part of the actual 1990s landscape illustrates the persistence of social injustice in the town and its legibility in the organization of space.Footnote ⁴⁴ We find out how grocery shopping breaks down along racial lines (white people to Wong's Foodland – suggesting, at least in name, that the Mississippi delta is not strictly a black-and-white space – and African Americans to Piggly Wiggly), who goes to what part of Lake Fergusson (all areas oppressive with the shared smell of fish and formaldehyde), and how seating at high-school football games breaks down along class lines. The prominence of football itself, with its clear demarcations of space along which players advance and regress, reveals the society's preoccupation with measuring people against one another to determine their worth. On the field, Ned can be a hero; off the field, he stumbles to be more than Mack Bell's hired hand. The novel's preoccupation with hegemonic masculinity means that the white male characters at its center act aggressively to prove their worth, abusing their wives and other women who drift into their focus, physically punishing other men whom they deem insufficiently masculine, and always demeaning African American people, male or female, as lasting demonstrations of the power of white male privilege.

In fact, the logic of economic rationality and the language of calculation, used to determine the worth of fish, land, and human capital, saturates The Oxygen Man, and particularly contributes to our understanding of Ned Rose. Melanie Benson notes the persistent linguistic emphasis on measuring monetary value in twentieth-century writing about the South: “All, regardless of subject position, are imbued with a primary drive issued by the logic of global capitalism and its earliest, perverse iterations under slavery: accumulate, dominate, exploit, and increase at all costs.”Footnote ⁴⁵ The easy parallels between the world of the African American workers in 1996 and the landscape of slavery belie its persistent legacy, as does Mack Bell's sense of entitlement and Ned's haunting conviction of worthlessness, linked to his dirty whiteness that he believes will never add up to anything within the region's calculus. Every character in the novel reinforces Ned's absence of self-worth. His sister Daze understands his relationship with Mack as “dog and master,”Footnote ⁴⁶ Mack treats him as “a piece of machinery,”Footnote ⁴⁷ and Larry, the black man above whom he should surely rank, observes to him early in the novel, “You ain't nothing, man. You zero. You just a empty blank for Mack Bell to fill in.”Footnote ⁴⁸ This yawning sense of hollowness at his core is Ned's constant companion. But it signals more than a lack of self-esteem. Ned's sense of himself as a zero also suggests the threat of emasculation in a hypermasculinzed culture, at the same time that it positions Ned as undercutting the nervous heterosexuality of the patriarchal structures shaping his world. Ned simply is not man enough, for himself or for anyone else in his damaged microcosm. Just before he brings the glass Coke bottle down over a black storekeeper's head, Ned calculates that he too might someday be a clerk in an out-of-the-way store and reflects,

Yarbrough's use of language related to “holes,” “zeros,” and “empty spaces to be filled in” clearly feminizes Ned and other workers: they are “fucked.”

Yarbrough's language here further equates Ned with the catfish themselves, with a fish out of water, engaged in “a fight for breath, just one long struggle to suck in air or water or food” and thus survive.Footnote ⁵⁰ Aware that he, like the fish, is but one more anonymous cog in the grind of capitalist agribusiness, Ned is caught between passively accepting himself as a nonentity and thrashing his way toward claiming some greater individualized value and meaning. His African American coworkers face a similar dilemma, and whereas Ned's inability to distinguish himself from them compromises his masculinity for much of the novel, it is ultimately his acknowledgment of their interconnection that allows him to revolt against the spatial injustice mutually hemming them in.Footnote ⁵¹ When, late in the novel, Mack asks Ned, “What's got you wanting to tabulate everything?” he answers the same way he might have in 1973: “I'm trying to see what I add up to.”Footnote ⁵²

The novel's African American characters calculate equations similarly, but understand them as extending beyond region. When Ned catches up to Larry's “woman,” Leota, on her walk home from a night on the kill line of the Southern Prime catfish processing plant, he suggests she use her influence to encourage Larry to move elsewhere, possibly Detroit, where presumably he could satisfy any nostalgic yearning for home with a plate of catfish. Her response – “Ain't nothing different in Dee-troit”Footnote ⁵³  – suggests the same geography of labor Larry sketches a few pages later when he offers his observation that everyone is “making a killing” except the people who do the work. It may be Mack's $60,000 tractor that Larry destroys by stalling it out in water, but he rages against the capitalist system that attributes only a monetary value to his labor and that has assigned them both these roles, inflected as they are with the contours of southern space and history.

As Yarbrough maps the geography of injustice beyond catfish ponds, the University of Mississippi emerges with a particularly potent role to play, hovering always on the narrative's edge just out of reach, firmly situated outside the delta in the state's northern hill country. The university's infamous stand to prevent the enrollment of James Meredith in 1962 is, not coincidentally, a scant ten years in the past during the novel's sections set in 1972–73. Mack, Rick, and Ned visit the campus one fall weekend in 1973, the same weekend during which Ned will kill a black storeowner in a failed bid to demonstrate to his friends that his white masculinity is, after all, the equivalent of theirs. They find a campus and a town emptied of people – everyone is gone to the UM–Georgia football game in Athens – and they amuse themselves in a menacing way with a college girl who has stayed behind, threatening her with gang rape before abandoning her miles from town. Ned will never enroll at Ole Miss, and none of them will play football there, but the symbolic power of this university erected originally to educate the state's white elite is not lost on them, most especially not on Larry, who, in an earlier moment, reveals to Ned that he applied to the school and was accepted. In response to Ned's question – “How come you didn't enroll?” – Larry offers a seemingly flip reply about the “climate,” by which Ned assumes (and rightly, we surmise) that he means “the band playing ‘Dixie’ at the ball games and the Rebel flags flying.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Ultimately the conversation illustrates the impasse between the two men, spurred by the social injustices that characterize the entire novel. Larry's non-enrollment at the University of Mississippi becomes one of the many “subjects they could broach but not discuss. At times the water got too deep to stand in.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Water returns as the novel's central image here with the threat of both Ned and Larry drowning in the seeming bottomlessness of the state's racial history. Yarbrough's most obvious reflection on the geography of institutionalized racism is packaged into the symbol of the university. As Mack and his friends gather to plot Larry's murder, Ned stands to the side and listens to their conversation about the emotional power of the song “Dixie” and its contested relation – in 1996, as in 2015 – to the University of Mississippi and to their identities as southerners, for which they seem already nostalgic. Talk quickly turns, however, to what the song means “to them”; that is, to African Americans.Footnote ⁵⁶ Each white man in the circle reveals that he can weigh precisely the tune's racial baggage, ranging from the “chains” and “shackles” of chattel slavery to the defenders of segregation, “George Wallace” and “Ross Barnett,” to the victims of civil rights-era violence, “Medgar Evers and Emmitt Till.”Footnote ⁵⁷ That they can name so clearly the song's powerful and racially charged symbolism, yet so utterly reject that knowledge, constitutes the novel's darkest hour. And that Yarbrough's novel was written and published in the late 1990s in the midst of the university's continuing convulsions around its symbols suggests, finally, that the water is deep everywhere, and not just in the catfish ponds on which the narrative primarily concentrates.Footnote ⁵⁸

Yarbrough's novel is acutely aware of the power exerted by symbols of exclusion and oppression, and while the content and form of such markers may vary by local circumstance, their function is not unique. We can choose to see Yarbrough's conclave of white men at dusk as an idiosyncratic episode, humming with a sort of regionally specific violence, or we can frame the spatial and social inequalities more broadly by including Leota's Detroit into the landscapes of injustice. As Ned at last reluctantly approaches the group, “They all looked up at him … as if by mutual consent, all their eyes rolling toward him at once. They had him in their sights now; they could see a manlike object.”Footnote ⁵⁹ In eventually locking eyes with that gaze, Ned does more than reclaim a singular manhood; he acknowledges an alliance with Larry and the farm's other black employees that every circumstance of his life thus far has been dedicated to obscuring with the bad math of racism and classism. When he finally aligns himself with Larry, Ned rejects what R. W. Connell has called the tenuous “patriarchal dividend” that is paid out to those men who align with hegemonic masculinity, even though they do not fully represent it. His move away from “complicit masculinity” to “marginalized masculinity” signals a hopeful alliance against race and class oppression.Footnote ⁶⁰ What is more, Ned supports Larry's earlier rebellion of jamming the tractor, symbolically clogging the entire machine of labor exploitation that has historically depended upon racial divisions.

The Oxygen Man makes room for such new possibilities. Larry describes his retribution against Mack for his refusal to raise their pay as “corrective action,”Footnote ⁶¹ and Ned does nothing to stop him, despite his role as caretaker of Mack's catfish enterprise. At the edge of the catfish pond, over the splutter of the drowning diesel engine, Larry recognizes both the similarities and the differences in their positions by acknowledging that he hopes not to hurt Ned in striking back at the system Mack embodies. “[E]very zero got a middle,”Footnote ⁶² he assures Ned, retracting his earlier calculation of Ned's worth. When Ned foils Mack's plan to kill Larry in the novel's closing pages (possibly by killing Mack himself), he finds his zero's elusive center, although it is entirely likely that he has simultaneously orchestrated his own death. Still, Yarbrough imagines a way forward that may not simply repeat the past. He imagines workers, black and white, similarly caught in the workings of capital and power, seizing control of the conditions under which they labor by first recognizing how the constructs of class, race, and gender have historically worked to thwart such self-awareness. This admittedly idealistic view requires solidarity and depends not just on Ned's epiphany, but also on Larry's; the novel ends in a moment of irresolution that emphasizes two kinds of kinship, the conventional ties of family in Daze's assertion that “Ned's my brother,”Footnote ⁶³ and the bonds of a different kind of affiliation outlined in Larry's claim that “I work with Ned.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Moreover, these relationships are geographical. Even in the novel's closing pages, Yarbrough's narrative remains aware of the nuances of space. Daze and the man in whom she finds lasting comfort toward the conclusion discuss a missing traffic light, gone some thirty years, but now signaling in its absence that they can move ahead. Together they encounter Larry, the “black man on the front steps at eight-thirty in the morning” whose presence neither of them finds strange, despite the fact that he “made no move to meet them halfway.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Yarbrough stops here, with their minimal verbal exchange and their handshake, a physical act that has the potential to bridge space, allowing the novelist to embed in the concluding scene a glimmer of the social change that spatial justice would allow. One of the novel's central achievements is its telling focus on the socially manufactured differences separating people. Those differences rest not only on the expected markers of class, race, and gender, but also on a moral index suggesting that the union of Ned's voice with Larry's is the first step toward remapping the entrenched geographies of injustice in the Mississippi delta.

III. WHAT'S REALITY GOT TO DO WITH IT? REFLECTIONS ON SPATIAL JUSTICE BEYOND THE NOVEL

Our reading of The Oxygen Man illustrates how space is, in the words of Soja, “actively involved in generating and sustaining inequality.”Footnote ⁶⁶ And while we wish we could conclude this essay by mapping out the most expedient route to spatial justice in the Mississippi delta and the world more broadly, we can only gesture towards the sociological realities underlying Yarbrough's fictional world. Set in and around Indianola, and more broadly Sunflower County, Mississippi, the novel intentionally zeroes in on a highly particularized place with a deep history that marks it as a singular location. Sunflower County, situated in the heart of the Mississippi delta, was home, for example, to powerful US Senator James O. Eastland (1904–86), whose extensive plantation holdings were primarily there and whose arch-segregationism sounded the death knell for all civil rights legislation during his lengthy tenure as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. At precisely the same time, Sunflower County was home to civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer (1917–77), who began her career with a voter registration drive in the summer of 1962, leading to her involvement with SNCC and later the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Earlier, both anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker (1900–70) and her Yale colleague John Dollard (1900–80) conducted the fieldwork for their now classic studies of southern life in Sunflower County, Powdermaker's After Freedom: A Cultural Study in the Deep South (1939) and Dollard's Caste and Class in a Southern Town (1937); rightly or wrongly, these books combined to set the narrative of delta life for generations to come, both in scholarly circles and in the popular imagination.Footnote ⁶⁷ Out of the highly charged racial environment that they describe emerge artists including blues musicians Albert King, born near Indianola in 1923, and B. B. King, the “King of the Blues,” born in neighboring Leflore County in 1925 and now buried back in Indianola at the B. B. King Museum.

Thus Sunflower County has long served as an intersectional node for a number of people, ideologies, and events that resonate in their significance, not just for local residents, but also for national and international observers.Footnote ⁶⁸ Yet this environment also moves beyond being merely “a point of intersecting orbits” to constitute, in the words of sociologist Wanda Rushing, an “agentic place” – that is, not simply a location in which events happen to transpire, but one which bears some culpability for what takes place there precisely because it makes the confluence possible.Footnote ⁶⁹ Steve Yarbrough, also a native of Sunflower County, not coincidentally locates the action of The Oxygen Man in this multivalent, agentic location.

From a contemporary critical vantage point, these historical contours of socioeconomic life in the Mississippi delta may be location-specific but they are certainly not unique. In fact, local racial and social economies readily connect to other geographical sites of injustice in the global South. Attuned to the complex relationships of space and power, we suggest that connections to other locations help broaden and reshape our understandings of places commonly understood as distinctly “southern.” By shifting our focus in this way, we are not left with the paralyzing assumption that the US South is somehow “different” or incomprehensibly backward and uniquely racist, a view that Yarbrough's novel initially seems to endorse. Instead, we urge readers to see connections between the working conditions in the Mississippi delta and the Mekong delta, between African American workers and Mexican workers in the current-day catfish industry, all confronting similar questions: what is a fair wage? How can we undo the structural inequities of the workplace? How can we achieve spatial justice locally and globally? These remain the nagging questions invited by, but just out of reach of, Yarbrough's novel.Footnote ⁷⁰