Abstract

At the moment when humidity, heat, smell, and color adhere to the surface of the body, the space of Vacation Novel emerges not as mere nature but as a field where sensation and desire are organized. This article conceptualizes such a tropical space as “tropical modernity, ” constructed by colonial tourist capitalism, and examines how it operates as a mechanism that arranges and regulates women’s desires and impulses into manageable forms. However, this order ultimately fails to reach completion as it encounters the intrusion of tropicality, the sticky affect of humidity, and the appearance of ghosts, thereby revealing internal fractures. In the collapse of sensory organization, affect does not disappear but overflows, refracted into anxiety, fear, and anger, and the world can no longer be sustained as a stable system of meaning. At this point, the female body functions as a surface of contact where sensation and affect intersect, a site that perceives the rupture of order while also mediating the persistence of affect beyond control. Ultimately, Vacation Novel invites us to reconsider how the world endures after the failure of desire’s regulation, within the ongoing flow of affect.