Haunting the Plantation: The Global Southern Gothic in Eric Walrond's Tropic Death

It wasn't Sepia, Georgia, but a backwoods village in Barbadoes.

-Eric Walrond, Tropic Death

For many decades in the twentieth century, Eric Walrond's Tropic Death (1926) remained out of print, and Walrond himself was relegated to the status of a "lost" author whose single published book went unappreciated. However, in recent years Walrond's status among critics and readers has been firmly reestablished, culminating in the reissue of Tropic Death in 2013 and the first full-length critical biography of Walrond in 2015. In our own time he has certainly been "found," and I want to use this notion of lost and found to reflect on the importance of place in Walrond's writing—both the geographic sense of place as well as Walrond's place in the literary canon. As the essays in the present volume suggest, place matters. And so, in considering the confluence between U.S. and Caribbean literature, Walrond's own peripatetic career serves as a perfect illustration of their interconnection, and he also suggests important questions with regard to canon formation and national identity. That is, where do we as readers locate Eric Walrond, both in terms of canons and national identities, and how do those locations shape our reading of Tropic Death?

Born in Barbados, Walrond grew up in the Panama Canal Zone. As an adult, he moved to New York, where he published Tropic Death with Boni & Liveright in 1926. This collection of stories stood out instantly for its use of Caribbean dialect, its lyricism, and its unflinching look at working class life. The text itself insisted on dislocating its readers—though it was published in New York, the action moved from Barbados to the Canal Zone and various locales in between.

Later, moving back and forth between the Caribbean and the U.S., he toiled on a second book, a history of the Canal, titled The Big Ditch. When he died in England in 1966 few took notice, and the second book had still not been completed. With a foothold in so many geographical places, where were scholars to categorize Walrond's literary work? To be sure, Walrond's life and his fiction can be understood within the context of diaspora, and this has been an increasingly cogent way to understand various writers of the early twentieth century, especially since Brent Edwards's important work on black internationalism in The Practice of Diaspora (2003). However, efforts to "place" Walrond, to put him in conversation with the particular literary movements and material histories through which he passed, have also yielded fresh readings of his work.

Much of the critical work has reestablished Walrond as a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance. When he lived in New York from 1918 to 1927, he was deeply engaged with the literary scene, publishing reviews of Jessie Fauset and Carl Van Vechten as well as other critical essays. Further cementing his place within the Harlem Renaissance is the fact that one of the stories from Tropic Death, "The Palm Porch," was first published in Alain Locke's important anthology, The New Negro (1925). This historical framework provides us with a new way of understanding both Tropic Death and Walrond's status as an American writer. However, locating Walrond within the Harlem Renaissance has other consequences for literary history since it highlights the central role that Caribbean writers had actually played within the movement. In addition to "The Palm Porch," The New Negro also included poems by Jamaican poet Claude McKay and an essay by W. A. Domingo on the West Indian presence in Harlem. Understanding Walrond as a Caribbean writer further illuminates the presences of other Caribbean writers who were central to this movement and allows us to better understand the Harlem Renaissance as a transnational movement. And so, like Wallace Stevens's jar, placing Walrond in Harlem transforms the literary landscape around him.

The inherent instability of geographic categories has been one of the central concerns of transnational American Studies in recent decades. Rather than merely expanding the canon through the addition of marginalized...