Enmeshed Landscapes: (Re)Constructing Canal Zone Aesthetics in Las novelas canaleras

The Canal Novel is characteristic of the political rupture of the 1960s decolonial movement in Panama, when writers and intellectuals sought to oppose US interventionism. This essay outlines how Gil Blas Tejeira’s Pueblos perdidos and Joaquín Beleño’s Los forzados de Gamboa situate a new political potential in the Canal Zone landscape by contesting the legacy of Theodore Roosevelt’s environmental logic as well as the importation of US imperial spatial models. In the Canal Novel, the landscape of the sublime proposed by Kant is no longer tenable: the aesthetic distance associated with the Kantian sublime is displaced by “enmeshment,” wherein humans and both organic and non-organic objects are fused together. By reading the Canal Novels against US imperial paradigms, we can better understand the racial organization of the landscape previously hidden by megaprojects like the Panama Canal.