An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Joanna Wilson-Scott (Susan Manning Fellow 2021-22; Bishop Grosseteste University)
Perforated Landscapes and Place-Based Distress: The Panama Canal in Eric Walrond’s Tropic Death
As an element of a wider project that explores literary representations of solastalgia and western extractivist practices, this work-in-progress session will look primarily at Eric Walrond’s 1926 short story collection Tropic Death, a Caribbean text that narrativizes both directly and indirectly the creation of the Panama Canal. I am preoccupied in my analysis with the excavation of the Canal rather than its construction, in part because of the wider project’s exploration of Western extractivist practices, but also because emphasis on construction can risk shifting focus onto presence rather than absence, along with what has been gained rather than what has been lost, and thus contributes to Western narratives that reframe and ignore violence against the Global South and that privilege practices of the Global North. As a Western endeavour completed under the control of the United States in 1914, the extraction and excavation of the Canal were of hemispheric proportions, cleaving a continent through the violent removal of earth, habitats, and all manner of regional biodiversity, and drawing workers towards it and away from their homes. Throughout Tropic Death, holes are a ubiquitous presence, returning the reader to the Canal and evidencing its wide-reaching ramifications beyond the Panamanian context. The people of Walrond’s Caribbean do not so much dwell in the shadow of the Canal as an edificial juggernaut, but rather they teeter on the edge of a mass grave, oftentimes plunging in as the unstable, excavated earth beneath them metaphorically erodes, disappearing in the name of progress and the interests of foreign powers.
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/81322391722
Passcode: Vr8f3ew2