Abstract
abstract: Set during the US construction of the Panama Canal, Eric Walrond’s Tropic Death paints a gruesome picture of the circum-Caribbean and challenges the picturesque image of the region as a tropical paradise. Contextualizing Walrond’s short stories within the modernizing project of canal-building, this essay argues that Tropic Death reframes the iconography of the Caribbean and evokes the archipelagic imaginary to rupture the myth of US continental exceptionalism. By reclaiming the erased history of the Caribbean’s violent inscription into global modernity, Tropic Death centers issues of race, colonialism, and transoceanic labor history in the context of the global expansion of modernist studies.