“Hard Reading”: US Empire and Black Modernist Aesthetics in Eric Walrond's Tropic Death

Abstract

Recent years have seen renewed scholarly interest in Eric Walrond’s 1926 short story collection Tropic Death, a portrait of circum-Caribbean labor migration during the construction of the Panama Canal (1904-1914). This essay argues that Tropic Death not only helps broaden the geographical terrain of the Harlem Renaissance but also introduces US imperialism as a key framework for understanding black hemispheric modernity. By situating its discussion of black folk culture not in the US South but throughout the Caribbean basin, Tropic Death grapples with the specter of US expansion and its implications for black labor, migration, and death. Crucially, Tropic Death’s critique of empire emerges as much through its aesthetics as through its themes. Taking up its reputation as a difficult text (W. E. B. Du Bois labeled it “hard reading͟”), the essay contends that Tropic Death’s formal experiments provide useful challenges to long-entrenched methods of reading and writing about black modernity. Finally, this essay contributes to ongoing debates by suggesting that at the start of the American imperial century, the hemisphere, rather than the diaspora more broadly, is the most immediate and urgent frame of reference for writers such as Walrond.

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