Abstract
This chapter shows how the early American plantation-based tropics, especially the West Indies, came to epitomize unsustainability and how racial homogeneity became a defining feature of agrotopias. For Thomas Jefferson and J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, the tropics were unsustainable—characterized by racial degeneracy and reproductive chaos. Lending credence to Jefferson’s claims about tropical degeneracy, Crèvecoeur’s “Sketches of Jamaica and Bermudas and Other Subjects” (1773) shows these climates threatening to corrupt a Pennsylvanian farmer and engulf the region in revolutionary violence. Fulfilling Crèvecoeur’s prophecies, Leonora Sansay’s Secret History (1808) portrays the Haitian Revolution as a demographic disaster through a combination of reproductive and horrific imagery that I call gothic fertility. Ultimately, across these texts, it is the possibility of racial intermingling, more so than a degenerative climate, that directly threatens a sustainable future in the Americas.
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