Zoning in on the American Tropics

Abstract

If you take the transnational turn in American studies and the global turn in postcolonial studies, you might end up in the American Tropics, along with Monique Allewaert’s Ariel’s Ecology: Plantations, Personhood, and Colonialism in the American Tropics (2013) and Surveying the American Tropics: A Literary Geography from New York to Rio (2013), edited by Maria Cristina Fumagalli, Peter Hulme, Owen Robinson, and Lesley Wylie. “American Tropics” refers to “a kind of extended Caribbean” that includes the southeastern US, the Caribbean islands, and adjacent parts of Central and South America (Fumagalli et al., Introduction 2). This region is united by its history of plantation slavery, near genocide of native peoples, and tropical environment. Consequently, as the editors of Surveying the American Tropics assert, “[T]he area has cultural and historical logics, which are based on—and inseparable from—a geographical or environmental logic” (3). Both works bring ecocriticism and literary geography to bear in this zone, which, until recently, saw more traffic in postcolonialism, the Black Atlantic, and Latin American studies. As an organizing framework, American Tropics allows for comparative analyses of literary, folkloric, and material archives of various languages, national origins, and time periods. Transnationalism is no longer an operative term here, perhaps because of its lingering attachment to the nation. Less interested in relations between and among nations, these works configure a contact zone (sometimes called the “plantation zone”) of European, African, African American, and indigenous peoples in order to examine the history and legacy of colonialism, plantation slavery, and racial personhood. Allewaert examines eighteenthand nineteenth-century literature and material culture of the southeastern US and several islands of the Caribbean. Surveying the American