2025/01/01 by Noah Hansen · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · #Poetry Analysis and Criticism
paper · doi:10.1093/alh/ajae134
openalex publication_date 2025/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Abstract Eric Walrond’s short story collection Tropic Death (1926) has been described as representing an historical process of Caribbean proletarianization. This essay draws attention to the role of women and women’s work in Walrond’s stories, contending that struggles over the meaning of reproductive labor in the early twentieth-century Caribbean form a continuous narrative thread across the collection. Women’s struggles for reproductive autonomy, I argue, lie at the heart of Walrond’s celebrated formal experiments, clarifying the sociopolitical stakes of his break from realism. By symbolically encoding the struggle over reproduction in nonrealist forms, Walrond develops what I term an “anti-patriarchal modernism.”