Will Edmonstone

My dissertation examines how US, African American, and Black Caribbean writers have understood the United States’ relationship to the plantation-based economies of “Plantation America,” a region stretching across the US South, the Caribbean, and parts of Latin America. Focusing on a period of heightened US military and corporate intervention in the Western hemisphere, from the Spanish-American War of 1898 to the Cuban Revolution of 1959, it demonstrates that US colonial expansion into the wider Caribbean often prompted writers to reckon with the modern United States’ historical and ongoing indebtedness to a transnational plantation system and the creolized cultures that emerged from it. Through the lens of Caribbean critical theory, including by Édouard Glissant, Fernando Ortiz, and Sylvia Wynter, I examine Richard Wright’s postcolonial and postplantation perspective in his little studied Haitian manuscript, transculturation in Ernest Hemingway’s Key West and Cuban works, the neoplantation and corporate power in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930), and the plantation framework of modern US empire in short stories of the Panama Canal Zone by the Caribbean-born and Harlem Renaissance writer Eric Walrond.