[Nonmember: Tori Bush as of 14 April]

The waters that make up the natural barrier between the United States and the Caribbean constitute a vibrant border culture where multiethnic and multilingual communities have existed long before the foundation of this country and continue to thrive today. This area acts as a contact zone between people from different countries in the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central America to an area that has historically been a symbol for white supremacy: the deep South and Florida. Two versions of the South emerge where cities such as Miami and New Orleans have been considered extensions of the Caribbean, while people of the Caribbean diaspora continue to face the hostility and racism from slavery’s roots in the US South.

The panel explores the aqueous borderlands of the Gulf Coast and Florida and recognizes this area as central to a South that is—and always has been—multilingual and diverse. Like the Caribbean, this area of the US South has witnessed overlapping histories of colonization and environmental destruction; the building of plantations and rebellions from enslaved people; the subjugation and displacement of native peoples and their resistances and revolts. More recently, the presence of Krome Detention Center in South Florida or the fact that the largest ICE raid in US history was in Mississippi reveals to us how the US South is, indeed, a border culture. And books such as Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing, Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby, Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker, and Cristina Garcia’s The Aguero Sisters, depict a South (or Souths?) entangled with and inseparable from the Caribbean. How do concepts of border thinking change when we shift focus to the Southeast? How have our theorizations and imaginings of U.S.-Caribbean relationships changed as a result of new developments in transnationalism and new southern studies over the last two decades?

The three papers in this panel approach these questions from different critical angles. Eric Solomon pulls from queer studies and studies of speculative fiction to posit Key West, Florida as one potential site of analysis through which to engage with multilingualism and diversity. Pulling from a longer project, Solomon will explore Key West's "One Human Family" mythos and the slipstream genre through an analysis of works by Denis Johnson and William K. Eakins. Pip Gordon reads Kacen Callender’s novels as reorienting southern canons as they create both coastal and a new “trans” Caribbean South. Finally, Tori Bush's ecocritical essay explores how Isle de Jean Charles has become an imaginative space in which two sometimes contradictory discourses occur: 1) how the island, with its bounded, peripheral nature, has become a foundation for imagining white westerners potential futures in regards to global warming and 2) how the island allows climate anxiety to be expressed in a way than confirms than the danger is still remote, and thus safe to those far from this coastline.

All three essays speak to the transregional/ transnational/ comparative focus of the panel as well as the 2022 MLA Conference them: Multilingual US.