The papers in this panel cover the post-Reconstruction era, the early twentieth century, and contemporary migratory patterns as we seek to bring together historical and political events with literary expression. Leah Rosenberg connects the migrant labor communities that built the Panama Canal to the 1928 hurricane in Florida and Caribbean and how authors capture the effects of environmental destruction on working-class communities. She argues that Olive Senior's poem, “All Clear 1928,” extends our understanding of Caribbean migration and the US South. Entering Panama to build the Canal in the 1920s, Caribbean immigrants stepped into a zone of systematic racial segregation, Jim Crow exported south of the border. In 1928, Jamaica was spared as a massive hurricane swept the region killing Afro-Caribbean workers in the Caribbean and Florida. Afro-Caribbean and African American women were some of the few to record their connected history. Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes were Watching God narrates the deadly violence of the hurricane of 1928 in Florida; Maryse Condé narrates the impact of that hurricane in the Caribbean in her 1992 novel, The Tree of Life. With “All Clear, 1928” Senior inscribes herself into that lineage of Black women writing transnational, working-class Caribbean migration into the historical record and literary canon.

Moving from 1928 to Katrina in 2005 and Maria in 2017, Kathleen Field looks at Jesmyn Ward and Raquel Salas Rivera ‘s writing about catastrophic destruction. In analyzing two texts that outwardly address twenty-first century state neglect but which draw on histories of place-based racial oppression, she engages with postcolonial ecocriticism, fugitivity studies, disaster studies, and queer and anarchist imaginaries. Field argues that Ward and Salas Rivera’s texts function as fugitive works that refuse to “pay;” they work laterally, beneath the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico, and insist upon a radical and subterranean form of improvised resistance without restoration. This comparison reveals a distinctly circum-Caribbean literary response to the ongoing catastrophe of anti-blackness, coloniality, and environmental racism in the Gulf South and Puerto Rico.

Following the theme of resistance, Jennie Lightweis-Goff examines the 2000 trial of the Charleston Five, a group of stevedores who were arrested for protesting, and the complex political dynamics of formerly segregated unions in Charleston, South Carolina. Charleston receives less attention as a circum-Caribbean coastal city in the literary and cultural imagination, and yet the port city extends into this wider network through its historic connections to the Middle Passage and its history of labor movements. The city’s proximity to water has defined its labor resistance, such as Denmark Vesey’s plans to sail newly freed people to Haiti and the presence of unions representing port industries and workers. She reads Charleston as a periplus or "water atlas" of the coastal South, considering how the city’s liquidity– a fiscal metaphor borrowed from topography –create a vision of Charleston as a port city under industrial capitalism, and by the dock in the postindustrial turn toward casualized labor in the service and hospitality sectors.

Each panelist will present on their topic for 15-20 minutes.