“Sympathy with the Swamp”: Reading Hurston in the Trumpocene

“Women,” Jim Meserve, the white Southern turn-of-the-twentieth-century entrepreneur protagonist of Zora Neale Hurston’s 1948 white-life novel Seraph on the Suwanee, observes, “were made to hover and feel”: “it was not in their nature to do much thinking. That was what men were made for” (105). ¹ While the novel does not quite subscribe to this theory of white gender and sexual relations, it expends considerable effort in tracking what it names the “strange moods and appetites” of Jim’s white wife and protagonist counterpoint Arvay (64): her compulsion to “eat [Jim] up and absorb him within herself” moments after he rapes her to secure her hand in marriage (54); her “great craving for meat, and for clay” during her first pregnancy, an inheritance from her mother, who used to “eat [clay] hungrily after a rain” (64–5); and especially her feelings about the Big Swamp, the “finest stretch of muck outside the Everglades,” on the edge of which Jim builds their first home. While Jim’s “thinking” perspective sees the swamp as a comingled source of profit and “propriation” – Jodi Byrd, Alyosha Goldstein, Jodi Melamed, and Chandan Reddy’s shared term for the entanglement of capitalist property relations with the affective senses of “properness” and proprietary entitlement – for Arvay, the swamp terrifies, as it seems a stretch of land whose voracious capricious appetites might rival her own: “It’s dark and haunted-looking and too big and strong to overcome. It’s frightening! Like some big old varmint or something to eat you up” (80). ² Jim cannot compromise his pursuit of profit for Arvay’s “notions” about the swamp; he vows instead that “some day I’m going to get it for you” (79). Surprisingly, when he keeps this promise to clear the swamp, Arvay is suffused not with pleasure, but with “sympathy” for the swamp, as together she and the swamp “had memories to keep” (195).

“I’m draining the Swamp, and the Swamp is trying to fight back. Don’t worry, we will win!,” Donald Trump tweeted in September 2018, echoing his 2016 campaign promise to “drain the swamp.” ³ As Salvador Zárate argues, Trump’s obsession with swamp drainage pairs the political and extractive projects of resecuring the world’s resources for a seemingly imperiled whiteness, feeding on “a long history of the swamp as a racialized threat to liberal humanist ideologies of subjectivity that if not kept in check will over-run settler institutions and bodies.” “The expansion of white life through the expropriation and accumulation of resources,” Zárate writes, “is [and has always been] tightly bound to actual swamp draining; a history of dual ecological and subjective extraction of pine and black bodies.” ⁴ Seraph, which Hurston wrote in the late 1940s during her expedition to Honduras “to collect material among the Caribs and the Mayans” and discover “keys to decipher the monuments of the ancient Mayan ruins,” affectively registers this history by way of the Meserves’s relationship to the swamp. ⁵ The novel’s focus on Arvay’s alternating fear of and sympathy for the swamp discloses Hurston’s interest in the particular role that the “strange moods and appetites” of white femininity play in linking the “expansion of white life” to racial capitalism’s extractive settler colonial and imperialist projects.

In this essay, I elaborate on this understanding of Seraph as Hurston’s imaginative rendering of white femininity’s historical and contemporary relationship to the racial capitalist and imperialist project of swamp drainage, both metaphorical and literal. I read Hurston’s representation of white heterosexual femininity first through the settler colonial anti-Black racial logics and hemispheric circulation of US capital that structured her encounters in Honduras, and then consider what it might mean to unstick the novel’s vision of whiteness from its context of the late 1940s in order to encounter it again in the context of the current Trumpocene. To read the novel in this way – as registering white femininity as a genre akin to an aesthetic form, as Lauren Berlant describes, as a reliable “structure of conventional expectation” that offers “certain kinds of affective intensities and assurances,” “something repeated, detailed, and stretched while retaining its intelligibility” across time periods – is to take up Claudia Rankine’s call to make whiteness an “object of inquiry,” “to understand its paranoia, its violence, its rage,” in order to begin to dismantle its “dominance.” ⁶ It is also to think alongside scholars grappling with how cultural forms register the relationship between settler colonialism, US imperialism, and racial capitalism in the Americas, and particularly with Manu Vimalassery, Juliana Hu Pegues, and Goldstein’s suggestion that mapping these conditions requires eschewing a commitment to progressive linear history in order to practice instead “a suspension of time, tense, and timeliness” and an attention  to “circular spiraling forms”: I read Seraph’s resonances in and out of its own time in order “to invoke,” as they write, “the spiral over the straight line, to ask after that which resonates, overlaps, converses across spatial and historical specificities.” ⁷

In Honduras, where Hurston pursued the work of documenting indigenous cultures she imagined as in need of study and preservation, white women were rivals she viewed with scorn. In her epistolary accounts of her trip, she describes her attempts to seize the advantage over these white women rivals through her manipulations of the Honduran version of mestizaje, the discourse that Stephanie Speed defines as Latin American settler colonial states’ favored “assimilationist strategy of Native elimination.” Mestizaje, Speed describes, was that “racial ideology consciously put forth by criollo elites in seeking to consolidate national identity” that elevated “the racial mix of Indian and Spaniard” into “the hegemonic belief that there was one race, rendering indigenous peoples a part of the racial mix and historic past.” ⁸ Hurston’s letters reveal how her adoption of the position of Honduran mestizaje became a vehicle for self-care and imperialist discovery, despite her stated anti-imperialist commitments, and thus obscured her ability to recognize the political and economic realities in Honduras. But Hurston’s adoption of a mestiza gaze also produces in Seraph a different account of white femininity than that which Adrienne Brown brilliantly argues Hurston provides in Dust Tracks on the Road. In Brown’s reading, the white women of Dust Tracks serve as “transitional objects for Hurston, allowing her to glimpse a life arranged around the privilege to initiate play enjoyed by her white employers,” as actors who possess an ability to engage in the “playful suspension of their bodies” to which Hurston aspires. ⁹ Because Honduras offers a forum for Hurston to engage in this kind of racial play, the novel she writes there from her adopted position of “mestiza” explores white femininity instead as a reparative genre. In doing so, the novel exposes how white feminine investments in love, relief, and repair not only underwrote the post-Second World War hemispheric past of the United States’s racial capitalism and empire, but also contribute to the political present’s ongoing projects of racial capitalism and settler colonialism in the Americas and rise of the white man “pussy-grabber” avatar of sovereign United States power. ¹⁰

I.

Hurston first visited Honduras in 1930, according to a letter she penned to her Barnard anthropology professor Ruth Benedict. In it, she details her observations of the Afro-indigenous “Black Caribs” (the ancestors of the Garífuna people) and the “Icaques”  (Hurston’s spelling of Jicaque, the derogatory name that Spanish colonizers bestowed on the Honduran indigenous people now recognized as the Tolupán people). ¹¹ Her imagination seems captured by her fantasy of their anti-modernity, what she terms “their isolation from all others”; she writes of the “Icaques,” “they are the one example of the absolutely uncontaminated people left.” ¹² Throughout the 1940s, Hurston dreamed of returning to Honduras, fantasizing about what “a contribution to science” her study of such “Indians … [who] have never been worked on” might make. ¹³ She imagined Honduras as a refuge from the exhausting state of Second World War politics, “the enormous pest of hate that is rotting men’s souls”: I am not talking of race hatred. Just hate. Everybody is at it … our allies as well. The people in the next county or state. The other political party. The world smells like an abattoir. It makes me very unhappy. I am all wrong in this vengeful world. I will to love.” ¹⁴ For Hurston, this “awful spiritual state” of America was inseparable from what she saw as the New Deal’s condescending coddling of Black communities – “crime in Harlem is rampant,” she wrote to Katherine Tracy L’Engle in 1945, “and the police are helpless because New-Deal-promoted Negro politicians immediately let out a scream that Negroes are being persecuted the minute a Negro thug is arrested” ¹⁵ – and the related paternalist influence of Communism on Black organizing and literary production. ¹⁶

In contrast to the United States, Honduras seemed to offer Hurston a place where, as she wrote to L’Engle, “there is not so much ‘social consciousness’ to deal with and be distressed over.” ¹⁷ Once she arrived in 1947, she announced triumphantly to her editor at Scribners, “This country is not rich like the United States, but here there are no crippling strikes, no COMMUNISTS, and other sea buzzards to puke all over and spoil the land.” ¹⁸ Hurston’s assessment of Honduras was accurate in the sense that workers in the 1940s were not striking against their exploitation by US corporations as they had in the 1920s and early 1930s. But this absence of strikes was the product of a combined exercise of US corporate and Honduran state power. When Tiburco Carías Andino, the United Fruit Company’s candidate, was elected in 1932, Carías disbanded the Communist Party and began two decades of brutal repression of workers and leftists; the Honduran labor movement remained fairly quiescent until the massive general strike of 1954 which included railroad and dock workers as well as banana laborers. ¹⁹ As this history suggests, US banana corporations and Honduran elites were the true “sea buzzards … puk[ing] all over and spoil[ing] the land.” Hurston’s later letters sometimes register this fact; despite her apparent disregard for the exploitation of Honduran workers, many of whom were the Afro-indigenous and indigenous people she wanted to study, these letters bear traces of the pernicious ubiquitous influence of US corporate power in Honduras. Hurston notes, for example, how “a group of norteamericanos who are here building a big storage tank for TEXACO bulldoze the natives”; recognizes the political influence of the Rosario mining company; and mails her first letter care of United Fruit. ²⁰

Ultimately for Hurston, though, Honduras was “unspoiled.” “I will be always grateful to Honduras,” she wrote in that same letter to her editor, “for it has given me back myself. I am my old brash self again.” ²¹ Here we can see the influence of Franz Boas’s philosophy that “conditions of life fundamentally different from our own can help to obtain a freer view of our own lives and of our own life problems,” ²² as Honduras becomes the object of Hurston’s reparative imaginary: a site of escape, self-care, and political repair, a manifestation of her “will to love,” that effaces and reinscribes US imperialism and the hemispheric circuits of racial capitalism. As David-Luis Brown suggests, “Hurston’s interest in black [and indigenous] cultural resilience” – in this case, her own, as well as that of the Honduran peoples she wishes to study – “prevented her from fully portraying the predicaments of [Black and indigenous Hondurans] in the context of imperialism and racial oppression,” or from fully imagining solidarity with them. ²³ Instead, Hurston focused on her planned salvage ethnographic projects: inspired by an earlier encounter with a gold miner who spun tales of “an ancient Mayan city … that no other white person has ever looked upon” along with “plentiful and virgin … folklore,” Hurston plotted to discover the lost city along with “collecting material” among various indigenous peoples, including, as she details on her Guggenheim application, “the PAYA Indians thought by some to be the most primitive in all Central America.” ²⁴ Hurston imagined her racial identity as an asset to this work, offering her both political capital and a competitive advantage in her quest for “original” and “sensational discovery.” “The family of the President of Honduras is in my corner and want me to come down and work there,” she boasts in a 1945 letter. “Frankly, they say that they would prefer me to a ‘Gringo’ who would come down, patronize them and act superior in other ways … I am just as sure that I am going to make history as I am that I am black. (Well, if not really black, of that denomination, so to speak.)” ²⁵

Throughout her letters, however, Hurston links her sense of herself as “preferable to a ‘Gringo’” in Honduran eyes less to her Blackness than to her expectation and experience that in Honduras she would be read as “mestiza,” an idea that emerges sharply in relation to the white women she encounters. The first such interaction occurs as she prepares for the trip in Daytona Beach in 1944 with Captain Fred Irvine, who, before losing interest in the trip, had agreed to let her charter his boat for the journey; together they meet “a woman down here with money who is so eager to go with us.” While Irvine refuses the woman’s interest in the hopes of remaining romantically unencumbered, Hurston voices a different objection:

 She would be scared of the “natives” and want to hang around the capitol and the foreign colony. That would be all right if she would cut loose altogether, but she wouldn’t. She would make us feel “guilty” of neglect and things like that. Moreover, she is a damned imperialist and would flap her big mouth and turn the Indians and perhaps all Honduranians against us … I know that Latin America is not too fond of Americans. It is going to call for months of careful behavior. A Honduranian himself tells me that being a mixed-blood will be in my favor. The President himself is part Negro. But even so, I am taking no changes on making mess-up. ²⁶

Here Hurston positions herself in opposition to the woman’s performance of a timid, xenophobic, whining white femininity that could jeopardize “months of build-up” in Hurston’s relations with potential subjects and sources. ²⁷ Unlike the woman “with money,” whose “damned imperialism” suggests to Hurston that she will be unable to modulate either her racist behavior (the “flap[ping of] her big mouth,” her recourse to emotional blackmail) or its ontological embodiment, Hurston asserts her own ability to perform the “careful behavior” necessary to make her discoveries, as well as her ability to embody a racial position that will be “in her favor.”

Hurston’s other foil arrives in the form of Doris Stone, Radcliffe-trained archaeologist, Tulane research associate, Harvard Peabody Museum fellow, and daughter of United Fruit president Samuel Zemurray. ²⁸ Hurston encountered Stone as she was researching a “planned expedition … to the find a lost city in the mountains of the Department of the Mosquita, Honduras.” “I have been told by the Indians, the only ones who really know anything about that vast area, that it is there,” she insists, “The average honduranian knows nothing about it”:

There might be something back in there that is not meant for the Blanco’s eyes. Being what they call here a Mestizo, (mixed blood) I am getting hold of some signs and symbols through the advantage of blood. Dorothy Stone, daughter of Samuel Zamurry [sic], Pres of United Fruit, is interested in archaeology in an amateurish way, tried to go in there and her guides messed her up so that she spent a great deal of money but go nowhere. They persuaded her there was nothing to see. She assured me that there was not because they had told her so! Ha! (555–6)

Pervading this passage is Hurston’s characteristic pleasure in the purveyors of folk knowledge and culture outwitting white elite moneyed American power. Stone’s version of “damned imperialism” is marked for Hurston by Stone’s white (Blanco) feminine naivete, evident in her “amateurish” interest in archaeology, as well as by her gullible belief in her guides’ disavowal of any knowledge of the lost city. Hurston, in contrast, constructs herself as the mestiza subject who is in the know, who “through the advantage of blood” can gain access to knowledge that even “the average honduranian” does not possess, which will allow her decode “the signs and symbols” such that she might demystify and dispel the “awe and terror” that shroud the city in mystery.

Hurston’s gleeful dismissal of Stone, it is worth noting, belies interesting parallels between the two women. As Darío A. Euraque describes, Stone’s archeological and anthropological work circulated within “a complicated network woven between North American archeology, banana imperialism, mayanization and official mestizaje.” ²⁹ In the early twentieth century, Euraque shows, the Honduran state worked to consolidate an official discourse of anti-Black “Indo-Hispanic mestizaje,” a vision of mestizo nationalism that selectively incorporated indigeneity while ostracizing the Afro-indigenous Garífuna people and West Indian banana workers. ³⁰ During and after the Carías dictatorship, mestizaje congealed around the state and banana-industry-sponsored “mayanization” of the Honduran past, a discourse that romanticized and exaggerated Honduras’s Mayan heritage at the expense of other living indigenous peoples and their histories. ³¹ North American banana companies collaborated with Honduran politicians and elites on this mayanization project, providing North American researchers like Stone and institutions like the Harvard Peabody Museum she represented both equipment and access to Honduran archeological sites. ³² Support for mayanization allowed US archaeologists, companies, and research institutions to ingratiate themselves with Honduran elites while burnishing their own credentials as the arbiters of the hemisphere’s “cultural capital.” ³³ For Euraque, Stone was a “contradictory” though crucial actor in this milieu. Her research was shaped by and in turn reinforced Honduran mestizaje’s racial imaginary, but also in some ways challenged it, as her publications increasingly seemed to acknowledge how the discourse of mayanization “marginalized the study of the non-Mayan regions of Honduras.” ³⁴

Hurston’s intellectual interests in Honduras, like Stone’s, display an ambivalent relation to the Honduran state and US capital’s mayanization project. Hurston’s romantic interest in the lost Mayan city competes with her impulse to document living indigenous and particularly Afro-indigenous cultures that she rightly, if opportunistically, observes had been overlooked by foreign archeologists due to that very romanticization of Honduras’s Mayan past. In this, as in her insistence upon Honduras as a site of Black and indigenous cultural preservation as well as an opportunity for “original” history-making discovery and self-care, we can see how, as Stephanie Leigh Batiste observes, Hurston’s ethnographic practice “bear[s] out the very contradictions of black imperialist looking.” ³⁵ These contradictory optics extend to Hurston’s confidence that she can trust in her “advantage of blood,” namely that she will continue to be read and understood as “mestiza” (and thus as anti-imperialist, but also as exceptional in comparison to “average honduranians”), and thus secure the secrets of Honduran indigenous and Afro-indigenous culture and history. Hurston’s adoption of the “mestiza” position, in what is either a misreading or canny manipulation of Honduran mestizaje discourse, seems to be a way to align herself with indigenous Hondurans against “damned [US] imperialists,” and white US women in particular. This attitude, or its epistolary performance at least, allows Hurston to be both anti-imperialist expert and advantaged agent of discovery. But it also requires an effacement of the racial capitalist and settler colonial logics that structured Honduran indigenous and Black lives, particularly the mestizo nationalism that congealed, whether from the conservative dictatorship or the liberal left, against what Euraque calls “the threat of blackness,” particularly “foreign blackness” as well as living indigeneity and Afro-indigeneity. ³⁶ Looking as a “mestiza,” Hurston is able to repurpose what Sarah Haley calls the “malleability of the Black female subject in the [American] white imagination” against the co-constituted “fixity of the white female subject and her traditional social role” as an agent of US imperialist expansion. ³⁷ But in so doing she makes Honduras the site of what Jodi Byrd calls “transit,” such that its indigeneity serves as a field through which these negotiations might occur. ³⁸

There is more to be said about the performative layers of ethnographic fetishism but also refusal potentially contained in Hurston’s letters: the possibility that the “Indians” she recounts as confiding in her were not as honest or forthcoming as she imagined, as well as the possibility that her letters, in their elliptical references to “what Indians told her,” are epistolary performances of what Mark Rifkin names ethnographic “settler-common sense” for white US audiences (often in the position to provide financial or other kinds of material support), reflecting Hurston’s own practice of what Audra Simpson calls “an ethnographic calculus of what you need to know and I refuse to write.” ³⁹ My interest, however, is less in Hurston’s negotiations of Honduras’s racial regime and more in how the complexity of her reparative positioning of herself within and in relation to Honduras – as a Black mestiza insider-explorer set in opposition to a US corporate imperialism embodied by moneyed white women – provides a set of conditions through which we might approach Seraph on the Suwanee, the novel that Hurston wrote and revised extensively during her time in Honduras. This understanding of the novel is in line with recent work that reads it not as a failure or a joke, but rather as a serious engagement with whiteness. ⁴⁰ Simultaneously, however, I read the novel against the purely domestic terms in which Hurston frames it for her editor and correspondents – “I’m trying to give a true picture of the South by showing Jim Meserve as a member of the liberal class which has always existed [there]”; and “millions of women do not want their husbands to succeed for fear of losing him. It is a very common ailment. That is why I decided to write about it” – from which most critics take their cues. ⁴¹ Reading the novel through Hurston’s assumed Black/mestiza gaze constructed explicitly in opposition to white women and the version of “damned imperialism” that they embodied for her in Honduras allows us to see more clearly the novel’s hemispheric engagements. Such a reading suggests how the novel tacitly registers a relationship between white femininity in the United States and what Martyn Bone describes as “‘the larger rhythms of the national and global economy’ that extends northward across the United States and southward into the labor force of the Caribbean and Latin America,” ⁴² in this case the intersecting material realities of banana plantation ecological devastation and emerging gendered discourses of the postwar development regime.

As Marco Katz Montiel writes, the Florida of Seraph is located explicitly within the Caribbean, Central America, and the US South’s shared history of Spanish settler colonialism, as the narrator evokes the history of “murdering, robbing, and raping” by the “conquering Spaniards” of “the stubborn Indians [who] had been there where they now lived, but they were dead and gone” (2). ⁴³ However, this is a history that “few were concerned with,” the narrator tells us. Late in the novel, it is Jeff, Arvay’s husband Jim Meserves’s loyal Black servant, who tries to point out to Arvay “the ancient Turtle Mounds, kitchen middens of a people who had disappeared before the comin’ of the Spaniards; rusting old iron pots left over from the indigo industry of the Minorcans; foundations of an old fort left by the Spaniards” (318). Jeff is “proud of his information,” but Arvay “was not paying him as much attention as she seemed” (318); distracted by her nervous desire over her impeding reunion with her husband, she has no interest in the gift of Jeff’s Black study, or in the tour of the landscape’s register of ongoing settler colonial violence. ⁴⁴

Here, as the novel maps the triangulated settler colonial logic of forced Black labor, indigenous disappearance, and white romantic innocence, Arvay’s disinterest marks her embodiment of a vacuous white femininity that hears and sees but will not comprehend the settler colonial and racial capitalist structures unfolding right in front of her. ⁴⁵ Like the woman on the boat, Arvay is a “damned imperialist”: both her desire and her status as the object of white male heterosexual desire underwrite the neocolonial development enterprise that spans from Florida into the Gulf Coast and Central America, but her preoccupation with her own internal insecurities and desires means that she expresses, at worst, an all-encompassing anti-Black, anti-indigenous racism and, at best, an ambivalence about these processes rooted in her own sense of discomfort, a sense that never rises to the level of political consciousness.

This dynamic is particularly visible during the draining of the swamp behind Arvay’s house, an endeavor Jim suggests to his son-in-law as a way to go straight, to turn his ill-gotten gains from numbers-running into a legitimate business empire. But this profit motive, Jim argues, is secondary to his desire to “get it [the swamp] cleaned off for [Arvay],” as “an honor and a comfort to [her].” Using “modern machinery and methods,” the “husky black roustabouts” who work for Jim are able to clear the swamp in an “amazingly short time” as Arvay watches:

Arvay was surprised at finding herself feeling a sympathy with the swamp. She was used to certain outlines against the sky and now it seemed a pity and a shame for those trees to be destroyed. She had hated and feared the swamp, but long association had changed her without her realizing it. She and the swamp had a generation of life together and memories to keep. She hated to see it go. But the horde of black men sang and chatted and swarmed and hacked, machinery rumbled and rattled, huge trucks grumbled and rolled until one day Arvay saw the sun setting behind the horizon of the world. The opening spread north and north before her eyes. The swamp monster retreated before the magic of man. (195)

This description evokes the long history of white settler colonial exploitation of Black labor to profit from indigenous swampland within the United States. Zárate describes how “settler colonists forced enslaved Africans to drain the swamps of the Carolinas to secure the extraction of resin,” a practice that continued after the instantiation of Jim Crow, when “Florida’s swamp industries, as part of the ‘southern labor colony,’ played a significant role in the rerouting of global finance capital to the US North through private investment squared on the continuation of black unfreedom in the South.” ⁴⁶ John C. Charles argues that Hurston’s description similarly evokes what C. Vann Woodward calls the “bulldozer revolution” that transformed the South into the Sunbelt; Hurston would have witnessed such scenes of domestic swamp-clearing during her fieldwork in Florida. ⁴⁷ But the scene’s focus on “clear[ing] the swamp” and “felling giant trees” simultaneously evokes more hemispheric histories and near futures: the deforestation and drainage of wetlands that characterized Cuyamel and United Fruit’s colonization of Honduras in the first half of the twentieth century, ⁴⁸ and the large-scale US-sponsored modernization and development projects in Latin America in the 1950s. We might read Hurston’s descriptions of singing chatting collectives of Black men working in concert with grumbling trucks in dialogue with the aesthetic vocabulary of modernization and development that Molly Geidel theorizes as emerging across the Americas in the late 1940s; this is Hurston’s iteration of what Geidel calls development’s early melodramatic imagination, in which the modernization project is carried out in the name of suffering white femininity. ⁴⁹

Though the swamp is allegedly sacrificed for her, Arvay evinces a strange fidelity to the “swamp monster” rather than to the “magic of man”: she observes that the complex of suburban homes, tennis courts, and golf courses that blooms where the swamp once was “seemed infinitely more threatening to her than the dark gloom of the swamp had been” (196–7). Her sympathy with the swamp is a version of what Iyko Day theorizes as “romantic anticapitalism,” a form of “white settler identification” that evinces “a biologized worldview in its human (and often racial and national) identification with the purity of the natural world, portrayed as the valorized antithesis to the negative influences of urbanization and industrialization.” ⁵⁰ This perspective not only erases the history of indigenous presence in the swamp while naturalizing Black labor – the Black laborers are, in Arvay’s eyes, variously a “swarm” or a “horde” – but also makes the extractive violence of “draining the swamp” into a personal psychodrama, as Arvay’s nervous energy centers on whether draining the swamp will reveal anything about her son Earl, who was killed there by a sheriff-led mob after being accused of assaulting their neighbor’s daughter. While she “burns” to ask the workers if they felt “any strange presence” or “small something” of her son when they were clearing the swamp, she refrains: “she could watch, and feel, and forever wonder, but she must keep such things to herself” (196).

Arvay’s private motherly preoccupations might seem to readers of Amy Kaplan and Laura Wexler like a familiar domestic alibi for the violence of US imperialism and settler colonial capitalism. ⁵¹ But interestingly, it is Arvay’s very commitment to domesticity’s obfuscating power that is the source of her primary conflict with her husband. Jim wants nothing more than for Arvay to “be awake enough to glimpse and see,” to admire his cunning (often illegal) practices of racial exploitation and manipulation in the name of profit, his conquest of the land in the pursuit of the New South that is of a piece with the ravaging corporate practices of United Fruit and Cuyamel: to give him “credit for love” (265). What Jim demands of Arvay is not “white fragility,” or what Wexler terms the “tender violence” of the white woman’s “innocent eye that could look at but not see,” but rather an explicit acknowledgment and appreciation of the violence he wields. ⁵² As Stephen Knadler argues, the novel only resolves in romantic bliss once Arvay comes to accept the “incurable diseased insufficiency” of the “poor white culture” in which she was raised, and to realize that it, along with her disabled son, has “no place in [the] health-inducing, rationalized civic order” of postwar racial liberalism. ⁵³ But this resolution also depends on her finally being able to witness, with a combination of motherly affection and sexual desire, the violence of Jim’s new hemispheric entrepreneurial project: captaining shrimp boats in the Gulf, murdering migrating sea life with impunity.

II.

If Seraph can be read, as I have indicated briefly here, as an attempt to make white heterosexual femininity into a genre or terrain for writing postwar imperial and settler colonial capitalist formations in the Americas, there is something uncanny about revisiting this novel in the time of the Trumpocene. This name has come to evoke the conjuncture of intensified white supremacist climate change denialism with the rise and reign of Donald Trump, a denialism that coincides with the years when the planet is widely perceived as reaching the point of no return; the term further signals, Claire Colebrook suggests, “the twenty-first-century recognition that the destruction of the planet has occurred by way of racial violence, slavery and annihilation.” ⁵⁴ This period thus marks a contiguous episode in the long unfolding of racial capitalist and settler colonial violence, but also the palpable arrival of a different order that Byrd, Goldstein, Melamed, and Reddy collectively gloss as a “shift in dominance between two coexisting logics of propriation between Obama-era multicultural neoliberalism and the plutocratic, more overtly white supremacist capitalism advanced under Trump,” marked by the resurgent power of “Trumpist repertoires of criminalization, renewals of the wages of whiteness, crony capitalism, and white settler ‘blood and soil’ claims to place and land exploitation.” ⁵⁵

As in the years Hurston wrote Seraph, Honduras is one site that bears the burden of such contiguous and shifting relations of racial capitalist and settler colonial power. Since the Obama era, hundreds of thousands of Central American migrants have made harrowing treks to the United States in hopes of gaining asylum; during this time, refugees have fled Honduras at a greater rate than other Northern Triangle nations. ⁵⁶ Drawing on the analyses of Afro-indigenous Garífuna activists, María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo has shown that Honduran refugees’ journeys, so often followed by their detention and deportation, have been driven by continuing yet largely unacknowledged practices of settler “colonial dispossession,” as the provisions of the Central American Free Trade Agreement have made Garífuna land “a prime target” for corporate and state greed. ⁵⁷ Honduran and other Central American indigenous peoples continue to flee violence that aims to stop their attempts to retake control of their land in order to protect it from multinational corporations bent on extraction, repressive US-drug-war-funded ever-militarizing states, and narco-cartels. ⁵⁸ During Trump’s presidency, these conditions have only worsened. In September of 2019, as news of Central American detentions, deaths, and family separations continued to circulate, the Trump administration and the Honduran government signed an agreement that enables the US government to deport refugees at the US-Mexico border to Honduras and then require those refugees to apply for asylum in Honduras before they can be considered for asylum in the United States. ⁵⁹ This policy, as December 2019 headlines announcing its impending enforcement suggested, applies the economic logics of “outsourcing” to the adjudication of human rights claims, marking the Trump administration’s continued commitment to corrupt corporate deregulation and growing economic inequality that have been hallmarks of neoliberalism (and against which Trump made a pretense of campaigning in the name of “draining the swap”). ⁶⁰ But it also marks, as Greg Grandin describes, the Trumpocene commitment to “refashioning the country into a besieged medieval fortress, complete with its own revered martyrs’ cult,” a cult in which white people are perpetually imagined as victims, white people for whom alone increasingly scarce resources due to perpetually denied climate emergency must be extracted, hoarded, and preserved. ⁶¹ Since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020, this violent white supremacist cultishness has been weaponized in the guise of public health, as the Trump administration has used the coronavirus emergency to further circumvent and terminate asylum procedures at the border. ⁶²

To read Seraph in this moment is to return, in other words, to Vimalassery, Hu Pegues, and Goldstein’s insight about “the spiral over the straight line”; it is to realize that in 1947, Hurston wrote a novel about a white male entrepreneur who raped a white woman, married her, drained a Florida swamp, and, on its remains, built a golf course. ⁶³ Within the course of the novel, Jim Meserve practices Trumpian modes of entrepreneurship beyond making golf great (again): he adopts a false Horatio Alger story of class ascension; underpays his Black and white ethnic workers while making them share the financial and legal risk of his business dealings; schemes to buy public land in order to “charge a fortune for a home site on it” (192); and tells his son-in-law, whom he makes heir to his business machinations, “if you’ve got the guts in you, this is where it’ll show” (191). Seraph also bizarrely anticipates Trump’s practice of “doing ‘The Snake’” during his 2016 campaign, in which he recited a song stolen from Black activist and artist Oscar Brown, Jr, about a woman who takes a snake home and feeds him, only to have him bite her: “‘Oh shut up, silly woman,’ said the reptile with a grin / You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in / Take me in, oh tender woman.” “Think of it in terms of immigration,” Trump often said: the woman is the country, the snake is the terrorist, the snake is the refugee, the snake is Trump. ⁶⁴ In Seraph, doing the snake plays on similar sadomasochistic dynamics: Jim “fools with” a poisonous diamond-back rattlesnake for no reason except “to do something big and brave and full of manhood”; when Arvay doesn’t coo over his bravery, or risk her own life to try to pull the snake off him, he tells her she “crapped out” on “the biggest chance in the world to make a great woman out of [her]self” and leaves her (260–1).

This terrible episode, which Claudia Tate identifies as “the climax” to the couple’s tale of “sadomasochistic bondage” – a saga which includes Jim’s rape of Arvay and another episode in which he rips off her dress and calls her his “damned property” – marks one place where the novel’s, per Elizabeth Binggeli, “critique of the masochism of erotic love in whiteness” becomes visible. ⁶⁵ But this white sadomasochistic gender play is not easily cordoned off from the space of the political, either in the novel’s moment of conception or in our own. After interviewing Hurston, one Barnard college alumna reported in 1946 that “fighting against the natural apathy of women, whether Negro or white, who vote as their husbands and family do without questioning the issues involved, is her [Hurston’s] particular job right now.” ⁶⁶ “What he said about women was disrespectful. But I don’t get offended like some people do,” said one white woman Trump voter in the New York Times over seventy years later. “You get through the bad and you focus on the good.” “My husband is a court officer and volunteers in the police force,” says another, “If I turned down every candidate who objectified women, I’d vote for no one.” ⁶⁷ These are testimonies of white women’s “apathy,” less natural than naturalized, in which apathy takes the form of simultaneous masochistic resignation to patriarchal violence and identification with white supremacist state violence, such that a citizenship practice like voting becomes an extension of the lived habits and conventions of white heterosexual femininity, a romantic and sexual negotiation with forms of white men’s power.

These strange confluences between Seraph and the Trumpocene suggest that the novel might have something to teach its readers about not only about modes of representing settler colonial capitalist development in the hemispheric past, but also about the genre of the present: a mashup of the Southern gothic plantation romance, the banana novel, ⁶⁸ and the “aesthetic and affective genre” that Kyla Wazana Tompkins theorizes as “white sovereign entrepreneurial terror.” ⁶⁹ When “whiteness seems to be falling apart,” Tompkins writes, “it finds partial relief in performing grotesqueness, which it paradoxically attaches to the physical precarity and political privileges of the white majority while simultaneously deploying it as a kind of uncivil illogic and gleeful everyday violence against precarious populations.” ⁷⁰ In Seraph, one prominent example of this kind of white “disinhibition” and “terrorizing vulgarity” is Jim Meserve’s treatment of the Black workers he pretends are his friends: Jim feels free to sneak up on Joe Kelsey, the Black man who risks the chain gang to run Jim’s illegal still, and, as a “practical joke,” claws Joe’s back while howling “like an angry bobcat on the kill” (43). ⁷¹ This playful performance exemplifies Tompkins’s description of how whiteness “signal[s] its power and privilege through a terrorizing intimacy predicated on disinhibited, even intoxicated, self-display.” ⁷² To ask, as many have since the 2016 election, why did white women vote for Trump, is really to ask, why do white women stay within the abusive orbit of such generic conventions of “terrorizing vulgarity” and “gleeful everyday violence”? Why do they want to?

Seraph’s answer is in part to expose what George Lipsitz helps us name white women’s “possessive investment in whiteness,” to tell the open secret, as Ayesha Hardison writes, that “white women’s racial privilege and social mobility are dependent upon structures of racism and sexism.” ⁷³ But the novel might also be said to answer this question through its sense of white women as hovering feeling subjects, a depiction that illustrates how, as Kyla Schuller writes, the “legacy of womanhood [is] itself a stabilizing structure of whiteness,” “both absorbing and smoothing over the flow of sensation and feeling that makes up the public sphere, ensuring that white men remain relatively free from the encumbrances of embodiment and are susceptible only to further progress.” ⁷⁴ This position is perhaps why Seraph often reads less like a critique, and more like an attempt to inhabit white heterosexual femininity as such a genre of absorption and affective excess, in order to render its attendant desires both grotesque and crucial to the functioning of settler colonial racial capitalism. Arvay struggles with her desire for Jim. She wants to leave him, but she is “compelled and overpersuaded by her attachment” (137) as “the call of Jim could no more be resisted than the sunflower can help turning its face to the sun” (136). She hates her own desire; one night she screams “in desperation”: “I can’t stand this bondage you got me in. I can’t endure it no more! I can’t never feel satisfied that I got you tied to me, and I can’t leave you, and I can’t kill you nor hurt you in no way at all. I’m tied and bound down in a burning Hell and no way out that I can see. I can’t see never no peace of mind. It’s a sure enough hard game when you got to die to beat it, but that’s just what I aim to do – kill myself!” (218).

But she does not. Instead, she finds, whether or not her readers do, freedom in her submission to his sovereign entrepreneurial logics, the stuff of romance that is also a matter of accounting. “Give me credit for love,” Jim says, and in the end, “Jim was her business” (351). At the conclusion of the novel, in working out the terms of this business that is also a renegotiation of her own “flesh” and desire, she thinks of her disabled son: “He was born first. It was meant to be that way. Somebody had to pay off the debt so that the rest of the pages could be clean. God must have thought that she was the one who could shoulder the load and bear it … She had been purged out, and the way was cleared for better things” (350). This idea of “purging out” and “clearing the way for better things” links white women’s heterosexual reproduction to “draining the swamp”: the forging of banana plantations and republics, literal ecological reorganization, the installation of a drone king. In this moment, the work of social reproduction that Arvay carries out – pregnancy, birth, mothering her disabled child, mourning his murder – is cast as “debt work”: white heterosexual femininity produces a bad debt, once that “must be paid so that the rest of the pages could be clean.” ⁷⁵ Jim wants credit for his love; Arvay wants her debt forgiven; to get it, she must “give credit where credit’s due” (350). The lure of white sovereign entrepreneurial masculinity, the monstrous promise that Trump offers, is this feeling of purging, this satisfying of the desperate voracious craving to be wiped clean of debt’s burden, to be forgiven: you have paid, you are absolved, you do not owe anything – in fact, you are owed. Give me credit for my love, give me credit. This is whiteness’s reparative fantasy.

The novel ends with this installation of the self-glorification of white feminine flesh in servitude. Arvay embraces the surveillance of the sun – it looks, she imagines, “to see if she was carrying out her work” (352) – much like the contemporary privileged white American woman finds pleasure in the aerial surveillance of murderous drones; she is, as J.D. Schnepf describes, “the revitalized imperial subject, at home in a state of perpetual war.” ⁷⁶ But underneath, throughout the novel, an undercommons stirs. Brannon Costello finds it in the “unrest, dissatisfaction, and anger” growing among Jim’s Black and white ethnic workers; Knadler finds it in “Earl’s fugitive flight into the Big Swamp, tentatively … open[ing] up a space for … the possibility of the intellectually disabled’s agency.” ⁷⁷ We can find it, too, in the moment when Arvay looks into the sun that is Jim’s entrepreneurial extractive violence: she watches him rip open the belly of a pregnant shark on the deck of his shrimp boat and then throw the bloody carcass over board. To his and his men’s disappointment, the “little live sharks” don’t drown, but “free themselves of their envelopes and swim off” (339). Arvay might trade sympathy with the swamp for sympathy for the devil, but this moment of shark fugitivity points to a flight from rather than through the genre of white femininity.

1. Zora Neale Hurston, Seraph on the Suwanee (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1948; New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008). Citations refer to the 2008 edition. All page numbers cited in text.[↑]
2. Jodi A. Byrd, Alyosha Goldstein, Jodi Melamed, and Chandan Reddy, “Predatory Value: Economies of Dispossession and Disturbed Relationalities,” Social Text 36, no. 2 (June 2018): 4.[↑]
3. @realDonaldTrump, 5 September 2018 https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/1037541538950209537?lang=en, quoted in Salvador Zárate, “#DrainTheSwamp: A Note on Ecologies of Black Unfreedom,” Race & Capitalism, https://www.raceandcapitalism.com/next-chapter/draintheswamp.[↑]
4. Zárate, “#DrainTheSwamp.”[↑]
5. Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, collected and edited by Carla Kaplan (New York: Doubleday, 2002), 505.[↑]
6. Lauren Berlant, Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 4; and Steven Thrasher, interview with Claudia Rankine: “Why I’m Spending $625,000 to Study Whiteness,” Guardian. 19 October 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/19/claudia-rankine-macarthur-genius-grant-exploring-whiteness. See also “The Whiteness Issue,” September 2017, https://theracialimaginary.org. This formulation of the genre of white femininity learns from Berlant’s sense in Female Complaint of femininity as a “genre” that people can “occupy” (173) and “perform,” (4), but also from Sylvia Wynter’s more sweeping sense that “‘gender’ is a function ‘genre,’” by which she means the problematic genres of “human” and “Man.” See Greg Thomas. “Proudflesh Inter/Views: Sylvia Wynter,” Proudflesh: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness 4 (2005); and Alexander Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014): 22–3.[↑]
7. Manu Vimalassery, Juliana Hu Pegues, and Alyosha Goldstein, “Introduction: On Colonial Unknowing,” Theory & Event 19, no. 4 (2016): 9–10.[↑]
8. Shannon Speed, “Structures of Settler Capitalism in Abya Yala,” American Quarterly 69, no. 4 (December 2017): 787–8.[↑]
9. Adrienne Brown, “Hard Romping: Zora Neale Hurston, White Women, and the Right to Play,” Twentieth-Century Literature 64, no. 3 (September 2018): 309.[↑]
10. On the reparative, see Eve Sedgwick, “Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is about You,” in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 123–51; and David Eng, “Colonial Object Relations,” Social Text 34 (2016): 1–19.[↑]
11. “To Ruth Benedict,” December 1930, Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters (ZNH), collected and edited by Carla Kaplan (New York: Doubleday, 2002), 196. On the history of the term “Jicaque,” see Darío A. Euraque, “Free Pardos and Mulattoes Vanquish Indians: Cultural Civility as Conquest and Modernity in Honduras,” in Beyond Slavery: The Multilayered Legacy of Africans in Latin America and the Caribbean (New York: Roman & Littlefield, 2007), 94. The Tolupán are one of nine indigenous groups recognized by the Honduran state; they also belong to the Confederation of Autochthonous Peoples of Honduras (CONPAH), a confederation of Honduran Black and indigenous peoples founded in 1992 and “striving to create a movement independent from mestizo influence and state control” (Anderson 393-4). See Mark Anderson, “When Afro Becomes (like) Indigenous: Garifuna and Afro-Indigenous Politics in Honduras,” Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 12, no. 2: 384–413.[↑]
12. “To Ruth Benedict,” December 1930, ZNH, 196–7.[↑]
13. “To Henry Allen Moe,” 8 and 18 September 1944, ZNH, 500–1, 504–6.[↑]
14. “To Benjamin Botkin,” 6 October 1944, ZNH, 509.[↑]
15. “To Katherine Tracy L’Engle,” 4 November 1945, ZNH, 535.[↑]
16. Hurston read race novels such as Lillian Smith’s Strange Fruit not as what Jodi Melamed calls a “officializing technology” for racial liberalism, but rather as a kind of smoke screen for Communism and for Jewish writers’ acquisition of a propertizing investment in whiteness in the name of racial solidarity with African Americans: “what they are really doing is working for the Communist revolution, plus the Jewish gripe against the non-marriage of Jews by gentiles as a rule. The money i[s] put up by Jews for the Negro to carry the ball for them.” See “To Katherine Tracy L’Engle,” 11 December 1945, ZNH, 538; and Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).[↑]
17. “To Katherine Tracy L’Engle,” 11 December 1945, ZNH, 537.[↑]
18. “To Max Perkins,” 20 May 1947, ZNH, 549–50. The publisher’s advance on Seraph financed her trip.[↑]
19. Dario Euraque, Reinterpreting the Banana Republic: Region and State in Honduras, 1870–1972 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); and John Soluri, Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption and Environmental Changes in Honduras and the United States (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005). For the labor history during the Carías regime, see Víctor Meza, Historia del movimiento obrero hondureño (Tegucigulpa: Eduitorial Guaymuras, 1980).[↑]
20. “To Henry Allen Moe,” 18 October 1944, ZNH, 514; “To Burroughs Mitchell,” 14 January 1948, ZNH, 565; and “To Ruth Benedict,” December 1930, ZNH, 196.[↑]
21. “To Max Perkins,” 20 May 1947, ZNH, 549–50.[↑]
22. Franz Boas, Race, Language, Culture (New York: Macmillan, 1940), vi, quoted in Stephanie Leigh Batiste, Darkening Mirrors: Imperial Representation in Depression-Era African American Performance (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 170.[↑]
23. David Luis Brown, Waves of Decolonization: Discourses of Race and Hemispheric Citizenship in Cuba, Mexico, and the United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 237.[↑]
24. “To Henry Allen Moe,” 8 and 18 September 1944, ZNH, 500–1, 504–6.[↑]
25. “To Harold Spivacke, Chief of the Music Division of the Library of Congress,” ZNH, 527.[↑]
26. “To Jane Bello and Frank Tannenbaum,” 14 October 1944, ZNH, 511.[↑]
27. Ibid.[↑]
28. Zemurray is infamous for engineering a military coup in Honduras in 1911, effecting regime change in order to secure government favors for his banana business, Cuyamel Fruit Company. United Fruit bought Cuyamel in 1930s; Zemurray retired but retained a majority of United Fruit’s stock, allowing him to return a few years later to take over United Fruit as president. Marcelo Bucheli, Bananas and Business: The United Fruit Company in Colombia, 1899–2000 (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 48–9.[↑]
29. Darío A. Euraque, “Antropólogos, arqueólogos, imperalismo y la mayanización de Honduras, 1890–1940,” Revista Historia no. 45 (January–June 2002): 86.[↑]
30. Darío A. Euraque, “The Threat of Blackness to the Mestizo Nation: Race and Ethnicity in the Honduran Banana Economy, 1920s and 1930s,” Banana Wars: Power, Production, and History in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 243. Euraque describes how Honduran mestizaje congealed in the 1920s when Honduran money was officially named the “Lempira” after an indigenous Lenca chief who heroically fought Spanish colonial invaders. The state’s appropriation of a “dead Indian” as a Honduran nationalist symbol created a discourse of mestizaje that aligned Honduran elites with workers, united by their anti-imperialist anger against the US banana corporations and by an anti-Black mestizo identity that excluded “foreign” West Indian banana company workers and the Afro-indigenous Garífuna people. Euraque, “The Threat to Blackness,” 247. See also Darío A. Euraque, “The Banana Enclave, Nationalism, and Mestizaje in Honduras, 1910s–1930s,” Identity and Struggle at the Margins of the Nation-State: The Laboring Peoples of Central America and the Hispanic Caribbean, ed. Aviva Chomsky and Aldo A. Lauria-Santiago (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998); and Euraque, “Free Pardos.”[↑]
31. Euraque, “Antropólogos.” See also Darío A. Euraque, Conversaciones históricas con el mestizaje y su identidad nacional en Honduras (Honduras: Centroeditorial, 2004).[↑]
32. Rosemary Joyce, “Critical Histories of Archaeological Practice: Latin American and North American Interpretations in a Honduran Context,” Evaluating Multiple Narratives Beyond Nationalist, Colonialist, Imperialist Archaeologies, ed. Junko Habu, Clare Fawcett, and John M. Matsunaga (New York: Springer, 2008), 58.[↑]
33. Rosemary Joyce, “Archaeology and Nation Building: A View from Central America,” The Politics of Archaeology and Identity in a Global Context, ed. S. Kane (Boston: Archaeological Institute of America, 2003), 86; and Darío A. Euraque, “Antropólogos,” 87, 91.[↑]
34. Darío A. Euraque, “Antropólogos,” 92–3.[↑]
35. Batiste, Darkening Mirrors, 168.[↑]
36. The widespread perception of this threat manifested not only in popular support in the 1920s for immigration laws that would require banana companies to deport Black workers, but also in the segregation, theft of land, and police brutality the Garífuna people experienced during the Carías regime. Euraque, “The Threat of Blackness”; and Mark Anderson, Black and Indigenous: Garífuna Activism and Consumer Culture in Honduras (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).[↑]
37. Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 9.[↑]
38. Jodi Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).[↑]
39. Mark Rifkin, Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance (University of Minnesota Press, 2015); and Audra Simpson, “On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘Voice’ and Colonial Citizenship,” Junctures 9 (December 2007): 72. On “refusal,” also see Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).[↑]
40. For early readings of the novel as a failure, see for example Mary Helen Washington, Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women, 1860–1960 (New York: Doubleday, 1987). For reading of Seraph as a joke, see Claudia Tate, Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); for the novel as possessing “archetypal” sexual politics, see Ann Ducille, The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). For reconsiderations of the novel’s relationship to whiteness and postwar liberalism, see John C. Charles, Abandoning the Black Hero: Sympathy and Privacy in the Postwar African American White-Life Novel (Rutgers University Press, 2012); Stephanie Li, Playing in the White: Black Writers, White Subjects (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Ayesha Hardison, Writing through Jane Crow: Race and Gender Politics and African American Literature (University of Virginia Press, 2014); and Veronica T. Watson, The Souls of White Folk: African American Writers Theorize Whiteness (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013).[↑]
41. “To Burroughs Mitchell,” 2 October 1947, ZNH, 561, 558.[↑]
42. Martyn Bone, Where the New World Is: Literature about the U.S. South at Global Scales (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2018), 24.[↑]
43. Marco Katz Montiel, “Sounds from Nowhere: Musical Protagonists by Alejo Carpentier and Zora Neale Hurston,” Comparative American Studies 10, no. 1 (March 2012): 37.[↑]
44. On Black study, see Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (New York: Autonomedia, 2013).[↑]
45. On this triangular configuration of settler colonial logic, see Iyko Day, Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016); and “Being or Nothingness: Indigeneity, Antiblackness, and Settler Colonial Critique,” Critical Ethnic Studies 1, no 2 (Fall 2015): 102–21.[↑]
46. Zárate, “#DrainTheSwamp.”[↑]
47. Charles, Abandoning the Black Hero, 174. On the bulldozer revolution and subsequent historiography, see M.D. Lassiter and K.M. Kruse, “The Bulldozer Revolution: Suburbs and Southern History since World War II,” Journal of Southern History 75, no. 3 (2009): 691–706. On Hurston’s experience with swamp work crews, see Valerie Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston (Simon and Schuster, 2003), 168.[↑]
48. Richard P. Tucker, Insatiable Appetite: The United States and the Ecological Degradation of the Tropical World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 137–49; and John Soluri, “Banana Cultures: Linking the Production and Consumption of Export Bananas, 1800–1980,” Banana Wars: Power, Production, and History in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 70.[↑]
49. Molly Geidel, “Love Develops the Lowlands: Jorge Ruiz’s Changing Vision of Modernization,” talk delivered at the Latin American Studies Association, 2013; and Geidel, “Mid-Century Liberalism and the Development Film,” paper delivered at Cambridge University, 2018.[↑]
50. Day, “Being or Nothingness,” 117.[↑]
51. Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of US Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of US Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).[↑]
52. Robin DiAngelo, “White Fragility,” International Journal of Critical Pedagogy 3, no. 3 (2011): 54–70; and Wexler, Tender Violence, 56.[↑]
53. Stephen Knadler, “Exceptional Minds, Unstated Exceptions: Intellectual Disability and Post-War Racial Liberalism in African American ‘White Life’ Novels,” Studies in American Fiction 43, no. 2 (Fall 2016): 231–57.[↑]
54. Claire Colebrook, “Slavery and the Trumpocene: It’s Not the End of the World,” Oxford Literary Review 41, no. 1 (2019): 40–50; and Graham Readfern, “We Are Approaching the Trumpocene, a New Epoch Where Climate Change Is Just a Big Scary Conspiracy,” Guardian, 21 October 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/planet-oz/2016/oct/21/we-are-approaching-the-trumpocene-a-new-epoch-where-climate-change-is-just-a-big-scary-conspiracy.[↑]
55. Byrd et al., “Predatory Value,” 4.[↑]
56. Stephanie Leutert and Sarah Spalding, “How Many Central Americans Are Traveling North?” Lawfare, 14 March 2019, https://www.lawfareblog.com/how-many-central-americans-are-traveling-north.[↑]
57. Maria Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, “Critical Latinx Indigeneities: A Paradigm Drift,” Latino Studies 15 (2017): 146.[↑]
58. Saldaña-Portillo, “Critical Latinx Indigeneities,” 148, 146.[↑]
59. Molly Hennessy-Fiske and Molly O’Toole, “U.S. to Send Asylum Seekers to Honduras, Bypassing American Asylum,” Los Angeles Times,16 December 2019, https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2019-12-16/us-poised-to-send-asylum-seekers-to-honduras.[↑]
60. For an example of the “outsourcing” analogy, see Noah Lanard, “Trump Administration Ends Its Asylum Obligations – by Outsourcing Them to Honduras,” Mother Jones, 17 December 2019. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/12/trump-administration-ends-its-asylum-obligations-by-outsourcing-them-to-honduras.[↑]
61. Greg Grandin, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America (New York:Metropolitan Books, 2019), 523–4.[↑]
62. Lomi Kriel, “Federal Agents Are Expelling Asylum Seekers as Young as 8 Months from the Border, Citing COVID-19 Risks.” Texas Tribune, 4 August 2020, https://www.texastribune.org/2020/08/04/border-migrant-children-hotels.[↑]
63. Vimalassery et al., “Introduction,” 9–10.[↑]
64. Eli Rosenberg, “‘The Snake’: How Trump Appropriated a Radical Black Singer’s Lyrics for Immigration Fearmongering,”Washington Post, 24 February 2018; see also Juliana Spahr, “A Destruction Story,” Harpers Magazine, May 2018. There is more to be said about the resonances of Trump’s appropriation of “The Snake” and Arvay and Jim’s son Kenny Meserve’s appropriation of Black music in the novel. For one reading the music in the context of the Americas, see Marco Katz Montiel, Music and Identity in Twentieth-Century Literature from Our America (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014).[↑]
65. Tate, Psychoanalysis and Black Novels, 174; and Elizabeth Binggeli, “The Unadapted: Warner Bros. Reads Zora Neale Hurston,” Cinema Journal 48, no. 3 (Spring 2009): 12.[↑]
66. H.M.F., “Fighter against Complacency and Ignorance,” Barnard College Alumnae Magazine (Autumn 1946): 6–7.[↑]
67. Both voters quoted in Sarah Jaffe, “Why Did a Majority of White Women Vote for Trump?” New Labor Forum, January 2018, http://newlaborforum.cuny.edu/2018/01/18/why-did-a-majority-of-white-women-vote-for-trump.[↑]
68. On Seraph as a plantation romance, see Brannon Costello, Plantation Airs: Racial Paternalism and the Transformations of Class in Southern Fiction, 1945–1971 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2007). On the banana novel, see Ana Patricia Rodríguez, Dividing the Isthmus: Central American Transnational Histories, Literatures, and Cultures (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009).[↑]
69. Kyla Wazana Tompkins, “‘You Make Me Feel Right Quare’: Promiscuous Reading, Minoritarian Critique, and White Sovereign Entrepreneurial Terror,” Social Text 133 (December 2017): 53.[↑]
70. Tompkins, “You Make Me Feel,” 57.[↑]
71. Tompkins, “You Make Me Feel,” 75.[↑]
72. Tompkins, “You Make Me Feel,” 72.[↑]
73. George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009); and Hardison, Writing through Jane Crow, 100.[↑]
74. Kyla Schuller, “The Trouble with White Women,” Duke University Press Blog, 11 January 2018, https://dukeupress.wordpress.com/2018/01/11/the-trouble-with-white-women.[↑]
75. I borrow the phrase “debt work” from Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 64.[↑]
76. J.D. Schnepf, “Domestic Aerial Photography in the Era of Drone Warfare,” Modern Fiction Studies 63, no. 2 (Summer 2017): 282.[↑]
77. Costello, Plantation Airs, 36; and Knadler, “Exceptional Minds,” 250.[↑]