Journal of Transnational American Studies

The essay uses an archipelagic lens to explore narratives of mobility and relationality surrounding the Panama Canal Zone. In the early twenieth century, the various projects of creating an interoceanic route culminated in the territorializing project of the Panama Canal that was organized around the colonization of land and ocean spaces and tied to the imperial expansion to the Caribbean and the Pacific, making the isthmus a crucial link in the imperial archipelago. After briefly discussing Willis J. Abbot’s popular history of the canal, Panama and the Canal in Picture and Prose (1913), the essay explores two texts by Black writers that question dominant representations of the canal and of the migrant Caribbean workers who built it: Eric Walrond’s collection of stories, Tropic Death (1926), and the bilingual prose–poetry history of Black West Indians in Panama, An Old Woman Remembers (1995), by Carlos E. Russell. I argue that these texts practice “archipelagic memory” by evoking an archive of submerged historical experiences that relates the Canal Zone to other spaces, and by making visible spectral presences and the sediments of imperial history submerged in the waters of the canal.