Journal of Transnational American Studies

This article repositions Orlando Patterson, the originator of “social death,” in his Caribbean milieu and suggests that part of why “social death” as a conceptual category has become fossilized is precisely because North American scholars have neglected other works in Patterson’s oeuvre, particularly the Caribbean scholarship that precedes Slavery and Social Death and the “richer stories” he attempts to tell in his largely unstudied Caribbean novels of the 1960s. This article attends to the emphasis on the hierarchies of difference and the idiom of sex within an understanding of “social death” in its close reading of Patterson’s 1972 neoslave narrative Die the Long Day.