ABSTRACT
In a biographical note included with his short story “The Godless City,” published in Success Magazine, January 1924, the Guyanese-born writer Eric Walrond wrote that “I am spiritually a native of Panama. I owe the sincerest allegiance to it” (qtd. in Parascandola 1998: 13). The previous year Walrond, who had served as associate editor of Marcus Garvey’s The Negro World from 1921 to 1923, had severed his ties to the pan-African leader and, in an essay titled “The New Negro Faces America” (Current History, 1923), had questioned whether diasporic blacks really desired to return to Africa. It is not surprising that Walrond, like many other Caribbean migrants and exiles to the United States during the Harlem Renaissance, would look to what Joseph Roach has called the “circum-Caribbean” world in an act of imaginative repatriation to fi nd a diasporic home of belonging, racial identity, and political solidarity after a disillusionment with the United States (Roach 1996: 4). But Walrond, it is important to note, chose as his “spiritual home” not his country of birth, or even of parental ancestry (he was of mixed Guyanese and Barbadian descent) but the newly created interoceanic space of global capitalism and the site of international labor migration: the isthmus of Panama. While histories of modern black consciousness most often begin with Alain Locke’s The New Negro (1925), which locates Harlem as the center of a new black cultural and political identity, Walrond, in contrast, shifts the imagined space of black internationalism from Harlem, or even Africa, to Panama. In struggling to fi nd a paradigm for black consciousness and activism, Walrond highlights a specifi c global political space, one deeply embedded in the networks of labor and capital created by an emergent US empire, but also one
that allowed for broader imaginative linkages among peoples of color, both within the Black Atlantic and within transpacifi c worlds.1
