The Slave in the Great House

This chapter expands the volume’s focus beyond the United States, exploring black diasporic relationships to property as theorized through poetic form. In his 1978 poem “The Star-Apple Kingdom,” set in Jamaica, poet Derek Walcott asks whether there are alternative ways for black subjects to relate to land and the environment beyond the rubrics of property, ownership, and nation. By drawing on the geography of the Caribbean archipelago, and practicing a form of fragmentary assemblage, Walcott does not merely represent the land but envisions how people might inhabit it differently through sensory experience. By attending to the environmental focus of Walcott’s poetry, the chapter reminds us that “the matter of race and real estate concerns not only neighborhoods, homeownership, and rental markets, not only buildings and houses, but also the long-vexed relationship between black diasporic subjects and the private and public land on which they have worked and lived.”

Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History