Eric Walrond's Anti-patriarchal Modernism.

This article analyzes Eric Walrond's 1926 short story collection *Tropic Death*, focusing on the central role of women and their reproductive labor within the context of early twentieth-century Caribbean proletarianization. It argues that Walrond’s formal literary experiments, which blend realism with modernist fragmentation and folklore, symbolically encode women’s struggles for reproductive autonomy amid colonial-patriarchal exploitation and economic transformation. Through close readings of stories such as "Drought," "The Wharf Rats," and "The White Snake," the essay highlights how Walrond portrays the disarticulation of production and reproduction, the erosion of peasant self-sufficiency, and the complex gendered dynamics of labor migration and social dislocation. Ultimately, Walrond’s work is situated within a Caribbean feminist-anticolonial modernist tradition that challenges colonial hierarchies by articulating subaltern resistance and alternative social imaginaries rooted in women’s reproductive and provisioning labor.