Northern/Southern Transfers: (Neo)colonialism, Racial Classification, and “Negro” Activism in Tiphanie Yanique’s Land of Love and Drowning

African American authors including Nella Larsen, Richard Wright, and Cecil Brown have produced a surprisingly substantial body of fiction depicting African American protagonists traveling to and living in Denmark. This essay turns to a more recent novel that complicates and extends this Black- and North Atlantic imaginary by re-routing it via the Caribbean. Tiphanie Yanique’s Land of Love and Drowning (2014) renders the last days of Danish colonial rule over the Danish West Indies before the islands were “transferred” to the United States in March 1917. Yanique’s narrative maps the multigenerational saga of the Bradshaw family on to the islands’ collective history as both the Bradshaw clan and the renamed US Virgin Islands negotiate a nexus of identities: colonial, postcolonial, and neocolonial; white, mixed, and “Negro”; Danish, Caribbean, and US. The essay focuses on three strands of Yanique’s novel. First, I discuss the post-transfer impact on the Bradshaw clan as US racial classification, rooted in the “one-drop rule” definition of blackness, displaces models of “racial” and national identity developed during the Danish colonial era. Second, I assess how New York supersedes Copenhagen as the “northern” city that looms largest in the lives of certain characters. Yet the US South more immediately defines islanders’ experience of the “mainland.” Third, then, I explore how the South relates to the U.S.V.I. during World War II and again in the 1960s. The civil rights movement offers an alternative mode of political “transfer” as it turns
south from the US South to the U.S.V.I.