This chapter outlines two possible approaches to geocultural analysis. In the chapter’s first section, I discuss what I call a phenomenological approach to literary texts. Scholars who adopt this mode of interpretation argue that literature provides a unique glimpse into the experiential worlds produced by capitalist systems. For such scholars, capitalism is not simply an economic system characterized by autonomous agents in a public marketplace (as envisioned by rational choice theory and free market ideology), but is instead a complex web of discrete processes, industries and modes of production, each of which organizes workers’ experiences, affects and environments in unique ways. The chapter’s second section proposes the term genre-system as a conceptual tool for examining how literary fields make sense of such contradictions by dispersing their representations of economic processes and ideologies across a range of different literary genres. Literary genres tend to render capitalism’s contradictions logically coherent by allegorizing particular stages of the production process within self-contained narrative forms. When such genres are examined together, as the constituent parts of a totalizing genre-system, it is possible to see how narrative forms work together to create a series of partial, dissonant, yet nevertheless legible representations of the capitalist world-system.

“Shadows of Haiti” examines echoes of the Haitian Revolution in three texts from the extended Caribbean:Victor Séjour’s “Le Mulâtre,”, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab, and Charles Chesnutt’s Paul Marchand F.M.C.After an overview of world-systems theory and an introduction to the historical context in which each of these texts is situated, this chapter compares the ways in which the potentially violent revolt of a mixed-race heterosexual male protagonist is neutered or silenced by the conventions of sentiment. Haunting all three texts is the dark shadow of the violent revolt in Saint-Domingue, enmeshed with the consequences of deadly family secrets related to race and violence. In “Le Mulâtre” and Sab, the male protagonist dies. In Paul Marchand F.M.C, however, the hero survives but is silenced and forced into exile in France.