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  • Liquid Landscape: Geography and Settlement at the Edge of Early Americaby Michele Currie Navakas
  • Ellis Cristin
Liquid Landscape: Geography and Settlement at the Edge of Early America. By Michele Currie Navakas. Early American Studies. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Pp. [x], 235. $49.95, ISBN 978-0-8122-4956-9.)

Liquid Landscape: Geography and Settlement at the Edge of Early Americaspotlights the tensions that could arise when settler ideologies of nationalism and empire collided with the material realities of local environments. In this study, Michele Currie Navakas argues that Florida's uniquely volatile topography and ambiguous geography presented acute challenges to practices of colonization and theories of national belonging in the early national period. [End Page 974]

Most immediately, Liquid Landscapemakes a case for Florida's singularity as a region whose distinctive environmental conditions rendered it both practically and conceptually difficult to incorporate into the new nation. From its swampy, hurricane-scoured lands to the long-unmapped maze of the Everglades and the treacherous shoals of its coast, Florida's landscape was largely hostile to conventional agriculture and martial surveillance while it proved hospitable to diverse and often fugitive populations (of Calusas, Seminoles, maroons, pirates, and wreck salvagers), whose local knowledge afforded them advantages against forces seeking to assert colonial and, later, national control over the region. Liquid Landscapeargues that these practical obstacles to colonization posed conceptual challenges to early American notions of national identity and belonging. Florida's flood-prone soils rebuffed modes of "improvement" (such as the establishment of permanent dwellings and agriculture) that the Lockean tradition taught settlers to believe was what conferred them rights to the land. Meanwhile, Florida's uncertainly solid geography (as Navakas demonstrates, its lower peninsula was often depicted on eighteenth-century maps as a fragmented archipelago) undermined the continental thesis—the idea, first formulated by early nationalists, that the landmass of the North American continent manifested the "natural" boundaries the United States was destined to assume. Liquid Landscapethus argues that early American writings about Florida articulate "imaginative alternatives to a nationalist narrative that depends on stable and contiguous land" (p. 14).

Looking beyond this case for Florida's exceptionality, Liquid Landscapesubmits that writing about Florida deserves a more central place in scholarship on early U.S. culture. As Navakas argues, early American "reflections on Florida capture the region's resistance to containment, borders, and regulation," demonstrating that "the farthest southern reaches of North America already mattered to people in many other places on the continent . . . and thus that these seeming peripheries of early America should matter more centrally to our own scholarly understanding" (p. 4). In this respect, Navakas joins cause with John T. Matthews, Matthew Pratt Guterl, and Michael P. Bibler, who oppose the marginalization of the South in Americanist scholarship, a tendency both symptomatized and perpetuated by the institutionalization of "southern studies" as a discipline.

Liquid Landscapemakes a convincing case that Florida's terrain impeded the colonial project and enabled the state's fascinating history of indigenous resistance, marronage, and wrecking. The book's greatest strengths may be its archive and the deftness with which Navakas reads across diverse media, including Anglo-American maps, surveys, natural histories, memoirs, and fiction about Florida from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. It does, however, bear noting that anticolonial resistance is not what finds expression in the series of "imaginative alternatives" this study's chapters elucidate (p. 14). Rather, the majority of the Anglo-American texts Navakas examines sought to facilitate Florida's absorption into the United States by adapting expansionist ideology to the specificities of Florida's unruly landscape. Thus, while the fluidity, porosity, and contingency that Navakas's prose often invokes are terms that have become closely associated in today's critical idiom with liberatory resistance, this book ultimately tells the story of how [End Page 975]Florida's landscape inspired Anglo-American authors to adapt their conception of "root-taking" so that rooting, or colonization and incorporation, could continue undeterred (p. 2). In this sense, Liquid Landscapearguably demonstrates the resilience of ideology despite material impediments—a sobering lesson in our warming present.

Ellis Cristin
University of Mississippi...

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