Liquid Landscape: Geography and Settlement at the Edge of Early America by Michele Currie Navakas

In this provocative literary and cartographic history focused on antebellum Florida, Michele Currie Navakas effectively employs a geographic lens to explore notions of empire, nationhood, and belonging. Liquid Landscape draws on a wide variety of sources to show that early Florida was conceived as a realm of shifting and uncertain topography, thus confounding the very concept of solid ground on which early U.S. conceptions of settlement, possession and empire were based. North America's southernmost peninsula, then, provides an intriguing case study for re-examining the U.S. expansionist imperative of manifest destiny, rooted as it was in an ideal of taking possession of contiguous continental territory through agricultural settlement.

Navakas argues that acceptance of Florida's impermanent geography – in both literature and maps – challenged the manifest destiny narrative, and she credits early writing about Florida with "exposing how some of the nation's most politically significant concepts of self, nation, and empire rested on assumptions that were as contingent as its topography" (p. 3). Furthermore, she concludes, important literary works set in or near Florida have been overlooked for the role they played in conjuring alternate methods of "taking root" at a time when American national identity was yet in a formative stage.

Drawing on recent scholarship that takes spaces of imperial periphery seriously, Liquid Landscape uses Florida's environmental and cultural geography to illustrate the many contingencies that necessarily develop at the margins of imperial territory. The book also participates in a broader rethinking of settler colonialism, which recognizes displacement-through-settlement as the essential vehicle through which imperial technologies and cultures are developed and deployed. Navakas offers Florida as a compelling case for scholars in both of these areas to consider, given that the peninsula was peripheral to multiple European empires over time and also served as a site of refuge, haven, and settlement for various cultural groups in its long history between Spanish contact and the U.S. Civil War.

Liquid Landscape moves easily between a variety of source materials – settlers' guides, captivity narratives, military account, woodcuts, lithographs, maps, natural histories, adventure stories, geodetic surveys, and canonical works of literature. Each chapter focuses on a few key sources and provides extensive historical context to guide the reader to a critical understanding often at odds with how these pieces have previously been understood. Although the book is deeply historical, it is organized not chronologically but rather geographically, with each chapter devoted to a specific form of shifting landscape. This organizational scheme effectively emphasizes Navakas's key point that antebellum notions of Florida's "topographic instability, geographic indeterminacy, and demographic fluidity" (p. 15) undermined the continental ideal of America in important ways.

Chapter 1 begins with the first British survey of Florida, which cartographically acknowledged the indeterminacy of Florida's topography – estuaries, marshes, sinks, springs, and shores – yet presented the shifting landscape nonetheless as territory that could be claimed. Later visitors, including Audubon, Bartram, and Cushing, built on this early construction, using Florida's landscapes to explore concepts of rootedness, possession, and belonging in relation to settlement and national identity.

Chapter 2 also begins with cartographic representation, noting how frequently Florida was presented not as a coherent peninsula but rather as a collection of islands, inlets, and shoals. Navakas argues that the long endurance of these depictions, even after detailed survey had shown Florida's peninsula was mainly contiguous, indicates broad acceptance of the region's indeterminate boundaries, fluid connections to the Caribbean, and defiance of settlement norms.

Chapter 3 focuses on Florida's harbors, keys, reefs and gulfs, recounting popular fiction that used these settings to define Florida as a "wrecker empire" in which robust flows of commerce were both enabled and endangered. South Florida's proximity to other Caribbean and Gulf ports, for example, was an important source of wealth production both in the British colonial era and in the U.S. territorial era. Underwater topographies presented perilous challenges to these flows, however, giving significant power to those in the wrecking/salvaging trade whose environmental knowledge could account for shifting geographies. Navakas notes that popular fiction depicted military approaches – building massive forts on tiny yet strategically located islands – as nonsensical, yet lionized wreckers' mode of "floating" along the reef as a more effective form of possession and belonging.

Chapters 4 and 5 turn attention to the shifting cultural geographies of Florida. Chapter 4 focuses on marronage in the swamps, savannas, and hammocks of the Everglades. Navakas examines military reports, maps, and captivity narratives that portrayed the 'Glades "as territory that defies U.S. experience and understanding, while sustaining other populations" (p. 92) who actively resisted incorporation into the nation. These populations included indigenous groups like the Creeks (later called Seminoles) as well as Africans who escaped slavery in the American South or elsewhere in the Caribbean before migrating to Florida to found independent communities. Rather than simply denying or erasing these non-white peoples' presence, Navakas shows, military accounts presented the landscape of the Everglades as a site of non-white control, giving the landscape itself credit for the US army's failure's and the enemy's success. Non-military works used traditions of early American literature to imagine what these non-Americans' lives were like, often giving them agency to interact with other groups outside the region and to "pursue experiences, economic activities, and roles unavailable to them anywhere else in North America" (p. 95). Chapter 5 looks at white Anglo settler narratives from central and northern Florida, showing many ways they rejected standard notions of possession and knowledge.

In a short coda, Navakas ties these landscapes together, presenting literary and cartographic Florida as an exceptional space in the antebellum period, "a place where land and water change places with little warning, dissolving homes and communities along with concepts of land, boundaries, and foundations — yet thereby encouraging modes of root-taking that would not elsewhere emerge" (pp. 156-157). This central premise is well supported throughout the book, although it sometimes renders Florida through an overly exceptional and environmentally deterministic lens. The reader may wonder why no comparative reference is made, even in a cursory way, to the bayous of Louisiana, where many of the same marshy, insular, and noncontiguous landscapes presented similar challenges to the Spanish, French, British and later American colonial settlers. This critique notwithstanding, Liquid Landscape makes an important intervention by revealing the clear variability and contingency of antebellum notions of belonging, nationhood, and empire. It will be of wide interest to scholars of empire, early America, historical geography, and the narration thereof through literature and maps.