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

Florida has long been considered an outlier among humanities researchers, including within subfields one might think would be amenable, like Southern Studies. And the trope of "Florida man" has become stock comedic gold on outlets such as The Onion and NPR's Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me! Florida's exceptionality is precisely the subject—and the object—of Michele Currie Navakas's excellent study: she simultaneously recuperates Florida's singular status in America's founding stories and points out the fallacy of figuring Florida as exceptional. This ability to hold up Florida as exemplary while rejecting the idea that it is anomalous or otherwise unextrapolatable is perhaps Navakas's most remarkable achievement in this text. She argues both that "Florida's local land and populations were [and are] more than local in meaning" (4, 156) and that its geography, topography, and cultures were hyperlocal and distinctive, generative of "histories and stories that could not elsewhere emerge" (157). This seeming contradiction is a masterful rhetorical move and a crucial argument of the book. Navakas asserts that even as Florida was unlike other material and literary landscapes of early America, it nonetheless occupied significant imaginative space in the minds of early Americans, impacting their conceptions of nationhood and belonging.

Accordingly, Navakas's book maps out the dendritic ways in which Florida's "liquid landscape" expands beyond state boundaries to encompass the fledgling nation and to destabilize our conceptions of national consolidation in the first place. Liquid Landscape argues that the unsolid ground of Florida—from its marshes and sinks to its reefs, shoals, keys, and other evocative topographies—"gave rise to new ways of imagining roots, and thereby personal and national identity" (3). In five meticulously argued chapters (as well as an introduction and coda), Navakas unravels for us the manifold ways in which the cultural imaginations and material experiences of Florida together crafted these new understandings of rootedness, settlement, and "founding."

A second, no less significant, argument is that Florida has also shaped American literary histories: echoing Christopher P. Iannini's Fatal Revolutions: Natural History, West Indian Slavery, and the Routes of American Literature (2012), Navakas claims that the "roots and routes of U.S. writing" (10) change when we consider early Florida alongside New England or even other southern colonies. For example, she shows how William Bartram's account of water lettuce (Pistia stratiotes) could provide an alternative model for national root-taking, and thus for our literary histories of national formation (10–13, 34–39). In contrast with the more solid formulations of citizenship dependent upon demarcation of terra firma, Bartram's watery roots provide stability by maintaining mobility, suggesting that other ways of inhabiting might be necessary on this new continent. The central project of the book is to establish "both the conceptual relevance ... and the literary value of Florida to our understanding of various themes and genres of U.S. writing as the nation's borders emerged and expanded" (13).

The depth and breadth of sources are impressive, and they match the ambition and achievement of the book as a whole: Navakas's archive restores and highlights previously published works in order to show both the exceptionality of Florida in the US (and international) imagination and the many ways in which that exceptionality was nonetheless applicable to places and spaces well beyond its singular peninsula. The choice to include only published texts supports her argument that Florida was "more than local" (4) in its cultural impacts, particularly as many of her chosen sources circulated widely and were seemingly well known in their own time, despite their relative obscurity today. Nevertheless, I wonder whether archival treasures might support her arguments still more: for example, in making claims about what early Americans observed, reflected, understood, or imagined, support from published fiction and non-fiction felt less representative to this reader than manuscript primary sources might have been...