In Florida, land and water frequently change places with little
warning, dissolving homes and communities along with the very
concepts of boundaries themselves. While Florida's landscape of
saturated swamps, shifting shorelines, coral reefs, and tiny keys
initially impeded familiar strategies of early U.S. settlement,
such as the establishment of fixed dwellings, sturdy fences, and
cultivated fields, over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, Americans learned to inhabit Florida's liquid landscape
in unconventional but no less transformative ways. In Liquid
Landscape, Michele Currie Navakas analyzes the history of Florida's
incorporation alongside the development of new ideas of personhood,
possession, and political identity within American letters. From
early American novels, travel accounts, and geography textbooks, to
settlers' guides, maps, natural histories, and land surveys, early
American culture turned repeatedly to Florida's shifting lands and
waters, as well as to its itinerant enclaves of Native Americans,
Spaniards, pirates, and runaway slaves. This preoccupation with
Floridian terrain and populations, argues Navakas, reveals a deep
American concern with the challenges of settling a region so
exceptional in topography, geography, and demography. Navakas reads
a vast archive of popular, literary, and reference texts spanning
Revolution to Reconstruction, including works by William Bartram,
James Fenimore Cooper, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, to uncover an
alternative history of American possession, one that did not
descend exclusively, or even primarily, from the more familiar
legal, political, and philosophical conceptions of American land as
enduring, solid, and divisible. The shifting southern edge of early
America produced a new language of settlement, belonging,
territory, and sovereignty, and that language would ultimately
transform how people all across the rapidly changing continent
imagined the making of U.S. nation and empire.
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