Literature, Race, and Reclamation: The Drainage of the Everglades

• In Event: Staying with the Changes: Displacement, Disaster, and Transformed Landscapes in the United States

Abstract

This paper examines how literature participated in racialized debates about the drainage of the Florida Everglades during the first half of the twentieth century. Through readings of Zora Neale Hurston’s novels Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), I reveal how literature both records and resists what was, at the time, the foregone conclusion of wetlands reclamation. Specifically, I argue that Hurston’s anthropological fieldwork in the wetlands led her to experiment with what I describe as the “mucky” boundaries of storytelling: She allowed the swamps of Central and South Florida to seep into and sometimes flood the fictional narratives of her novels. Citing archival research alongside my own embodied experiences of the Florida wetlands, I contend that Hurston cultivated a porous boundary between fictional texts and historical and environmental contexts. In so doing, her literature revealed the anti-Black agenda behind the state-sanctioned drainage project while also emphasizing the agency of water and weather in resisting environmental racism.

Author

• Jane Robbins Mize, Hamilton College, Literature and Creative Writing Department