Early Modern Wetlands: A Brief Literary History of the Unfast

Abstract

In western literary history, wetlands often appear as nature’s ugly mistakes. Key to understanding humans’ widespread animus toward wetlands is the perception, rooted in a teleological and anthropocentric understanding of history and enshrined in early modern discourse of wetlands, that these locales are inimical to human movement and progress. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as England and Spain, in particular, experienced an expansion in mobility that rendered the world more accessible and traversable than it had ever been, their wetland encounters threatened to destabilize their global enterprises. Taking examples from the early modern Atlantic world, this essay argues that the perceived slowness of wetlands often runs athwart the circulation of dominant cultural and religious attitudes, the fast violence of conquest, and imperatives for technological progress. These “unfast” countercurrents invite reading strategies better attuned to the categorial and temporal impurities of wetlands. I offer such a reading of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s History of Florida (1605), where explorers’ disorientation in swamps shows the limitations of colonial mastery, and indigenous habitation practices demonstrate how humans might accommodate themselves not just to the unique ecomateriality of the terraqueous, but also to the augmenting shakiness of planetary and intellectual life. [H.E.]