Whiteness, Infrastructure, and the Haunted Landscapes of the Florida Everglades

Keywords: white, built environment, infrastructure, race, florida
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 30

Abstract

In a 1910 letter, Napoleon Bonaparte Broward claimed that the draining of the Everglades under his governorship had provided significant economic advantages to the state of Florida. In the same letter, he claimed to have saved the Everglades from corporations in the name of “the people.” At the same time, Broward argued for legal separation of “the races” as a means for preventing inter-racial violence and “for the good of the white race, to keep sweet the lives of the white people, and to keep their conscious keen and clean.” How did Broward’s racial reasoning collide with his vision for draining the Everglades? How did this set the foundations for a built environment that centered white supremacy? In this paper I integrate historical analysis of the history canal construction and the history of the Town of Davie, Florida with an autoethnographic recounting of race, whiteness, and the relationship to the built environment in this area. I argue that a more or less direct line can be drawn from N.B. Broward’s politics and ideas for the first drainage canals to the history of Klan violence that occurred along the Southeastern stretch in the 1980s. Seeing the now drained and suburbanized Everglades as key battlefields in the Seminole Wars, I draw on the work of Mark Fisher and Avery Gordon to argue as well that these landscapes are haunted by whiteness, and that this very act of haunting must be grappled with in any attempt at Everglades restoration in Broward County.