<i>Earthquake and the Invention of America: The Making of Elsewhere Catastrophe</i>. By Anna Brickhouse.

This book is about much more than earthquakes. While earthquakes recur throughout as an organizing throughline, Anna Brickhouse's main focus is on how the political and racial unconscious of colonization continually threatens to shake apart the hegemony of the colonizers and their descendants. Earthquake becomes a main trope for a recurring instability and fear of insurrection by enslaved and colonized people that haunts the apparent stability of white settler society. To allay that fear, North American colonizers have attempted to shore up their sense of stability through the idea of the “elsewhere catastrophe,” projecting earthquakes onto the south as something that can only occur in other places.Earthquake and the Invention of America expands in this sense on Brickhouse's previous book, The Unsettlement of America: Translation, Interpretation, and the Story of Don Luis de Velasco, 1560–1945 (2014), by positing earthquake as a figure of “unsettlement.” Brickhouse builds on her longstanding exploration of transatlantic and hemispheric connections, situating 19th-century American literature in much wider networks of exchange. The networks that she explores here are broader in temporal and spatial scope than her earlier books, spanning from Aristotle's engagement with climate and earthquake in The Republic, Timaeus, and Critias; through the disastrous Lisbon earthquake of 1755; to 17th- and 18th-century Spanish colonial Peru; 17th-century Puritan settlement in Massachusetts; J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur's Letters from an American Farmer (1782); Olaudah Equiano's 1789 autobiographical narrative; and nineteenth-century literature by James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, José Martí, and others. The book concludes with N.K. Jemisin's contemporary Broken Earth trilogy (2015–17), tracing the history of the elsewhere catastrophe to the present day. As in her previous books, Brickhouse engages extensively with the discourses and knowledge formations of Indigenous and enslaved people, for whom earthquakes had very different and often liberatory meanings.In tracing these discursive networks, Brickhouse exposes what she labels as the “predatory optimism” of American and other white writers of the global north, whose faith in the stability and goodness of their own societies depends on positing “elsewhere catastrophe and the idea of a catastrophic South” (64). One telling instance is the deliberate renaming of the disastrous 1906 San Francisco earthquake as the “San Francisco Fire,” in order to dissociate San Francisco and California from the supposedly earthquake-prone tropics. In her view, this discourse is “predatory” since it premises the stability of the north and the instability of the south. It elides the ongoing violence of colonization by projecting it onto the violence of natural disasters, thus enabling ongoing “emotional and economic investment” in that colonization (64).The book's most compelling sections make unexpected connections across space and time, for instance, between Voltaire's Candide (1759) and the Guaraní War (1754–56) in Paraguay. Brickhouse links the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 with the Lima–Callao earthquake of 1746 and bridges the Indigenous writer Garcilaso de la Vega's Comentarios reales de los Incas (1609), a narrative of the pre-contact Incan empire and its conquest by Spain, the political philosophy of John Locke, and Daniel Defoe's proto-novel, Robinson Crusoe (1719). I appreciate how the book opens space in the archives to register Indigenous voices and ways of knowing, such as the Andean concept of pachacuti, a combination of natural and social catastrophe that Brickhouse claims “still shapes Andean Indigenous struggles for a new political order that might reverse the course of global-colonial capitalism” (133).While the book's sprawling scope is often a strength, it can become a weakness, as the central trope of earthquake does not consistently hold all of the readings together convincingly. While many chapters engage extensively with the theme of earthquake, others—such as the two chapters on Crèvecoeur and Melville—include relatively few direct earthquake references. Sections on antebellum and postbellum American Civil War literature cycle rapidly through short interpretive engagements with a series of very different texts, only loosely bound by the main theme of unsettling. The book's overall thesis is clear and compelling—that earthquake functions as a persistent trope for instability and revolution that unsettles colonial hegemony. At many points, however, the interpretive connections rest on slender evidence. Despite its earthquake theme, the book does not offer much to environmental humanists or to those interested in posthumanism or new materialism. The book focuses on earthquakes primarily as a symbolic trope, rather than on the materiality or ecological impacts of those catastrophes.Overall, Earthquake and the Invention of America provides an intriguing narrative of hemispheric unsettling, tracing unexpected and arresting connections between European, North American, Caribbean, and Latin American literature over many centuries, including Indigenous, European, and white settler writers. The violence of colonization, Brickhouse warns, is never simply contained by the past. Instead, it continually haunts the colonizing imagination and repeatedly threatens to erupt into the present.