America’s Intracoastal Waterway: Understanding the nation through narratives about infrastructure

Traversing the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts of the United States, the Intracoastal Waterway comprises 4828 km of protected canals, with 3218.7 km running from Boston to the Florida Keys, and 1609 km running from Carrabelle, Florida to Brownsville, Texas. Often used by commercial vehicles, especially in the transportation of petroleum and petroleum products, the canal gets understood and discussed within American society in a variety of ways. Reading across different texts, I explore how the Intracoastal Waterway has been narrativised, including within a lineage of settler-colonialism, as an ecologically disruptive infrastructure project and as a space for life-affirming encounters. Among these texts I find two dominant modes of narrativising this infrastructure project, each of which impact our understanding of it and, by extension, the nation. Hegemonic narratives emphasise the canal’s place within a nation-wide history of colonisation, while local narratives emphasise the ecology, history, and people surrounding the canal. Altogether, by considering these different approaches we get a complicated understanding of how America gets understood, both locally and at the national level, through the stories told about its infrastructure.