Enduring colonial legacies in Philadelphia

By training, I am a cultural historian of early modern Europe and North America, and thus of the networks that created colonial Atlantic worlds, including the region that became known as Pennsylvania. The Schuylkill River is one of present-day Philadelphia's two rivers; it was named “hidden river” by Dutch explorers who knew it to be an important waterway from native informants but who couldn't find its mouth amidst the lush marsh that straddled its confluence with the larger Delaware. This “hidden” river plays a vital role in the book I am writing, Utopia Found and Lost in Penn's Woods. I also work very near the banks of the Schuylkill River, and I often spend time there when I need to take a break from reading, to walk, and to think.

In 2015, after a day spent submerged in the pages of various seventeenth- and eighteenth-century descriptions of the river's bounty—in German, English, and French, some translated from the “Delaware” (Lenape)—the river as it was on that day insisted that it be considered. How had it become what ecologists variously call a “patchy environment,” a “novel ecosystem,” or more pointedly, “trash” (for more on these distinctions, see Wiggin, Premoli, and Sarti). Lined by walking trails, traversed by major highways and rail lines, the river had simultaneously become the site of an oil refinery and Bartram's Garden, naturalist and slave-owner John Bartram's landmark historic home perched on a high bluff over a broad bend in the waterway. Facing one another across the river, the juxtaposition between the polluting petrochemical complex and the verdant garden was jarring. In the weeks, months, and years that followed, I became somewhat obsessed with this “forgotten place” (Gilmore) that was sorely missing a community of care.

Over the past several decades, humanistic fields of study, including some strands of German studies, have grown to include vastly more diverse objects of examination. For those, like myself, trained originally in language and literature departments, this slow interdisciplinary turn has meant learning to read myriad other forms, often through creative interdisciplinary lenses. And yet, humanistic objects of inquiry remain, as Caroline Levine also argues, most often diminutive: the untranslatable concept, the luminous detail, the exceptional event. (One notable exception is of course “distant reading,” or what Franco Moretti also called the study of “normal literature” and the sociology of literature more broadly.) The humanist occupation with the small is not limited only to the space that humanistic objects take up, but as David Armitage and Jo Guldi have documented, it is also true of humanistic analytics of time. Working at the scale of a work or even a movement, style, or period limits apprehension of lives “in the wake,” as Christina Sharpe has shown, and it blinkers our view of the forms and structures that, over centuries, shape both landscapes and individual lives.

Finding methods that allow work at the middle durée is a central concern of Utopia Found and Lost. For me, that's meant learning how to read larger “genres” that exceed the textual, including rivers, creeks, and neighborhoods; and it's meant learning narrative techniques beyond historic realism. To do so, I have immersed myself in environmental history and the history of science, environmental anthropology, and science and technology studies (STS). I have come to regard environmental case studies as modes of genre or formal criticism.

J.T. Roane and Justin Hosbey's concept of Black ecologies has helped me to conceptualize methods of historical research commensurate to the “patchy environment” of the Schuylkill River (Wiens). These include the crafting of non-linear narratives that mark times on historically distant shores, times that puncture the present and overdetermine the future. Philadelphia, a majority Black city, is sometimes known today as “the nation's largest poor city” (Saffron). Named in 1682 as “the city of brotherly love” by English Quaker founder William Penn, Philadelphia's neighboring town was named “Germanopolis” by German and Dutch settler colonialists, including Francis Daniel Pastorius. There, settlers could and did speak German and tried to live in a “teutsch” (upright, honest, but also German) manner amidst their English, Swedish, and Lenape neighbors. Penn, Pastorius, and others with a humanistic, classical education understood the multilingual word play that translated the “brotherly love” of Penn's Greek name into Pastorius's punning Latin “translation” of Philadelphia as “Germanopolis,” Germantown, today a neighborhood in the city. Philadelphia is a place where colonial history endures, putting many inhabitants under duress (Stoler). Colonial history endures in local archives filled with rich German-language materials. And it endures in the built environment, as colonial-era decisions made about land-water relations continue to shape today's lived realities, adversely affecting populations made still more vulnerable by climate change (see Figure 1).

These maps trace the movement of waterlines they both document and facilitate. Heavy industry hardened relations between the wet and the dry, “reclaiming” land and removing marsh, swamps, and islands. Vulnerable human populations were co-located with the increasingly polluted rivers. Many neighborhoods face a triple threat of flooding today: from “nuisance” flooding that has become chronic, from storm surge, and from sea level rise. Historic waterlines seen on older maps from the eighteenth century indicate where water is returning amidst extreme rain and storms.

Living in Philadelphia amidst enduring colonial relations has prompted me to devise research projects that address these colonial relations, often by inviting research co-creation (Martin-Hill, Gibson, Looking Horse, Gendron, Anson, McQueen, and Tehahenteh). On a modest scale, these projects attempt to foster anticolonial relations and mutualism, and they are informed by my sense that the university where I am employed, the University of Pennsylvania, should acknowledge its colonial beginnings and its enduring colonial relations. The university's institutional predecessor, the College of Philadelphia, was founded amidst the “French and Indian War,” the “first global war,” fought in theatres on five continents. The college's first provost, Anglican William Smith, drilled students to forsake Quaker and German “sectarian” pacifism and join the combat “o'er a savage land” (qtd. in McGinley 43–44). Smith's educational program, animated by “the anti-Indian sublime” (Silver 192–202), further contributed to the dissolution of relations of reciprocity that Lenape and some European settler colonists had labored to maintain over decades (Wiggin, “Multilingual Soundings” 12–22).

Entangled with the forms and structures of rivers and creeks as well as their textual representations, my work is ineluctably enmeshed in worlds beyond those more familiar to humanists: the campus classroom, the library, or the archive. In trying to understand how these worlds have been made, I am also responding to them and acting on them. In collaborating with extra-academic partners, I have tried to become accountable to them, embracing this accountability by making publicly engaged work response-able to worlds beyond the academic. Settler colonialism transformed Lenapehoking into resources—turning its rivers and its tributaries into highways and waste sinks. In lieu of conclusion, I offer windows into place-based, co-created work including digital archives where collaborators’ voices can be seen and heard (see Figure 2).

This card and dozens of others were sent to elected officials in our present by their authors, eighth-graders in several Philadelphia schools, who had imaginatively time travelled to 2100. The collection of cards beckons other land-water relations into becoming. Imaginatively, they tell of gradations of wetness as sea levels rise and storms surge with chemically saturated histories. With good humor and dry wit, the stories from the future suggest we must attend to the river's story today, accounting for its histories—as a site for heavy industry, as a waste dump, as a place for free Blacks, as an ecologically abundant site—and remediating its toxic legacies before they pollute the future. 

The Philadelphia oil refinery began operations during the American Civil War and was in near-continuous operation until its “final explosion” in 2019, termed a “close call” by city officials. One million people lived in its blast zone. After the refinery's explosion, I began working with students and neighbors in Gray's Ferry, a refinery fenceline neighborhood, to document neighbors’ experiences of life with refining and to help them create and lead neighborhood tours. The qualitative data offered by neighbors’ long-form oral histories suggest the quantitative data we badly need to repair. And they also point to how data poverty reproduces structures of analog, or lived, poverty. Residents are caught in cycles of environmental injustice fueled by systemic racism. (For more on the project, see Futures Beyond Refining; Wiggin, “Restoring a River”; and Anand, Wiggin, Pranjal, and Dikshit).

This public storytelling and story-sharing project responds directly to Philadelphia high school teachers’ desire to teach climate literacy in classrooms across the curriculum (see Figure 3). Today, it offers in-roads for participation by learners as young as twelve, who may contribute by following prompts available on the project website (see My Climate Story). In 2024, twelve Campus Correspondents, college students at twelve universities across North America, are working with My Climate Story to document and share short climate stories from their campuses. All project participants are co-creating a public “story bank,” a compendium of qualitative data that records how climate change is changing individuals’ lives. It is searchable by location and climate impact. Storytelling prompts are given in fifteen world languages, although the majority of the two hundred climate stories contributed to date are overwhelmingly in English.