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Anna Brickhouse, Earthquake and the Invention of America: The Making of Elsewhere Catastrophe

Christopher Bates
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Anna Brickhouse, Earthquake and the Invention of America: The Making of Elsewhere Catastrophe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Oxford Studies in American Literary History, 2024, 368 pages, ISBN: 9780198914143, £103.

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1In a recent episode of The Ezra Klein Show, New York Times reporter David Wallace-Wells was asked “What have we forgotten?” about the Covid-19 pandemic. He bluntly replied: “the death.” In the rush to return to a sense of normalcy in the wake of this truly global disaster, the majority were quick to forget about the 30 million people who died across the globe, with Wallace-Walls underlining that “[f]undamentally, almost all of us have forgotten […] the basic medical trauma which we lived through.”

2What Wallace-Wells’s pithy statement echoes is an ideology at the center of Anna Brickhouse’s meticulous and capacious new monograph Earthquake and the Invention of America: a wilful amnesia of disastrous events, both natural and human-caused, that displaces them to sometime and/or somewhere else in order to shore-up the exceptional status of the US itself, a phenomenon Brickhouse terms in the book’s subtitle “elsewhere catastrophe.” Just as Covid-19 made acutely visible the geopolitical, socio-cultural, and biological networks with which we are all embroiled in our contemporary moment, Brickhouse’s history of literature and thought across North and Latin America reveals how disasters, both natural and manmade, are inseparable from similarly complex and continent-spanning networks of settler-colonialism and slavery, which may have remained invisible were it not for the attention Brickhouse pays to their subterranean strata. Of course, as Brickhouse’s introduction asserts, earthquakes are the “exemplary elsewhere catastrophe”: they are an “enduring figure both for the world-negating violence of colonialism and […] for the potential eruption of a world built on conquest” (1).

3The attention to the social-political phenomena that are attached to earthquakes places Earthquake and the Invention of America within a growing arena of criticism, including Dana Luciano’s How the Earth Feels (2024) and Karen Pinkus’ Subsurface (2023), which demonstrates that even something as putatively stable as geology is anything but, especially since, as Brickhouse acknowledges, “our current ecological era—the so-called Anthropocene—has established humans as geological agents in truly earth-shattering ways” (6). What Earthquake and the Invention of America brings to this growing body of what might be called the geological humanities is nothing short of a comprehensive literary history of earthquakes and “elsewhere catastrophe” that ranges from Plato’s Republic to N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy. Containing chapters covering Leibniz, Voltaire, Guaman Poma de Ayala, William Bradford, Crèvecoeur, Poe, Fenimore Cooper, Melville, and several others, this monograph is an impressive display of both textual breadth and close reading that, Brickhouse argues, “challenge[s] a dismissal of depth in much recent work in the humanities that describes itself as post-critical” (13). Such a challenge may account for why the book regularly switches between earthquake as a metaphor on one hand and as a material force shaping the world and its geology on the other; the otherwise extensive introduction may have benefitted from reflecting on the difference between these two modalities of earthquake thought, as the blurred boundaries between the two are occasionally ambiguous throughout the remainder of the text.

4The first chapter, “Elsewhere Catastrophe,” sees Brickhouse work backwards from the US Civil War to Plato to elucidate how “[c]atastrophe is from the outset understood to have happened elsewhere” than the US (27). Beginning with Poe’s “The Premature Burial” (1844), a text which includes a global “delineation of disaster” (Brickhouse 27), Brickhouse argues how the assertion that such catastrophes “[are] not and [are] never happening” in the United States is really a deferral (27; original emphasis)—a disavowal of an “overwhelming apprehension of the catastrophe of slavery” that was splitting the US at the time and generating a “simultaneous need to metabolize that emotion into the metaphoric logic of an elsewhere catastrophe” (27). Echoing the argument of the monograph as a whole, however, “Poe’s tale suggests” that “all catastrophe represents a deeper and abiding possibility: that a world built on conquest, slavery, and dispossession might be overturned by the dispossessed” (28). It is this possibility that necessitates placing catastrophe elsewhere, as recognizing the horrors of slavery and conquest “would mean contending with the possible rupture of the surface hiding the subterranean” (29). To unpick the origins of these phenomena, Brickhouse then winds the clock back millennia to Plato’s “alternative history of rupture” (57). Undertaking careful re-readings of foundational moments in Platonic thought—the myth of Gyges, the myth of Er, the myth of metals and the noble lie—Brickhouse reveals a vein of seismicity across the Republic, Critias, and Timaeus that both justifies and challenges the stratification of society, including its slave and slave-holding classes, inaugurating a “mode of thought that helped produce a broken world” (57) and which powerfully connects across the years to her meditations on Poe.

5Central to the second chapter, “Predatory Optimism,” and the book as a whole is the eighteenth-century concept of theodicy. To situate the concept within her theory of earthquakes, Brickhouse brings together several philosophers central to the Enlightenment—Kant, Leibniz, Rousseau, Smith, and Voltaire—around the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. This “foundational catastrophe in the shaping of Western thought” enabled those molding it to argue that “[c]atastrophe brings—and retroactively justifies—the creation of new worlds” and that “prosperity here is fundamentally tied to catastrophe elsewhere” (63, 65, 66). Brickhouse then takes the assertion in Voltaire’s Candide that ‘“the North will enrich itself on [the] fatal losses’ of other worlds” (Brickhouse 79) as a defining example of a predatory optimism that, alongside theodicy, justifies the conquest and suffering of great swathes of the earth in order for its conquerors to flourish. Significantly, deploying Candide here enables Brickhouse to explore both the formation and eighteenth-century critique of such cruel optimism, while, at the same time, through a detailed exploration of the novel’s depiction of the Guarani war, “emplac[ing] the Lisbon earthquake within a global history indelibly shaped by the conquest of the Americas” (87). Brickhouse then nuances this reading towards the end of the chapter through an original connection between Candide, the Lima-Callao earthquake of 1746 and Amédée-François Frézier’s 1716 Relation du Voyage de la Mer du Sud aux cotes de Chili, Pérou, et du Brésil. However, it is the English translation of Frézier’s text by Henry Johnson and its refiguring of the Lima-Callao earthquake as “an opportunity for a new ‘conquest of those rich kingdoms’” that enables Brickhouse to convincingly conclude the chapter by asserting that “all disaster response in the imperial world […] was indelibly molded by colonizing experience,” generating a “prehistory of disaster capitalism as it emerged from the rise of the European empire and racial capitalism” (95).

6The Latin nature of “elsewhere catastrophe” is the ostensible subject of the book’s third chapter, as is the Aymara and Quechua notion of pachacuti, which refers both to the earth-shattering power of earthquakes and to the processes of “reversal and change,” “the remaking of time,” and “the earthquake-renewal of the world” (111, 4). In arguably the book’s most original and entertaining chapter, Brickhouse unfolds the power of pachacuti and Indigenous thought in the torrid zone to reimagine and resist the stratifications that form in the wake of conquest by placing colonial and Indigenous-authored texts in opposition. Thus, we see Andean historian’s Guaman Poma’s conception of pachacuti as that which acknowledges earthquakes’ “colonial contingency but also [their] potential ground for creating a different order” contrasted with Spanish Jesuit Jose de Acosta’s Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1590), in which earthquakes are deployed as a means by which to “vindicate the violence of conquest itself” (112, 109). In a hybridization of these viewpoints, Brickhouse dedicates much of the chapter to El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, whose name indicates his dual Spanish-Andean heritage and whose long-celebrated Comentarios reales de los Incas (1609) outlines a dualistic approach, which, like Guaman Poma, enlists “earthquake as a unifying metaphor for colonialism but also, conversely, a powerful idiom for the pachacuti that might bring about colonialism’s end” (117). Yet, in distinction to Guaman Poma, whose work was only rediscovered in the twentieth century, Garcilaso’s Comentarios Reales, which is “masterfully recounted according to the terms of classical and Renaissance models” (113), was widely read, albeit misunderstood, by those same Enlightenment philosophers Brickhouse analyses in chapter two. This therefore enables Brickhouse to posit that “Voltaire’s critique of theodicy may have emerged first in El Inca’s land of the earthquakes” (130), providing a valuable Latin American and Indigenous take on Enlightenment thinking about earthquakes and conquest.

7If the opening half of the book seeks to situate “elsewhere catastrophe” and a literary history of earthquake within a transatlantic frame dating back thousands of years, the second half looks to trace this history through the canonical authors of American literature from the sixteenth to nineteenth century. This section begins with the work of William Bradford and Cotton Mather, whose writing on the early settlements of new England is rife with accounts of earthquakes that “threatened more than the physical stability of houses and churches” by “disturb[ing] the fragile psychological and metaphysical ground of colonial occupation” (Brickhouse 144). Moreover, these texts and their milieu are haunted by the “spectres” of those forces that challenge the settlers’ worldview, including revolt and subordination from Indigenous and enslaved populations.

8The most engaging chapter of part two, though, is chapter five, which provokes a new, earthquake-centered response to Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s canonical question “What is an American?” (qtd. in Brickhouse 183). Placing Letters from an American Farmer in dialogue with his lesser-known essay “Rock of Lisbon,” Brickhouse argues that her novel concept of the “settler colonial sublime” is key to answering Crèvecoeur’s provocation (182). The settler colonial sublime is, following Brickhouse, the modality which generates what Crèvecoeur described as a “new sort of happiness” that the settlers of eighteenth-century America felt at beholding a vast, uncultivated space on which to develop and grow (Crèvecoeur qtd. in Brickhouse 184). Of course, such a view runs roughshod over the rights of extant Indigenous nations and ignores the networks of settler-colonialism and slavery that enabled settlers to flourish. It is this disavowal of the suffering of others and the relief that it is not happening to settlers such as Crèvecoeur that facilitates the new sort of happiness that characterizes an American. The originality of Brickhouse’s coinage of the “settler colonial sublime” lies, though, in her modulation of Edmund’s Burke famous dictum that sublimity lies not in “any idea of positive pleasure” but rather “passions which belong to self preservation [and] turn on pain and danger” (qtd. in Brickhouse 184), an idea she connects with the “elsewhere catastrophe” presented through Crèvecoeur’s analysis of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake in “Rock of Lisbon.” Here, Brickhouse deftly analyses Crèvecoeur’s imperial history of Lisbon, with its inaugural roles in slavery and global trade, as being inherently fragile, with the 1755 earthquake thus becoming the “recurring, disavowed sign of this fragility” (Brickhouse 188). In doing so, much like the theodicy discussed in chapter two, the “envisioned horrid desolation of earthquake in southerly Lisbon becomes the source of the ‘northern’ spectator’s peculiarly American ‘new sort of happiness’; Lisbon’s destruction defines America’s immunity from seismic catastrophe” (188).

9If the settler colonial sublime is to function in the long term, though, then the earthquake destruction of elsewhere that propagates American happiness must be continually reinscribed. Yet this back-bending logic requires perpetual forgetting of those earthquakes, disasters, and uprisings that ostensibly do occur on American soil, an “earthquake amnesia” that denies “that the settler colonial state may one day be swallowed by the earth” (228). Brickhouse pursues this notion in chapter 6 through Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) and “the great, forgotten seismic novel of US literary history” (19), James Fenimore Cooper’s The Crater (1847). Unlike many of the texts Brickhouse discusses earlier that reinforce settler-colonialism’s sense of “elsewhere catastrophe” and earthquake amnesia, Poe’s and Cooper’s novels deploy Indigenous characters with powers of unsettlement to offer a much needed “resistance to the stability of the settler terms” that is, Brickhouse acknowledges, “a critique from within that cannot escape the conditions of its own possibility” (254). From here until the book’s epilogue, Brickhouse’s chapters follow a similar structure, whereby she plumbs the depths of canonical authors from the US nineteenth century to excavate their seismic credentials and the extent to which they either reinforce or challenge the ideology behind “elsewhere catastrophe.” In this way we see readings of Melville’s “The Encantadas” and “Benito Cereno” (1856) that utilize recent criticism to place his texts within a Latin American and Pacific context, aligning effectively with the rich vein of Indigenous and Latin thought that pervades many of the monograph’s chapters.

10Finally, in chapter 8, Brickhouse adds a last stratigraphic layer to her geological thesis, pulling together the work of Frederick Douglass, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, and José Martí—authors who, at times, are awkward bedfellows—to demonstrate the spread of attitudes shaping US literature, before, during, and after the seismic singularity of the Civil War. Whether these authors celebrate the unsettlement of an American sense of “elsewhere catastrophe” that relies on slavery or settler colonialism (Douglass), figure it as a distant, yet impending and omni-present disaster (Dickinson), diminish it through humour in a bid to escape its challenge to the settler status-quo (Twain), or, as Martí does, powerfully remind us that earthquake and the social eruptions it serves as a figure for “will happen” despite attempts to disavow them (332) original emphasis), earthquakes are ultimately inescapable. Ending the chapter (and the main body of the book) powerfully, Brickhouse asserts, “there can never be harmony until you [the conqueror] remediate the violence of conquest throughout the hemisphere and indeed the global-colonial world” (332).

  • 1 Admittedly, some of these events would have taken place after the book was written, yet global disa (...)

11As suggested above, the book is powerful in both the breadth and depth of its analysis, crossing millennia and unearthing textual gemstones from within the sediment of literary history, providing a unique figure, the earthquake, through which to interrogate the world in which we currently exist. Given this scope and the potential applications for readers in the twenty-first century, more extended meditations on the presence of “elsewhere catastrophe” in the present would have been welcomed. How, for example, do we conceive of “elsewhere” in light of the LA wildfires and the climate crises that led to them, the horrors taking place in Gaza, Covid-19, or the rapid erosion of the humanities across universities, especially in the US? These are all disasters that are unsettling the literal and theoretical ground upon which we form our criticism in the current moment and which, through technological advancement and the 24-hour news cycle can now be said to be “everywhere catastrophes,” inescapable, oppressive, and far harder to ignore than in past centuries.1 Rather than grapple with such pressing questions, though, the book’s epilogue turns away from disaster in the present to consider instead the speculative futures of N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy (2015-2017). While Jemisin’s text is a powerful illustration of humanity’s geological agency and the extent to which this agency is marred by a history of conquest and oppression, turning to it feels like a missed opportunity to really explore the value—which certainly exists—of earthquakes and elsewhere catastrophe when confronting the disasters and ruptures of today. Overall, however, Brickhouse’s work is a testament to the importance of depth, explored through masterful close reading, and offers a vital and original contribution to current work in the environmental humanities, postcolonial studies, and literary history.

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Bibliographie

BRICKHOUSE, Anna. Earthquake and the Invention of America: The Making of Elsewhere Catastrophe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024.

LUCIANO, Dana. How the Earth Feels: Geological Fantasy in the Nineteenth-Century United States. Durham: Duke University Press, 2024.

“MAHA is a Bad Answer to a Good Question.” The Ezra Klein Show from New York Times, 22 August 2025, nytimes.com/2025/08/22/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-rachael-bedard-david-wallace-wells.html.

PINKUS, Karen. Subsurface. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2023.

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Notes

1 Admittedly, some of these events would have taken place after the book was written, yet global disasters in the present are nonetheless ubiquitous.

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Christopher Bates, « Anna Brickhouse, Earthquake and the Invention of America: The Making of Elsewhere Catastrophe »Transatlantica [En ligne], 2 | 2025, mis en ligne le 01 décembre 2025, consulté le 16 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/26949 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15i2t

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Christopher Bates

University of Sussex

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