After Coasts: Cartography, Desiccation, and Dwelling in Amphibious Worlds

As cities and nation-states design massive coastal development projects, I show in this review how these projects require and produce emptied and flattened surfaces necessary for the workings of coloniality, racial capitalism, and enslavement, dispossessing amphibious modes of life and livelihood in their wake. Nevertheless, despite their accreted force (and also perhaps because of it), colonial and postcolonial projects to stabilize and concretize coasts are always falling apart. Their disrepair manifests how projects, and the lives and landscapes they make, continue to be situated in amphibious worlds. Building on the work of scholars in anthropology, geography, science and technology studies, and Black studies, I first draw attention to the spatial and temporal rhythms in which social groups dwell in amphibious terrain. Second, thinking with Kamu Brathwaite's formulation of tidalectics and Tiffany Lethabo King's formulation of shoals, I show how concepts of an amphibious anthropology lend themselves to reading the compromised yet consequent forces with which sedimented and sodden social and natural histories matter. Finally, I return to Peters & Steinberg's provocation of more-than-wet ontologies to unpack how an amphibious anthropology might register and theorize the permeability of the body and, in so doing, address the long-standing separations between environmental science and the health sciences.