What question did this study set out to answer?

This article aims to introduce the concept of brackish culture to better understand how folklore shapes coastal spaces.

May 29, 2026

Brackish Imaginaries: Supernatural Folklore and the Making of Coastal Space in Nineteenth-Century Cornwall

Key Points

This article aims to introduce the concept of brackish culture to better understand how folklore shapes coastal spaces.
Develops a theoretical framework by critiquing the concept of entanglement in cultural analysis.
Applies the brackish conceptualization to the study of nineteenth-century Cornwall's coastal supernatural tales.
Examines the interplay between folklore and spatial politics, highlighting both its subversive and limiting factors.
Establishes brackish culture as a beneficial framework for analyzing coastal folkloric narratives.
Demonstrates how coastal tales of haunting blur temporal and spatial lines, creating a unique sense of place.
Reflects on the limitations of folklore's capacity for tactical subversion in spatial politics.

Abstract

This article proposes a new theoretical concept of brackish culture to analyse how coastal imaginaries are co-created through supernatural folklore. Questioning some of the limitations of entanglement as a theoretical approach, it argues that a brackish analogy of a co-mingled, in-between fluid state offers greater analytical potential, especially in relation to littoral spatial cultures. Firstly, it advances a brackish analogical conceptualisation in response to the over-use of entanglement as a means of analysing spatio-cultures. This is developed through recent theorising of relational and affective landscapes, performative space- and placemaking, ecosemiotics, and the supernatural narrativization of place. Secondly, it illustrates the application of a brackish conceptualisation of spatial cultures, focussing on nineteenth-century Cornwall as an area of Britain both rich in tales of coastal haunting and with a strongly defined spatial imaginary. Presenting the coast as an affective and emotional environment negotiated through stories of haunting, it highlights how these tales disturb and merge temporal and spatial boundaries. The third section considers the spatial power politics of coastal folklore, its ability to subvert more mundane spatial imaginaries from within, but also the factors that limited its use to a tacit rather than tactical subversion. The piece concludes with reflections on how a brackish conceptualisation makes an original contribution to coastal studies. Highlighting its potential superiority to notions of entanglement, a brackish concept helps destabilise some of the innate terrestrial biases and rigid conceptual boundaries that inform how we imagine littoral space.

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