Cover of a book titled 'Renee Gladman Prose Architectures' with black text on a white background.
Title page of a book titled "Poetics of Relation" by Édouard Glissant, translated by Betsy Wing, published by the University of Michigan Press in Ann Arbor.
Title page with bold text: 'Our Sister Killjoy or Reflections from a Black-Eyed Squint. Ama Ata Aidoo.' A logo with the letters INDO/ORK at the bottom.
Title page of a book titled "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts" by Amos Tutuola, with a foreword by Reverend Geoffrey Parrinder.
Book cover titled 'Black and Blur' by Fred Moten, published by Duke University Press in 2017.

through littoral: (inter)tidal textualities we consider the littoral zones as a pretext for developing a literary counter-aesthetic. littoral zones are liminal geographies, they are sites of perpetual flux. ecologically, they are areas of high turbidity and biodiversity. thus, with the shore as our locus, we simultaneously propose and enact a turbid literary practice, after éduoard glissant’s poetics of relation and the “right to opacity”. 


italicized phrases, glossaries, the singular authorial subject, and show-don't-tell maxims have become a few methods for ignoring and repressing the flourishes of language inherent in the embodied (oral, performative, gestural) and textual traditions from the global south. the current capitalist regime weaponizes genre and emphasizes categorizability/transparency of authorial identity, audience, and subject matter at the expense of writers from the colonized world who navigate the fundamental contradiction of resisting the metropole with its own rhetorical/linguistic principles.  

these stressors, alongside the writer’s need for economic stability and artistic visibility,  create the conditions for a stifled imaginative range. with (inter)tidal textualities, we roundly oppose these impulses. we, susceptible to this symbolic violence, resist with an obstinate pleasure in the sounds and shapes decidedly indigestible to the so-called universal audience: whiteness. the text need not operate in the singular trimmed fashion generated and perpetuated in west-centric writing workshops. we know that the text can flow in varying directions, bloom like underwater foliage, and become an errant subject, refusing the strictures of form and genre established through violence.  

through littoral, we perform the structural misrecognitions and miscommunication between dialoguing minds. by decentering clarity, the idea of a clean transmission of message from one zone to the other, we will find liberty in the cut and mix, in the infinite recombination of signs, a flood that spills beyond the narrow band/zone/belt/region of sense/logic/reason/understanding.