This introduction theorizes the littoral zone as a space for rethinking comparative literature and the environmental humanities. Beaches and ports are among the twentieth century’s most vexed and polyvalent cultural geographies. The article contends that the tidelands should be approached as a representational and geophysical overlap, an amalgamation of industry, biology, text, and image. Beaches and ports are ecological and industrial force fields: spaces of prohibition and pleasure, labor and play, exposure and refuge. They are the staging grounds and terraformed dreamscapes of carbon-based capitalism—but they are also potential commons in which different rhythms of existence come into view.
https://read.dukeupress.edu/comparative-literature/issue/73/2