following the questions of fraught coastal intimacies, we enter into the even more treacherous belts of the erotic, of pleasure, leisure and desire potentialities, of the movements of bodies, organs, of sensuous viscerality, their uses, their ends within themselves.

the carnival, carnal, porous structuration of the self and desire. 

(c)littoral questions the investments in the flesh from the coast across the atlantic to the americas. it prefigures modes of erotics at play at the coast, drawing from the sexuality of yemoja and the duplicity of esu-legba, their brimming surplus of gendered configurations, the rise of commercial sex work along the coast during, before, and after colonization, the return of formerly enslaved folk from the americas to the west african coasts with their technologies of self, gender and sexuality, the sexual license sanctioned by the restructuring of the economies around profit, the possessive individualisms and inventions of the powerful whose dilated appetites demand more flesh. 

the question of the erotic, of the libidinal flows and recoils, is entangled with the ethical limits of desire—an entanglement with its dangers and necessities.

(c)littoral fashions itself around the possibly minimized or obfuscated propulsions of desire among west africans enslaved within the violent architectures on the shoreline, and the middle passage. it also explores the attempts by coastal elites in the 19th century to control the bodies of women through colonial laws, the invention of homophobic codes to govern bodies that rebel against heteronormativity, and the more effective imposition of gender hierarchies. it accounts for, traces forms of arousals, the swellings and squirtings of the roiling waves on the shore, the push, pull and relaxation of shoreline fractals, of foams bristling and bursting, of lives dissolving into the melting heat of passion, to heightened life or spiritual death.

(c)littoral is interested in the ethics of pleasure, its supposed limitations when surrounded by subjugation, degradation, and the destruction of human beings and their material bodies. it follows and haunts the expressions of leisure, voluptuous despair and abandon, as are practised now just as they were practised in the past, the sublime surrender to the boisterous expanse, a seething sheet of meaning, hope, confusion and pain, a mangled coil of desire and regret. 

the paradoxes of the sublime, of the body, as that which is susceptible to the brush and tug of distant forces, of the tidal incursions against and for the body, of the celestial effect upon terrestrial bodies, of the hint of portentous proximity, or gravitation and gravidity and miscegenation. 

here, pleasure is figured within a geographic habitus, wherefrom it emanates, returns, diminishes or intensifies. The (c)littoral summons the suppositions of tourisms along the coasts, the sexual economies that undergird them, the long tissues of desire that subtend the economic and political movements of the shorelines.

one also thinks of fluids, both those of cleansing and pollution, those that cool and those that torch the air. we are talking of the black scourge of oil extraction along our coasts, the many spills of black fossils upon the seas, lagoons and lakes, the planetary levels of disasters building up along our coasts, but also the blood leaks of the working class, of the seeping of quick metal in the waters due to gold mining, the poisoning of the arteries of nations for the extraction of gold, oil, bauxite.

an anti-mythologizing praxis moves the (c)littoral. the clitoris is a tip, a phenomenon with a deep substructure, it emerges, or is always emerging. the staging of this genital middle ground is of importance here, a kind of non-arriving motion, like the movement at the shore.