how can one speak of intimacy where a sinister connotation overdetermines what forms of touch are possible under the trade in flesh? how can we shift, if for a bit, from the intense, roiling life of the hold, to imagine the vast fields of cultures, their intimate tensions, betrayals, and loyalties? what is (west)african personhood, if it ever existed? what happens when (west)african personhood encounters the descendants of the enslaved, the objectified, the socially dead? what happens when the (west)african person becomes the enslaved, the objectified, the socially dead?

coastal intimacies are necessary but uncomfortable touches. like the knuckle pressed hard against the rib to dislodge a choke, we explore the (fraught) relations and the (wounded) kinship between the continent and the black diaspora. through coastal intimacies we ask questions, open up the conversation anew, with the akan flourish of yɛ nim, nanso yɛ bisa (we already know why, yet we ask), an answer to its antagonist nipa a wo nim no ewia  no, wonnsɔ kanea ɛnnhwɛ nenim anadwo (the person with whom you are familiar in daylight should not be identified by a lamp in the night).  these proverbs stage the paradox of recognition, an example of the antagonistic tendencies within cultures. however, misrecognitions populate social reality. through coastal intimacies, we explore these epistemes of misrecognition.

coastal intimacies are proddings into the sensitive corners of intraracial contacts. the coast is etymologically linked to the rib, flank, side, the uncomfortable sensation of being tickled, the horror-stunned laughter as its effect. the coast is the pre-transit, the site where many humans, strangers among familiars, are fused into the commodities in the middle passage. it is the shore in the literal sense. here the african was shaved, washed, and sheared away from the land, now strangely familiar, into a hostile alienation of the middle passage and the americas. it is a site of paradoxes, of limits that transcend immanently.

the africans of the west african coast have also been altered by encounter in that irruptive event of enslavement, it is the uncanny sameness of the trans-atlantic diasporic african to the continental african, a series of misrecognitions that both constitute and dismantle the littoral zones of blackness, as an articulable, articulatory, cluster of position-takings, or position-inflictions, in the arrangement of empire.