Littoral liminality : the colonial beaches of Zama and Salt of this sea

This thesis explores the beach as a site of decoloniality, whose place in-between land and ocean complicates stable binaries of ownership and infuses a racially-Othered subjectivity in its materiality. In what I term littoral liminality, the possibility of a watery, fluid ontology defies the logic and structures of coloniality and the Anthroprocene in a powerfully subdued resistance. I analyze Lucrecia Martel’s Zama (2017) whose beach is not simply the film’s setting, but also the instigator to the white colonial protagonist who desperately seeks his escape, and Annemarie Jacir’s Salt of this Sea (2008), which confronts the ownership of Palestinian beaches through a fluid embodiment to resist the hard lines and borders of the Israeli occupation. This paper is a careful mediation between two different spaces, time, and subjectivities through the shared site of the beach.