Afterword: The Littoral Museum of the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

Abstract The museum, the mausoleum, and the memorial are key concepts for theorizing beaches and ports in twenty-first-century literature and cinema. On the littoral, these constructions suggest the very opposite of a sealed off monumentality to become living museums of women’s labor in modern and contemporary France (Sciamma, Varda), bodily mausolea of migration on the Senegalese shoreline (Diop), and shapeshifting war memorials in Atlantic and Pacific tidelands (Darrieussecq, Rolin, Virilio). Examples of anamorphic seascapes, especially in photography, underscore the reversibility of sand and cement in Japan (Narahashi, Ono), as well as the dereliction of Cuban beach architecture and American industrial harbors (Morales, Sekula). In art as in criticism, the waterfront stages gender and class crossings (Dumont) and tangles fields. The afterword thereby weaves the major threads of the special issue: textures, labor, and ruins; social mobility and migration; marine life, geological time, and the history of sensation.