The discussion between land and water transcends the fixity of geographical context, of architectonic accidents. The articulation between water and land is loaded with experiences. Here death and life sustain one another in extremis (Taussig, 2004), which abolitionists call black shoals (King, 2019), and which some bad examples refer to as swamps (Taussig, 2013). The chattel slavery system served itself with fungible black bodies as interchangeable and replaceable endemic to the commodity (King, 2019). Colonial violence arranges and rearranges black bodies for infinite kinds of use (King, 2019). Black shoals or swamps as a unit of sticky bushes become the beginning and the end, life and death, the cemetery of the Nation-State (Taussig, 2013). This is a mobile cemetery that disperses dead and useless bodies that have been shipwrecked in the water until they can land. The limit between water and land is similar to the balance between life and death. Shipwrecked bodies are no longer considered "autonomous" bodies (Hustak & Myers, 2012; Neimanis, 2017). They have become something else; they are the bodies that have transcended their own skin; they are the bodies that have become niches of multiple bodies such as worms, germs, and wigglers (Neimanis, 2017; Taussig, 2013). These bodies began their lives as fugitives and fungibles away from home, and now they are flesh homes to many actualized bodies. Their death with its powerful impetus revolves our stomachs but to update social life where land and water will meet.
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