In this seminar, I present a chapterization of my PhD manuscript across four core chapters that focus on an analytic engagement with issues of territory, spatiality and spatial dialectics. My research locates this in Kerala’s Alappad. Its conventional framing would make it contingent to global change, fragility of an insignificant narrow strip of ‘rural-coastal’ idyllic evolved around its fishing economy, all of which would be lost barring a few remnants of heritage value. Instead my research emphasises how this site is produced through multiple spatialities: fishing, thorium mining, a site of global spiritualism around the Mata Amritanandamayi Math, fishers' sacred territories and religiosity, and more recently emphasis on tourism via a series of coastal infrastructure development projects. Recent literatures mobilise ideas of Planetary Urbanisation to both extend and proventialise concepts of Accumulation by Dispossession in critical analysis of coastal renewal. In response, considerations of space, spatiality, and spatial dialectics have complicated these ideas. Here, my consideration of fishing practices co-produced across land and sea, help to sharpen these debates. It also raises broader questions to critique dualistic approaches framing littoral societies as contingent to wider meta transformative forces along teleological perspectives. The materiality of land-sea posed as situated histories and everyday practices helps nuanced understanding of territorial contests.

Keywords: Spatiality, spatiality, spatial dialect, littoral society