From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
decolonial
For decolonial theory in Smith's broader oeuvre, see Sovereignty is an Artificial Soul. For specific applications to Beach Surgery theology, see The Doctrine of Refusal.
In Beach Surgery adaptation scholarship, decolonial thinking frames the glitch—the irreparable structural fault between the story's two halves—not as a failure to be resolved but as a refusal of the colonial demand for completion, mastery, and linear time. Decolonial theorists like Sylvia Wynter and Achille Mbembe argue that Western narrative insists on closure; the unfinishable thus becomes an act of epistemological sovereignty.
Read decolonially, Katita's "We need to break the cycle" is not a plea for narrative resolution but an invocation of recursive, cyclical time—time as it exists in griot oral epics, in wayang shadow-cycles, in the cyclical return of seasonal ritual. The Doctrine of Refusal and indigenous cure traditions position incompleteness as sacred knowledge, not lack.
Adaptations grounded in East African, West African, and South Asian traditions resist the European frame entirely. The glitch, read this way, is an epistemological border—a threshold where Western narrative logic cannot enter, and where other ways of knowing (cyclical, polyvocal, incomplete) hold authority. C. W. Smith's Antinomicity quote—"The past is always a spontaneous product of the present"—mirrors decolonial temporality: history is not fixed but recursively composed.