ABSTRACT
In the Western cultural imagination, the beach features prominently as a site in which humans seek to realise their fantasies of a return to nature, however short-lived; at the same time, reactions to encounters with dangerous wildlife there indicate that our cultural investment in the beach as vacationscape jars with our awareness of humanity as always already a part of nature. When sharks attack, the beach becomes a site of abjection, a zone where divisions so laboriously upheld by humans collapse. It is up to cultural mediation to repair what has been breached, and to mould the account of the shark attack into familiar narratives, thereby channelling our gory fascination with the fact that humans can be eaten and saving us from the full impact of the realisation that when sharks eat human flesh they do not merely devour individual human subjects but threaten our self-perception on a larger scale.
