Paper short abstract:

This article is concerned with the circulations of piscine animals – both dead and alive, with human experience of crisis / time, and with the character of the divine under terraqueous capitalism in Senegal.

Paper long abstract:

This article is concerned with the circulations of piscine animals – both dead and alive, with human experience of crisis / time, and with the character of the divine under terraqueous capitalism in Senegal. It weaves together an anthropological account of the unhealthy making of an Afropolitan piscine commodity, keccax bu amul xorom – a non-salted species of smoked and dried fish – at one locale on the Senegalese Atlantic seaboard, where decades of protracted fisheries extractivism and the violence it brings about have long rendered crisis into a permanent condition. Grounded in an ethnographic description of the everyday materiality of the crisis at a site placed under the sign of fish, this article sketches the history and current production politics of this charismatic yet astonishingly spectral commodity. Bringing Jacques Derrida’s (1994) Specters of Marx into conversation with Achille Mbembe’s (2002) invitation to read (African) ‘subjectivity as time’ (p. 242), I argue for a refined understanding of the (commodified) animal as time. The corollary of this proposition is that anthropological accounts of contemporary human experiences of time under capitalism on the continent should take (more) seriously the entanglement of humans with nonhuman animals and their cyclical absences and presences; a concern which political ecology has yet to better engage in critiques of the devastating relations between capitalism and nature. The article concludes with remarks about the (im)possible extinction of piscine animals in postcolonial ruins placed under the sign of the divine.