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Paper Short Abstract:

This paper explores the interconnections between the transnational exploitation of Senegal’s fish and the migration of young Senegalese by sea to Spain. Placing the ocean at the center of the analysis, it examines how certain lives are produced as economically valuable but unworthy of protection.

Paper Abstract:

With 700 kilometers of coastline, Senegal’s culture and economy are intimately connected to the ocean. Fish crowns the country’s most iconic dish, cëebu jën, and the country itself is said to be named after the traditional fishing boat: the gaal, or pirogue. Nowadays, however, traditional fishers’ catch is dwindling, and pirogues are increasingly used not to go fishing but to make the dangerous sea journey to the Spanish Canary Islands. Spain is the destination not only of disenchanted youths – many of them fishermen and others from coastal areas – but also of a large share of the fish caught in their country’s waters by large, industrial trawlers that locals blame for the decimation of fish banks. Once in Spain, however, migrants are less welcome than their fish: some are deported; many are given unfulfilled expulsion orders and effectively irregularised: allowed to stay without formal authorization nor rights to reside or work, thus vulnerable to precarity and labour exploitation. Drawing from long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Senegal and Spain, and situating at the core of the analysis the ocean’s duality as source of life and loss, space of closure and connection, this paper examines how value, exclusion and exploitability are produced in the Anthropocene. It explores how certain lives (human, oceanic) are produced as worthy of economic exploitation, but not of rights and protection. The oceanic waters from which both fish and migrants originate serves a prism through which to analyse the interconnections between the exploitation of nature and humans.