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Paper short abstract

This paper extends “illicit seas” to the Sea of Marmara, linking the erasure of artisanal fishing and industrial expansion on Istanbul’s shores to the paper’s focus on more-than-human displacement, where fish and fishers together archive imperial capture, racial extraction, and displaced memory.

Paper long abstract

The smallest sea in the world, the Sea of Marmara, is a site of extractivist practices, most notably through the erasure of artisanal fishing—an erasure that far exceeds what its small size might suggest. Such extraction is neither isolated nor ahistorical. It builds on the forced exodus of Ottoman Greek fishing communities from the shores of Marmara through successive waves of forced and involuntary migration, unfolding in tandem with the rise of state-sponsored illicit industrial fishing. Together, these processes formed a predatory capitalist mode of governance that forcibly displaced both fish and minorities from the shores of this crossroads between the Black Sea and the Aegean. This paper argues that state sovereign practices of human and more-than-human forced displacement must be read together in order to properly diagnose the condition of this dying sea today. In doing so, it extends the notion of “illicit seas” to attend to multiple temporalities and to the archival capacities through which imperial capture, racial extraction, and memory are jointly registered.