Terranean Coasts: Extractive Economies and Near-shore Worlds in Mumbai

This talk looks at how policies that govern India’s fishing industry and its coastal environment map near-shore waters and the consequences they pose for fishing communities and the nonhumans that inhabit Mumbai’s edge. These policies flatten and divide the coast into distinct zones, which become the basis for projecting and calculating the growth potential for an increasingly extractive fishing industry. These growth-based calculi introduce new pressures on the dynamic field in which fishers operate and fish spawn. The paper attends to their intersections with the coast and the ways in which they draw a hard line between the land and sea, papering over fluid and liminal coastal worlds.