The Extracted Fish

Fish are missing in Abdoulaye Barry’s photography series Pêcheurs de nuit (Night Fishermen); Andrey Samoute Diarra’s documentary Hamou-Béya (Sand Fishers); Moussa Touré’s docudrama La Pirogue; and Nuruddin Farah’s novel Crossbones. Overfishing twinned with climate change leads, as evidenced in these works, to the figure of the starving fisherman who, as he seeks other means to provide for himself and his family, is criminalized by the state. Racial capitalist immigration policies in these works are exposed for what they are: attempts to immanently retain a colonial present. Piracy, trafficking, and migration are recognized as movements simultaneously inherent to and resistant to racial capital. Expanding upon Thomas Nail’s theory of ‘kinopolitics’, defined as the politics of movement whereby migrants pose a counter-power and alternative to state structures, enter the movement of fish hydrocommunally swimming through light and dark waters and varying time zones. Add these shadowy figures’ liminality to the way the real collides with the fictive, and what emerges is a kinopolitics of artmaking: the refusal of Barry, Diarra, Touré, and Farah to privilege concepts of light and truth over darkness and fiction.