In Tamil Nadu, and elsewhere in the global south, seafood production involves community practices between artisanal fishers, entangled with knowledges of the ocean and marine life. Living-being on the coast in such small-scale fisheries also involves contentious relations with dominant fisher groups, industrial actors and the state. Yet, artisanal fishers have persisted in postcolonial India while living through political-ecological precarity. This paper methodologically thinks-with their contingent material livelihood practices for survival and resistance amidst a Blue Economy that is emerging in India. With its emphasis on coastal shrimp aquaculture to exploit as well as safeguard marine resources from supposedly indiscriminate fishers, it replicates terrestrial practices of enclosure, extraction and monoculture to a watery world that fishers have hitherto not treated as such. First, I ask how the proliferation of such novel yet fraught ecological arrangements contributes to geo-graphical debates on a plantationocene on the coast. Next, I introduce the Palk Bay and Ennore-Pulicat wetlands in Tamil Nadu, which are two regions of Tamil Nadu where this is becoming a reality, with artisanal fishing villages overlapping with proximate shrimp farms and conservation areas. Based on preliminary ethnography, I offer reflections on how fishers contest and make claims to a Blue Economy through diverse economic and environmental rationalities. These operate through three ontological terrains of struggle: i) seafood, as wild or cultivated ecologies, ii) fisheries and shrimp farms, as sites of experimentation where Blue Economy discourses materialize, and iii) coasts, as environments over which fishers’ spatial practices unfold. Finally, I outline my prospective dissertation research in 2025-2026, which assembles such an ontological politics to intimately render capable fishers and marine life. This informs my provocation on an alternative Blue Economy: what are the social, economic and ecological relations that sustain small-scale fisheries and make possible aquaculture that is environmentally just?
