Encounters with the Flesh of Fish: Subsistence Fishing along the Anacostia River

Abstract

AbstractCoursing through Washington, DC, the Anacostia River is simultaneously an object of rehabilitation and a symbol of ongoing contamination. The river is a place where roadway runoff, sewer spillage, and trash add to the mix of industrial polychlorinated biphenyls and alkanes long wedded with the sediment. Yet, time spent with subsistence fishers along the Anacostia River also reveals how returning to the water’s edge, setting lines, hooking bait, or cleaning and consuming fish has the potential to expose the capitalist state. This essay considers the many facets of exposure beyond the sense of harm replete in environmentalist and environmental justice literatures. This essay ethnographically maps a constellation of bodies, environs, and exposures; it draws on Black feminist theory, including Leith Mullings’s conceptual treatment of environment, Audre Lorde’s erotics of the body, and Hortense J. Spillers’s analytic of the flesh, to conceptualize exposure as always an exposure to and an exposure of, or exposé. Through this synthesis, I not only trace the contours of a capitalist state where legacies of uneven contamination undergird selective prosperity but also attend to the excesses of exposure—what else there is to say about the river and ways of carefully paying attention along its banks.