Last Stand of the Louisiana Shrimpers

by Emma Christopher Lirette

In recent years, shrimpers on the Louisiana coast have faced a historically dire shrimp season, with the price of shrimp barely high enough to justify trawling. Yet, many of them wouldn’t consider leaving shrimping behind, despite having transferrable skills that could land them jobs in the oil and gas industry. Since 2001, shrimpers have faced increasing challenges to their an influx of shrimp from southeast Asia, several traumatic hurricane seasons, and the largest oil spill at sea in American history.

In Last Stand of the Louisiana Shrimpers , author Emma Christopher Lirette traces how Louisiana Gulf Coast shrimpers negotiate land and blood, sea and freedom, and economic security and networks of control. This book explores what ties shrimpers to their boats and nets. Despite feeling trapped by finances and circumstances, they have created a world in which they have agency.

Lirette provides a richly textured view of the shrimpers of Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, calling upon ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, interdisciplinary scholarship, and critical theory. With evocative, lyrical prose, she argues that in persisting to trawl in places that increasingly restrict their way of life, shrimpers build fragile, quietly defiant worlds, adapting to a constantly changing environment. In these flickering worlds, shrimpers reimagine what it means to work and what it means to make a living.

232 pages, Paperback

Published August 24, 2022

Reviews

[Nathan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Largely due to knowledge of the people that this book is supposedly about, this was a difficult read. Shrimp fishermen are not regulated by the Department of Interior. A footnote mentioning direct marketing is set out in the same book referencing an "activist" shrimper that doesn't bother to discuss his family's development of an incredible direct marketing business as a precursor to investment in processing facilities (Mariah Jade). And the ivy league educated child (currently a professor of law at one of the best law schools in our country) of a fishermen lived in the Netherlands, not Luxembourg. Plus, the fact that most of the people profiled continue to be commercial fishermen -- now eight years after the interviews were conducted -- undermines the central judgment that this is a dying profession.

this is a book about the author, which would be fine, if not for the fact that the people discussed in it are treated as props -- set designs intended to further some grand narrative premised on a refusal to listen, or otherwise take seriously, the subjects of the analysis.

[sarah panic · Rating 5 out of 5]

I fell in love with this book from some of the first lines and was enamored all the way through. There is something about an author’s writing when they have lived experience with something. Lirette has lived experience in this land that I call home and her words resonated so deeply within me that it felt like a piece of home on paper.