Description
This paper explores the overlaps and tensions between colonial and international mobilities orders in calls for decolonising the Chagos Islands from the 1960s on. In 1968 the inhabitants of the Chagos Islands were forcibly displaced by the British to set up a US military base on Diego Garcia. As descendents of enslaved people and itinerant labourers, the islanders were represented by British Foreign Office officials as an itinerant ‘floating population’ with no claim to ‘belonging’ on the islands. The displacement of the islanders is being contested in the courts through an international framework that hinges on questions of national belonging and indigeneity.
The paper works with Glissant’s thinking on postcolonial errancy, nomadism and rootedness to think through the question of the possibility of making political claims on the basis of errancy, under an international legal framework. It asks whether and how the realities of postcolonial politics can be parsed in relation to international understandings of nation-state based belonging.
