To know is to empower : Chagos institute of environmental humanities

Abstract

Chagos Archipelago was sanitized in the 1970s for a US military base on Diego Garcia, following a secret "exchange of notes" that evaded legislative approval. 1,500 Chagossian evictees, "dumped" in Mauritius and Seychelles, have since become surplus population dwarfed by the planetary-scale military-colonial network. Of all the denounced legal ammunitions, the Chagos Marine Protected Area (MPA), along with its fiction of terra nullius, inflicts the greatest violence by legitimizing environmental fortification on the basis of a denial of the almost 200 years of Chagossian inhabitation. The assemblage of the military, security institutions and certain members of the scientific community, by defining the Chagos MPA as an "organic rationality," deploys a generalized and abstracted sense of ecological insecurity in aspiration for global environmental administration in opposition to traditional bodies of government. This thesis proposes the Chagos Institute of Environmental Humanities, a trojan horse with dual agency. While staging an apparent conformity to restrictions and regulations imposed by the UK-US alliance, the Institute quietly and resolutely supports an undercover project of decolonization and empowerment. Beyond physical resettlement, it recognizes and continues Chagossians' sustained efforts in resisting colonialism and militarism. It reads from the Chagos landscape their forgotten and dismissed stories. To know is to reclaim. To know is to empower. The new system of environmental humanities rejects the nature-culture dichotomy. In problematizing the anthropocentric bias within our production of knowledge, it reveals the racist and colonialist othering of non-Western epistemologies. There is not a deficit in knowledge, in a quantitative sense, but a deficiency at the epistemic level. This thesis urges that we reclaim prior Chagossian knowledge in the formation of their future that is still rooted in Chagossians' history.