Imperial mobilities, errantry, and the displacement of the Chagos Islanders

Abstract In 1968 the inhabitants of the Chagos Islands were forcibly displaced by the British to set up a US military base on Diego Garcia, in an act which Chagossians have contested for over 50 years. At the time, and to the present, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) attempted to legitimise the displacement by disingenuously claiming that the Chagossians were a mobile population of contract workers. Through archival analysis, this paper addresses the FCO representation of the islanders as a mobile ‘floating population’ of ‘contract workers’, linked to the figure of the ‘migrant’. At the same time, it problematises the legal contestation of the islanders’ displacement through a politicisation of stasis, linked to claims to ‘indigenous’ status based on long-held ties with the islands, as well as a discrete ‘Ilois’ or ‘Chagossian’ identity category. It argues that these debates reproduce distinctions between ‘migrants’ and ‘natives’ which obscure mobile political relations, including the imperial mobilities that constitute ‘national’ polities, as well as the histories of enforced mobility of enslaved and indentured labourers. Drawing on Glissant’s concept of errantry, the paper highlights the need to multiply conceptual and legal frameworks and create additional frameworks that can recognise mobile forms of rootedness.