Back to Search
Start Over
Developing Terra Nullius: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Indigeneity in the Andaman Islands.
- Source :
- Comparative Studies in Society & History; Oct2017, Vol. 59 Issue 4, p944-973, 30p
- Publication Year :
- 2017
-
Abstract
- This article explores the legal structures and discursive framings informing the governance of one particular “backward” region of India, the Andaman Islands. I trace the shifting patterns of occupation and development of the islands in the colonial and postcolonial periods, with a focus on the changes wrought by independence in 1947 and the eventual history of planned development there. I demonstrate how intersecting discourses of indigenous savagery/primitivism and the geographical emptiness were repeatedly mobilized in colonial-era surveys and postcolonial policy documents. Postcolonial visions of developing the Andaman Islands ushered in a settler-colonial governmentality, infused with genocidal fantasies of the “dying savage.” Laws professing to protect aboriginal Jarawas actually worked to unilaterally extend Indian sovereignty over the lands and bodies of a community clearly hostile to such incorporation. I question the current exclusion of India from the global geographies of settler-colonialism and argue that the violent and continuing history of indigenous marginalization in the Andaman Islands represents a de facto operation of a logic of terra nullius. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 00104175
- Volume :
- 59
- Issue :
- 4
- Database :
- Complementary Index
- Journal :
- Comparative Studies in Society & History
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- 125462478
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417517000330