Writing on water: Peripheries, flows, capital, and struggles in the Indian ocean

Positions

Volumn 11, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 241-257

  Vergès, Françoise ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 39049129968     PISSN: 10679847     EISSN: 15278271     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10679847-11-1-241     Document Type: Article

References (55)

1. Associated Press brief, Beijing, October 2000. On Sino-African cooperation, see www.fmprc. gov.com; www.centrexnews.com; www.sino-projects.com; www.oneworld.org/ips2/; www. chinese-embassy.org.uk; www.chamber.org.hk; and www.afrchn.com. At the Sino-African Forum in October 2000, Chinese officials used an "old Chinese saying" to portray their country's relation with Africa: "Distance cannot keep true friends away." China accounts for 58 percent of all investment in the African continent, though the trade volume between the two sides remains modest ($6.5 billion in 1999)
2. Chinese official reports do not describe the working and living conditions of workers on these projects. Reportedly, hundreds among the 10,000 Chinese workers assigned to work on the 1,850-kilometer railway between the Tanzanian port of Dar es Salaam and the Zambian copper mines died from heat and exhaustion (www.oneworld.org/ops2/octoo/08)
3. See Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2001). Davis shows how through a series of devices - from manufactured famines to the establishment of a monetary system - the West constructed a causal triangle between ecological poverty, household poverty, and state decapitation, which led to the emergence of a "third world."
4. Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living (New York: Modern Library, 1999)
5. Henri Lefebvre, The Survival of Capitalism (London: Allison and Busby, 1976)
6. and Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991)
7. See also David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000)
8. Klaus Doods and David Atkinson, Geopolitical Traditions: A Century of Geopolitical Thought (London: Routledge, 2000)
9. Edward W Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1988). The work of Yves Lacoste and his journal Hérodote are also useful for the understanding of space as socially and politically produced
10. For instance, the conference "Reasserting Connections, Commonalties, and Cosmopolitanism: The Western Indian Ocean since 1800" at Yale University, 3-5 November 2000, organized by Dodie McDow and Bruce McKim, and the ongoing "Oceans Connect Project" at Duke University, directed by Martin Lewis and Karen Wigen
11. Braudel's study of the Mediterranean was very much biased toward its northern shores and inhabitants. Braudel had no knowledge of the Berber and Islamic worlds of the southern shores. Despite these biases, his insights have passed the test of time. See Fernand Braudel, La dynamique du capitalisme [The dynamics of capitalism] (Paris: Arthaud, 1985)
12. See Ashin Das Gupta and M. N. Pearson, India and the Indian Ocean, 1500-1800 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989)
13. Frank Boeze, ed., Brides of the Sea: Port-Cities of Asia from the i6th-20th Centuries (n.p.: South Wales University Press, 1989)
14. and Boeze, Gateways of Asia: Port-Cities in the 13th-20th Centuries (London: Kegan Paul, 1997)
15. Also see Nicolas Chittick, "L'Afrique de l'Est et l'Orient: Les ports de commerce avant l'arrivée des Portugais" [East Africa and the Orient: Port cities before the arrival of the Portuguese] (Paris: UNESCO, 1974), 1-9
16. See Edward A. Alpers, "The African Diaspora in the Northwestern Indian Ocean: Reconsideration of an Old Problem," New Directions for Research: Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 17, no. 2 (1997): 62-81
17. Kiri N. Chaudhuri, Asia Before Europe: Economy and Civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)
18. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)
19. Das Gupta and Pearson, India and the Indian Ocean
20. Richard Hall, Empires of the Monsoon: A History of the Indian Ocean audits Invaders (London: Harpers and Collins, 1998)
21. John Middleton, The World of the Swahili: An African Mercantile Civilization (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992)
22. Laskhmi Subramanian, ed., The French East India Company and the Trade of the Indian Ocean (Calcutta: Center for the Studies in Social Sciences, 1999)
23. and Auguste Toussaint, History of the Indian Ocean, trans. June Guicharnaud (London: Routledge,1966). The pioneering work of Hubert Gerbeau on the world of the slave trade and slavery must also be noted
24. see Gerbeau, Les esclaves noirs: Pour une histoire du silence [Black slaves: For a history of silence] (Saint-Denis, Réunion: Océan Editions, 1998)
25. For readings on the mythologies in the Indian Ocean, see Sumathi Ramaswamy, "Catastrophic Cartographies: Mapping the Lost Continent of Lemuria," Representations, no. 67 (summer 1999): 92-129
26. and Jean-Claude Carpanin Marimoutou, "La Lèmurie: Un rive, une langue" [Lemuria: A bank, a language], Cahiers CRLII-CIRAOI, no. 6 (1990): 121-131
27. Edmond Maestri, Les îles du sud-ouest de l'Océan Indien et la France de 181 y Nos jours [The islands of the southwest Indian Ocean and France from 1815 to today] (Paris: L'Harmattan/ Université de La Réunion, 1994)
28. Paul Dussac was a colonial civil servant from Réunion who served in Madagascar, where he sided with the Malagasy against the French colonial power. Georges Garros, a colonial civil servant serving in Indochina, wrote a pamphlet in which he denounced French colonialism. René Maran, a Martinican colonial governor in West Africa, wrote a novel called Batoula, which won the Prix Concourt in 1921. See Philippe Dewitte, Les mouvements nègres en France, 1919-1939 [Negro movements in France, 1919-1939] (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1985)
29. Michael C. Lambert, "From Citizenship to Nègritude: 'Making a Difference' in Elite Ideologies of Colonized Francophone West Africa," Society for Comparative Study of Society and History 35, no. 2 (April 1993): 239-262
30. Tyler Stovall, Paris Noir: African-Americans in the City of Light (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996)
31. François Manchuelle, "Le rôle des Antillais en Afrique Noire francophone" [The role of Antillais in francophone Africa], Cahiers d'études africaines, no. 127 (1992): 375-408
32. René Maran, Batoula: Véritable roman nègre [Batoula: A Negro novel] (Paris: Albin Michel, 1921)
33. Monoranjan Besboruah, U.S. Strategy in the Indian Ocean: The International Response (New York: Praeger, 1977)
34. Moti Lal Bhargava, Indian Ocean Strategies through the Ages (New Delhi: Reliance Publishing House, 1990)
35. R. Delcorde, Le jeu des grandes puissances dans l'Océan Indien [The game of superpowers in the Indian Ocean] (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1993)
36. Asok Kapur, The Indian Ocean: Regional and International Power Politics (New York: Praeger, 1982)
37. G. O. Tuathail and J. Agnew, "Geopolitics and Foreign Policy: Practical Geopolitical Reasoning in American Foreign Policy," Political Geography, no. 11 (1992): 190-204
38. Actes du colloque sur l'esclavage (Antanarivo: n.p., 1997)
39. Pier M. Larson, History and Memory in the Age of Enslavement: Becoming Merina in Highland Madagascar, 1770-1822 (Oxford: James Currey, 2001)
40. Sudel Fuma, Esclaves et citoyens: Le destin de 62,000 Réunionnais: Histoire de l'insertion des affranchis de 1848 dans la société réunionnaise (Saint-Denis, Réunion: Fondation pour la recherche et le développement dans l'Océan Indien, 1982)
41. Christiane Rafidinarivo Rakotolahy, "Empreintes de l'esclavage dans les relations internationales," in Esclavage et Colonisation: Colloque du 13 juin 1998 (Le Port, Réunion: CCT, 1998), 45-78
42. Françoise Vergés, "Abolition et citoyenneté " and "Traite des esclaves: Esclavage et abolition" in Diagonales, no. 46 (May 1998): 15-21, and 22-24, resp.
43. Vergés, De l'esclave au citoyen (Paris: Gallimard, 1998)
44. Vergés, "Une citoyennete paradoxale: Affranchis, colonisés et citoyens des vieilles colonies," introduction L'abolition de l'esclavage: Un combat pour les droits de l'homme (Brussels: Editions Complexe/Ligue des Droits de l'Homme, 1998), 17-47
45. Marina Carter and James Ng, Forging the Rainbow: Labour Immigrants in British Mauritius (Mauritius: Alfran, [1997])
46. Denis Lombard and Jean Aubin, eds., Marchands et hommes d'affaires asiatiques dans l'Océan Indien et la Mer de Chine (Paris: Editions de l'Ecole des hautas études en sciences sociales, 1988)
47. Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830-1920 (London: Oxford University Press, 1974)
48. Edith Wong-Hee-Kam, La diaspora chinoise dans les Mascareignes (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1996)
49. Wong-Hee-Kam, L'engagisme chinois: Révolte contre un nouvel esclavagisme (Saint-Denis, Réunion: Ocean Editions, 1998)
50. Jean Régis Ramsamy, Histoire des bijoutiers indiens à l'Ile de La Réunion (Saint-Denis, Réunion: Azalées Editions, 1999)
51. Aihwa Ong and Donald M. Nonini, Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalisms (New York: Routledge, 1997)
52. Emmanuel Ma Mung, "Dispositif économique et ressources spatiales: elements d'une economie de diaspora" [Economie organization and spatial resources: elements of the economy of the diaspora], Revue Européenne des Migrations Internationales 8, no. 3 (1992): 175-194
53. Kuan-Hsing Chen, "The Decolonization Question," in Trajectories: Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, ed. Chen (London: Routledge, 1998), 1-56
54. The quote can be found on www.fmprc.gov.com; www.centrexnews.com;. It is interesting to note that there seems to exist one vocabulary on "aid," which leads its users to insist on disinterestedness, on the purity of intentions of aid workers. Thus the economy of aid appears as a pure exchange
55. On free trade zones and female workers, see Uma Kothari and Vidula Nababsing, Gender and Industrialization (Mauritius: Editions de l'Océan Indien, 1996)