Chen Chu

To Know is to Empower: Chagos Institute of Environmental Humanities

Chen Chu Advisor: Miho Mazereeuw Readers: Nasser Rabbat, Delia Wendel

Chagos Archipelago was sanitized in the 1970s for a US military base on Diego Garcia, following a secret “exchange of notes” that escaped legislative approval. 1500 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 ammunition, the Chagos Marine Protected Area (MPA), along with its fiction of terra nullius, commits dual violence in legitimizing environmental fortification and denying 200 years of Chagossian inhabitation. The assemblage of the military, security and scientific institutions, by defining the Chagos MPA as an “organic rationality,” deploys a generalized and abstracted sense of ecological insecurity in aspiration for global environmental administration and in opposition to traditional bodies of government. How can design rearticulate a relationship to land and ecology that is diverse, specific and un-generalizable to counter this militarized environmentalism?

This thesis proposes the Chagos Institute of Environmental Humanities that is duplicitous in function. While staging apparent conformity to restrictions and regulations imposed by the UK-US alliance, the Institute quietly supports an undercover subversive project of decolonization. This involves not only strategic building and reconstruction that affirm Chagossians’ right of abode and that assist future resettlement but, more unsettling, the decolonization of environmental science, shifting from a romanticized pristine ecology to an inhabited landscape as a source of knowledge, vitality and livability. This is

not another savior project. It is not converting Indigenous politics to a Western doctrine of liberation. Chagossians have already demonstrated superb capabilities in mobilizing political support, advancing legal claims, sustaining cultural ties and heritage across generations even in exile; they are just not heard by us. The Institute facilitates dialogical actions through which both Chagossians and Western scientists cultivate oceanic literacy and botanic sensibility, capitalizing on the land, the plant and the sea as pedagogical and mnemonic devices.

Image 1 (Below): The blue-washed Chagos as a territorialized node of de-territorialized powers.

Image 2 (Left): Storied landscape as a source of knowledge. Both images are courtesy of the author.