A NewNomosOffshore and Bodies as their Own Signs

Abstract

Abstract, This paper begins with the paradoxes that accrue around the appearance of Robinson Crusoe and his "Man Friday" within recent judgments relating to the Chagos Archipelago. These references are understood as revealing the complex of anxieties and limits that are the final legacy of these rulings. In particular, we trace the ways in which À through Daniel Defoe's iconic characters À these judgments enact a troubling retreat from review of executive action, and a fuller withdrawal of sensibility from situations of "otherness" that both bear and cannot bear analogy to that of Friday. The paper then more briefly considers a similar complex of anxieties and limits, retreats and withdrawals enacted by recent judgments relating to Australian territory in the Indian Ocean. This allows us to suggest that between these two series of highest court rulings, the Anglophone common law is currently constructing the Indian Ocean as an offshore: a site excised from judicial review, and a site in which certain figures À peoples, individuals À are not considerable in both senses of the word. But in fathoming this, we turn to Derrida's insights on sovereignty to argue that, far from being new, this construction of a common law of the Indian Ocean tells us about the affront of an archaic sovereignty that always already determines and is determined by law. Across the arguments of this paper, these perceptions of judgment, geography and sovereignty are enabled by literature, and specifically by reading the return of Crusoe and Friday in a recent novel form (by J. M. Coetzee) that also broaches the limits of judgment and recognition, but through a kind of vigilant silence À an abstinence À that craves an alternative commonality: and in this very longing, resists the silencing complicities of the UK and Australian judgments with the disembodiment of a littoral nomos, offshore.

A post-colonial legal approach to the Chagos case and the (dis)application of land rights norms

“…His description of how ‘each family had a house with a garden and some land to provide vegetables … they also did some fishing … and into this innocent world there intruded, in the 1960s, the brutal realities of global politics’ creates a type of nostalgia and false romanticism that works to divert attention away from framing Chagossian identity in terms of indigeneity. Like Wolfe's argument that acts of Indigenous dispossession itself work to make the Indigenous subject improper (Wolfe, 2006), the imagining of this fictional imagery of Chagossians as Men Friday and Crusoe-like is not the original Friday of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe , but ‘this Friday is a historically and geographically de-contextualised “native”: an abstraction, under imperialist rubrics of savagery, amenable to slavery' (Jones and Motha, 2015, p. 259), which carries an improper, othering effect. There is a dark meaning to the response of a Chagossian gentleman when asked why he feels they have been treated differently, and he replies by pointing to his skin: ‘le peau,’ he says 46…”

Offshore Mysteries, Narrative Infrastructure: Oil, Noir, and the World-Ocean

“…Both fields have begun to address the importance of the offshore in social and cultural life. 1 It provides a useful 1 For example, see Campbell (2019); Jones and Motha (2015); Macdonald (2015); Paye (2019); Polack and Farquharson (2017); Sheller (2018). optic, the multiple meanings of which-flagging, offshore oil-rigs, offshore finance-suggest a way of interpreting the links between oil, the ocean, and literary genre.…”