Displaced Passengers: States, Movements, and Disappearances in the Indian Ocean

Abstract

The Indian Ocean is a site of intriguing disappearances—real, fictitious, and anything in between—many of which involve island stopovers of some kind. This chapter deploys the concept of disappearance on islands in relation to “passengers,” a term describing a motley group of people transitioning on islands but also from and to islands. The analysis connects with how subnational island jurisdictions in the region—like the Chagos Archipelago, Mayotte, Réunion, and Rodrigues—offer particular assumptions about the experience of place, nudging us to maintain perspectives on islands as ongoing and commonly contested processes of creation and becoming, with largely indeterminate futures.