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Displaced Chagos islanders are not only embroiled in political mobilisation and protest: they also participate in cultural expression in exile. This chapter illustrates how representations of a homeland in song lyrics and oral narratives have been transformed through experiences of displacement and relocation, and asks to what extent such transformed representations help or hinder political and legal struggles in exile. Focusing on the relationship between displacement and musical production, it reveals the changing structure and thematic content of Chagossian song lyrics by comparing the lyrics of songs composed by Chagos islanders while living on the colonial Chagos Archipelago with those composed by displaced Chagos islanders living in exile. The latter songs form part of an emergent collective historical imagination motivated by the political and legal struggles for compensation and the right to return to Chagos.

This chapter describes the mobilisation of Chagos islanders in Mauritius. Chagossian groups have historically been united concerning their desired ends, with a shared focus on compensation and the right to return to the Chagos Archipelago. Competing Chagossian groups have, however, disagreed on whether negotiation or litigation is the best means to achieve these aims. The chapter outlines these tensions before focusing on the ideological and pragmatic disagreements within and beyond the community concerning two key issues. The first is debates about whether Chagos should be under British or Mauritian sovereignty. The second is debates about the legitimacy or otherwise of the US military base on Diego Garcia, which is seen by some as a necessary opportunity for employment and by others as conflicting with their visions for the resettlement of Chagos.

Culture [kiltir] has been an issue for displaced Chagos islanders in Mauritius for two reasons connected to the Chagossian struggle. First, in order to make a case for special treatment — compensation, the right of return, UK citizenship — they must show cultural uniqueness and demonstrate their distinctiveness from other Mauritian citizens and lack of integration into Mauritian society. Second, in order to be recognised as victims they must demonstrate suffering and loss as a result of the displacement. These two requirements imply contrasting notions of the characteristics of culture. On the one hand, emphasising distinctiveness implies certain static, authentic, or essential characteristics of ‘Chagossian culture’ distinguishing it from correspondingly authentic ‘Mauritian culture’. On the other hand, emphasising loss indicates that Chagossian culture underwent transformations as a result of the displacement, which requires recognition that culture is not static but changeable. This chapter investigates how Chagossian socio-political and socio-cultural groups have responded to the dual challenge of needing to represent both cultural continuity and cultural change. It starts by outlining the main issues in the anthropology of the politics of culture. It then explores how Chagos islanders came to identify collectively as Chagossians. Next, it illuminates processes of Chagossian cultural revival and gendered transmission in exile. Finally, it shows how Chagossians have simultaneously associated with and dissociated from other Indian Ocean island Creole cultures.

This chapter examines the use of the trope of hunger in Lindsey Collen's There is a Tide (1990) and Mutiny (2001) to dispel the myth of Mauritius as a model of paradise that permeates historical, travel, and literary writing. In these texts, the plight of characters debilitated by lack of nourishment, literally and metaphorically, and symbolically consumed by the ravenous, parasitic apotheoses of capitalist market relations points to cannibalism as the ultimate act of domination. Specifically, Collen draws an analogy between the historic slavery that had been the economic basis of the island as a plantation colony, and contemporary economic processes that commodify bodies in the production of consumable goods. In this general scenario of cannibalistic cravings that threaten the autonomy of physical and national bodies, the predicament of the Chagossians (or Chagos Islanders)—forcibly displaced to Mauritius after their island was expropriated and turned into a strategic lynchpin for U.S. military operations in the Middle East and the wider Indian Ocean region—evokes territorial appropriation as spatial cannibalism par excellence. The chapter also highlights the newer forms of cannibal intent that continue to define islands' contact and subsequent negotiations with consumer culture.