New Histories of the Andaman Islands: Landscape, Place and Identity in the Bay of Bengal, 1790–2012
Cambridge University Press
Edition: Illustrated, 2/11/2016
EAN 9781107076792, ISBN10: 110707679X
Hardcover, 333 pages, 23.8 x 15.5 x 2.3 cm
Language: English
This innovative, multidisciplinary exploration of the unique history of the Andaman Islands as a hunter-gatherer society, colonial penal colony, and state-engineered space of settlement and development ranges across the theoretical, conceptual and thematic concerns of history, anthropology and historical geography. Covering the entire period of post-settlement Andamans history, from the first (failed) British occupation of the Islands in the 1790s up to the year 2012, the authors examine imperial histories of expansion and colonization, decolonization, anti-colonialism and nationalism, Japanese occupation, independence and partition, migration, commemoration and contemporary issues of Indigenous welfare. New Histories of the Andaman Islands offers a new way of thinking about the history of South Asia, and will be thought-provoking reading for scholars of settler colonial societies in other contexts, as well as those engaged in studies of nationalism and postcolonial state formation, ecology, visual cultures and the politics of representation.
1. Introduction
Part I. Contentious Landscapes
2. Improving visions, troubled landscapes
the legacies of colonial Ferrargunj
3. Entangled struggles, contested histories
the Second World War and after
4. The making of a 'rhizomatic' landscape
place, space and the politics of memory in the Andamanese Islands
Part II. Affective Landscapes
5. The Andaman local born
history, identity and convict descent
6. Dwelling in fluid spaces
the Matuas of the Andaman Islands
7. In pursuit of fireflies
the poetics and politics of 'lightscapes' in the Jarawa forests
Part III. Imagined Landscapes
8. Visual representations of the penal colony
9. Endangered landscapes, dream destinations
the shifting frames of 'tropicality' in the Andaman Islands
10. Conclusion
Bibliography
Index.