Coming into Visibility in the Indian Ocean

Abstract

This article discusses photographs in the Seychelles archive of Liberated Africans and in the Mauritian archive of identity documents for indentured Indians or Indian Immigrants. It considers the heterogeneity of their movement in two related contexts, when territorial boundaries and new definitions of labour and photography were drawn into assertions of state and colonial British authority. In the Seychelles, ‘passport-sized’ photographs were fixed and immobile in the Register of Liberated Africans. In Mauritius, identity photographs were attached to documents which individuals carried to prevent what we now call ‘identify theft’ and falsification. At issue is the differential mobility of the images and what they reveal about the circumstances in which ‘free’ people were trapped in and by a British colonial state bureaucracy determined to curb the ‘lawlessness’ of settlers, only to be drawn into an entangled complicity with those it sought to regulate. When European powers were consolidating territorial jurisdictions and boundaries by policing movement across the liquid domain of the Indian and Atlantic oceans, the ‘coming into visibility’ that photography afforded and demanded worked to differentially restrict the movements of racially marked people and to make movement itself the medium of State authority over local capitalists.