Co-constitutive Peripheries: Settlement Landscapes of Power and Memory on Mauritius

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Islands around Africa: State-of-the-Art and Future Directions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This paper examines changes in settlement patterns in Mauritius over the seventeenth through twentieth centuries and the ways these landscapes are remembered on the island today. I emphasize agro-industrial landscapes as a specific cultural mode of land use and as a spatial phenomenon that has come to define so much of the contemporary tropical island landscape in Africa and elsewhere. By systematically reconstructing the first century of the partitioning of Mauritius into private estate parcels, colonial administrative centers, and trading ports, I also define the spaces formed between the plantation boundaries as areas where free people of color–built communities, particularly in coastal and mountainous regions. Villages formed later in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are still named after the estates they once belonged to, having expanded out of or adjacent to the domestic quarters of plantation workers. These names are a residual, a shadow of the colonial plantation still imprinted on the contemporary landscape. As such, plantations and independent villages emerge as co-constituted spaces, each peripheral to the other. More broadly, this paper highlights the intertwining of the industrialization of agriculture, the racialization of labor migrations, urbanism, and how these processes impacted the formation of local communities.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Islands around Africa: State-of-the-Art and Future Directions   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 40462.0