Displaced passengers : states, movements and disappearances in the Indian Ocean

Abstract

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 movements and stays of such people, as well as the "hubbing" function performed by islands with respect to them, take us back to the long, historical disposition of offshore island spaces as supremely suitable locations for quarantine stations, a practice dating back to at least 1423, when Venice - itself an archipelago--set up a Lazaretto on the nearby islet of Santa Maria di Nazareth (Sehdev 2002; Valsecchi 2007). The offshoring nature of remote islands, plus the self-evident geophysicality of their bounded space, renders islanded "passengers" who are suspected of carrying pathogens virtual prisoners for the duration of their island stay, typically forty days (hence the word "quarantine").