What Figures Lurk on Madame Elysé's Path? Reflections on Philippe Sands' The Last Colony

Abstract

One person’s life forms the core around which Philippe Sands’ The Last Colony explores the events leading up to the advisory opinion on the Legal Consequences of Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius in 1965. That person is Liseby Bertrand Elysé, who was born in 1953 in Chagos, then forcibly removed to Mauritius in 1973. Her efforts to return home eventually brought her to a 2018 hearing at The Hague, where she spoke to the International Court of Justice bench by means of a subtitled video. This essay, which appears in a symposium issue on Sands’ book, investigates the ethics, the effectiveness, and the emancipatory potential of the author’s telling of the story of the Chagossian woman he most often calls "Madame Elysé."

Keywords: International Court of Justice, Chagos, international law, nonstate actors, nation-states, race, gender, class, colonialism, imperialism, decolonization, forced displacement, enslavement, United Kingdom, Mauritius, United States, Africa, British Indian Ocean Territory, Indian Ocean, foreign policy, international relations, feminism, law and humanities, law and literature