Statelessness, Citizenship and Annotated Discriminations: Meta Documents and the Aesthetics of the Subtle at the United Nations

摘要

From 1906 to 1980, the Indigenous population of the Southwest Pacific island nation of Vanuatu (New Hebrides) was stateless. They had no citizenship. This contravened the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights asserting that “everyone has the right to a nationality”. After 1948, the New Hebrides joined a number of European colonies that received United Nations scrutiny for racial discrimination, economic negligence and human rights violations. In the archives of the British colonial administration of the New Hebrides are a series of documents outlining how officials negotiated and contested UN conventions, declarations and resolutions. This article argues that these “meta-documents” comprise “aesthetics of the subtle”; reports on reports, handwritten annotations on diplomatic cables and exclamation marks on the margins of government paper. These interpretations, negations and commentaries on official documents disrupt binary accounts of colonialism in an era when the telos of decolonization informs the narrative of imperial to post-colonial political change.View full textDownload full textKeywordsStatelessness, Citizenship, Colonialism, Metadata, AestheticsRelated var addthis_config = { ui_cobrand: "Taylor & Francis Online", services_compact: "citeulike,netvibes,twitter,technorati,delicious,linkedin,facebook,stumbleupon,digg,google,more", pubid: "ra-4dff56cd6bb1830b" }; Add to shortlist Link Permalink http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2012.626408