Abstract | The Ennore wetlands in North Chennai, India were once dense with diverse habitats and interwoven histories. Many of these histories began to unravel from the 1960s onwards, when state-sponsored heavy industry began encroaching into and polluting the wetlands. Local fishers, whose lives, livelihoods, and cultural worlds were ignored by these changes, fought back in a campaign to reclaim and restore the wetlands. This paper analyses how the Save Ennore Creek Campaign and Ennore fishers used counter-mapping strategies to reveal the state's wilful suppression of fisher knowledge and worldviews using maps and plans. It draws from decolonial and ignorance studies literatures to analyse the campaign's counter-maps as cartographic, performative, and affective insurrections of subjugated knowledges and counter-histories that un-made the state's maps and plans, exposed the state's knowledge as wilful ignorance and spotlighted geographical knowledge from the margins as a way of remaking reality and opening up possibilities of alternative futures for the creek and its communities. |
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