Abstract
This thesis examines literary imaginings of Mauritius as a geographic space from the starting point of what I term the island’s paradox of creolisation: how, despite its history of creolisation and its Creole cultural practices, including the Mauritian Creole language, Mauritian society rejects creolisation through the instrumentalisation of ethno-cultural differences deriving from designated ancestral cultures. This rejection is not only central to Mauritians’ perception of the island as a space where diverse groups cohabit, it has also privileged the largest ethno-cultural group on the island, who identify themselves as Indo-Mauritian on the basis of Indian ancestry. My research draw links between this paradoxical rejection of creolisation and Mauritius’s geographical relationality by examining representations of the island within a corpus of contemporary novels that I term ‘archipelagic’: that is, novels that redefine Mauritius’s borders by establishing unexpected creolising connections between diverse ethnic communities and between islands. Analysing this corpus, I show how the texts grapple with discordant social demands in keeping with the gendered and racialised identities of their authors and the characters these authors create.This thesis develops a spatial methodology through which it identifies three kinds of island imaginings that the texts associate with different constituencies of the Mauritian population. I interpret these three island imaginings as spatialised negotiations responding to Mauritius’s archipelagic and creolised relationality. Chapter One shows how white communities in Mauritius, and a lightly disguised Reunion Island, reject their creolisation and evolve in hyper-insular spaces by analysing Le Bal du dodo (1989) by Geneviève Dormann, Alma (2017) by J.M.G Le Clézio, and Bé-Maho (1996) by Monique Agénor. Chapter Two studies Pagli (2001) by Ananda Devi, Blue Bay Palace (2004) by Nathacha Appanah, and Getting Rid of It (1997) by Lindsey Collen. It foregrounds the marginalisation of women and explores their attempts to subvert Mauritius society’s restrictive vision of insularity by redefining the island’s borders. Chapter Three returns to these authors, following the evolution of their island imaginings in three texts: Soupir (2002) by Devi, Tropique de la violence (2016) by Appanah, and The Rape of Sita (1993) by Collen, with the addition of one text: Le Silence des Chagos (2005) by Shenaz Patel. The chapter demonstrates that these texts re-articulate intercommunal relationships by connecting the island of Mauritius with the archipelago as a whole.
| Date of Award | 1 Feb 2023 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Ananya Kabir (Supervisor) & Siobhan McIlvanney (Supervisor) |