Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-68ccn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-12T01:32:47.513Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Creolization Otherwise: Centering the Local Intertextualities of Ananda Devi's Pagli

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 December 2022

Usha Rungoo
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

As the literature of Creole societies severed ties with colonial literary models, a new literature conceptualized through scholarly and literary conversations on creolization emerged. In a zeal to amplify Creole solidarity against colonial dominance, however, these conversations unfortunately erased the internal hierarchies and linguistic unevenness among the formerly colonized, uniting them all under the banner of the Creole language. The aesthetics of the literature of creolization is consequently read through the lens of a strict dichotomy opposing the colonized, Creole, and orality to the hegemony of the colonizer, the colonizing language, and writing. Reading the Mauritian novelist Ananda Devi's Pagli (2001) in depth, I reveal a novel that goes against this trend and bears witness, through its very textuality, to the complexity of racial and linguistic stratifications in Creole societies, without flattening them into dichotomies. In this light, it constitutes a necessary theoretical intervention in the field of creolization aesthetics.

Type
Essay
Information
PMLA , Volume 137 , Issue 5 , October 2022 , pp. 795 - 808
Copyright
Copyright © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Modern Language Association of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Allen, Richard B. “Asian Indentured Labor in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Colonial Plantation World.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History, edited by Ludden, David et al. , Oxford UP, 2017, oxfordre.com/asianhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277727-e-33.Google Scholar
Bahadur, Gaiutra. “CIA Meddling, Race Riots, and a Phantom Death Squad.” Foreign Policy, 31 July 2015, foreignpolicy.com/2015/07/31/guyana-cia-meddling-race-riots-phantom-death-squad-ppp/.Google Scholar
Bahadur, Gaiutra. Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture. U of Chicago P, 2014.Google Scholar
Bernabé, Jean, et al. “In Praise of Creoleness.” Translated by Taleb Khyar, Mohamed B.. Callaloo, vol. 13, no. 4, fall 1990, pp. 886–909.Google Scholar
Bragard, Véronique. “Transoceanic Echoes: Coolitude and the Work of the Mauritian Poet Khal Torabully.” International Journal of Francophone Studies, vol. 8, no. 2, 1995, pp. 219–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brathwaite, Kamau. “History of the Voice.” Roots, U of Michigan P, 1993, pp. 259–304.Google Scholar
Carter, Marina. “Indian Indentured Migration and the Forced Labour Debate.” Itinerario, vol. 21, no. 1, 1997, pp. 52–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carter, Marina, and Torabully, Khal. Coolitude: An Anthology of the Indian Labour Diaspora. Anthem Press, 2002.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Condé, Maryse. “Créolité without the Créole Language?” Caribbean Creolization: Reflections on the Cultural Dynamics of Language, Literature, and Identity, edited by Balutansky, Kathleen M. and Sourieau, Marie-Agnes, UP of Florida, 1998, pp. 101–09.Google Scholar
Confiant, Raphaël. Case à Chine. Mercure de France, 2007.Google Scholar
Confiant, Raphaël. La panse du chacal. Mercure de France, 2004.Google Scholar
Confiant, Raphaël. Rue des Syriens. Mercure de France, 2012.Google Scholar
Couassi, Ana. “Rencontre avec Khal Torabully.” Jeune Afrique, Sept. 1998, pp. 68–69.Google Scholar
Devi, Ananda. “Entretien avec Ananda Devi.” Interview by Corio, Alessandro. Francophonia, vol. 48, spring 2005, pp. 145–67.Google Scholar
Devi, Ananda. Les hommes qui me parlent. Gallimard, 2011.Google Scholar
Devi, Ananda. Pagli. Gallimard, 2001.Google Scholar
Devi, Ananda. Le voile de Draupadi. L'Harmattan, 1993.Google Scholar
Eisenlohr, Patrick. “Creole Publics: Language, Cultural Citizenship, and the Spread of the Nation in Mauritius.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 49, no. 4, Oct. 2007, pp. 968–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. Common Denominators: Ethnicity, Nation-Building and Compromise in Mauritius. Berg, 1998.Google Scholar
Glissant, Édouard. Le discours antillais. Seuil, 1981.Google Scholar
Glissant, Édouard. “Free and Forced Poetics.” Translated by Benamou, Michel. Alcheringa: Ethnopoetics, vol. 2, no. 2, 1976, pp. 95–101.Google Scholar
Hutcheon, Linda. Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox. Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2013.Google Scholar
Jean-François, Emmanuel Bruno. “Narrations, déconstructions et recréations de soi: Fantasmes, dédoublements et mises en abyme dans quelques textes mauriciens.” Nouvelles études francophones, vol. 28, no. 2, 2013, pp. 53–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lal, Brij V. Grimitiyas: The Origins of the Fiji Indians. 1983. Fiji Institute of Applied Studies, 2004.Google Scholar
Lionnet, Françoise. Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture. Cornell UP, 1989.Google Scholar
Lionnet, Françoise. “‘Cinq Mètres d'Ordre et de Sagesse, . . . Cinq Mètres de Jungle Soyeuse’: Ananda Devi's Unfurling Art of Fiction.” Écritures féminines et dialogues critiques: Subjectivité, genre et ironie / Writing Women and Critical Dialogues: Subjectivity, Gender and Irony, L'atelier d'écriture, 2012, pp. 240–83.Google Scholar
Lionnet, Françoise. “Matière à photographie: Cosmopolitique et modernité créoles à l'Ile Maurice.” French Forum, vol. 34, no. 3, fall 2009, pp. 75–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lionnet, Françoise. Postcolonial Representations: Women, Literature and Identity. Cornell UP, 1995.Google Scholar
Lionnet, Françoise, and Shih, Shu-mei. Introduction. Minor Transnationalism, edited by Lionnet and Shih, Duke UP, 2005, pp. 1–26.Google Scholar
Michelman, Fredric. “French and British Colonial Language Policies: A Comparative View of Their Impact on African Literature.” Research in African Literatures, vol. 26, no. 4, winter 1995, pp. 216–25.Google Scholar
Parépou, Alfred. Atipa: Premier roman en créole. 1885. Éditions Caribéennes, 1980.Google Scholar
Salomon, Richard. Indian Epigraphy: A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the Other Indo-Aryan Languages. Oxford UP, 1998.Google Scholar
Scheid, John, and Svenbro, Jesper. The Craft of Zeus: Myths of Weaving and Fabric. 1994. Translated by Volk, Carol, Harvard UP, 1996.Google Scholar
Shih, Shu-mei, and Lionnet, Françoise. “The Creolization of Theory.” Introduction. The Creolization of Theory, edited by Shih and Lionnet, Duke UP, 2011, pp. 1–33.Google Scholar
Tinker, Hugh. A New System of Slavery: The Éxport of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830–1920. Oxford UP, 1974.Google Scholar
Torabully, Khal. Cale d’étoiles: Coolitude. Éditions Azalées, 1992.Google Scholar
Tyagi, Ritu. Ananda Devi: Feminism, Narration and Polyphony. Rodopi, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van den Avenne, Cécile. “L’élément indien de la créolité: Une reconstruction identitaire.” L'usage de l'Inde dans les littératures françaises et européennes (XXXVIIIe–XXe siècles), edited by Moussa, Sarga et al. , Kailash, 2006, pp. 339–56.Google Scholar
Vaughan, Megan. Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius. Duke UP, 2005.Google Scholar
Waters, Julia. “‘Ton Continent Est Noir’: Rethinking Feminist Metaphors in Ananda Devi's Pagli.” Hybrid Voices, Hybrid Texts: Women's Writing at the Turn of the Millennium, special issue of Dalhousie French Studies, edited by Rye, Gill, vol. 68, fall 2004, pp. 45–55.Google Scholar