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  • Locating Hybridity: Creole, Identities and Body Politics in the Novels of Ananda Devi by Ashwiny O. Kistnareddy
  • Peter Hawkins
Locating Hybridity: Creole, Identities and Body Politics in the Novels of Ananda Devi. By Ashwiny O. Kistnareddy. (Modern French Identities, 117.) Bern: Peter Lang, 2015. 198 pp.

This study is a further addition to the already extensive bibliography of critical analysis of the writings of the contemporary Mauritian novelist Ananda Devi. As its title suggests, it adopts a postcolonial approach broadly inspired by the theorizing of Homi K. Bhabha in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), which develops the notion of hybridity as a characteristic of postcolonial writing. Devi’s novels lend themselves to this approach, and Ashwiny Kistnareddy first analyses the undercurrent of linguistic hybridity in Devi’s texts, predominantly written in stylish, literary French but revealing the presence of other vernaculars widely used in Mauritius, such as Creole and Bhojpuri. She goes on to explore the implications of unstable hybrid identities in Devi’s characters in Chapter 3, ‘Interrogating “Hybrid” Identities: Doubling, Fragmentation and Schizoids’. From there she undertakes to examine the notion of ‘hybrid bodies’ (Chapter 4), dealing with the tensions arising from ethnic mixing in Mauritian society, as well as several examples of physical deformity and the interface between humanity and animality dramatized by Devi’s narratives. Her conclusion looks forward to a ‘poetics of hybridity’ that Devi herself admits is far from being widely accepted in the highly segregated society of Mauritius. Kistnareddy is herself of Mauritian background, and this gives her a personal sensitivity to the complex tensions that underpin the multicultural and multi-ethnic society of the island. The range of scholarly reference is much wider than the title’s allusion to Bhabha would suggest, and the book discusses literary comparisons drawn by Devi herself, such as T. S. Eliot or Toni Morrison, as well as incorporating references to Bakhtin’s notion of the grotesque and the psychiatric theories of R. D. Laing. Kistnareddy also draws comparisons with the Caribbean, with reference to the notion of ‘relation’ as theorized by Édouard Glissant, and shows a good grasp of the range of complex debates that have characterized postcolonial theory. She also provides an introductory sketch situating the writings of Devi in the sociopolitical and linguistic context of contemporary Mauritius, and outlines the historical factors that have led to the multilingual and multi-ethnic texture of Mauritian society. In general the study represents a searching discussion of the ramifications of the notion of hybridity, not always positive ones, which have broader implications for the idea of a multicultural society of which Mauritius is a salient example.

Peter Hawkins
University of Bristol
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