Le Malaise Créole: ethnic identity in Mauritius (review)

Le malaise Créole (the Creole malaise) refers to the persistence of poverty, social problems and political marginalization amongst Creoles of mixed, African or Malagasy descent, who comprise 29 per cent of the Mauritian population (the remainder is 66 per cent Indo-, 3 per cent Sino-, and 2 per cent Franco-Mauritian). Boswell examines four established (and interdependent) interpretations of the phenomenon through the lens of her ethnographic research amongst Creoles in Mauritius. In the first interpretation, le malaise Créole is seen as a consequence of dispossession and physical and psychological violence under slavery, which had a fragmenting impact upon identity, solidarity and economy (although, as Boswell goes on to argue, this fails to account for the continuing Creole evocation of both primordial and hybrid identities). In the second interpretation, le malaise Créole is a social pathology resulting from the lack of a pre-existing, underlying Creole identity (as Boswell points out, this does not explain the existence of other, more positive Creole responses to oppression). Third, Boswell outlines the claim that the African heritage and hybridity of Creoles (rather than their experiences of colonialism and slavery per se) has resulted in their destructive tendencies (a primordialist and essentialist claim that Boswell is quick to refute). Finally, Boswell outlines the suggestion that le malaise Créole is a concept deployed by Creole political and socio-cultural groups to homogenize and mobilize Creoles (she notes that this view fails to recognize the continuing impact of slavery on Creoles’ access to resources in Mauritius).

The first three chapters set the scene theoretically and methodologically. Boswell provides an extremely helpful account of the crucial difference between global understandings of the concept Creole, usually conceived in terms of hybridity, and its Mauritian usage in reference to peoples of primarily African and Malagasy descent. Her methodology chapter has a dual focus: on the one hand, it contains a weak section on anthropology at ‘home’; but on the other, it provides a compelling justification of ‘multi-sited’ fieldwork, undertaken in order to explore the diversity of Creole experiences within Mauritius. Boswell elaborates her main argument that colonial and post-colonial negative perceptions of hybridity have created particular problems for those of mixed heritage (such as Creoles in Mauritius), who are torn between seeking to ‘primordialize their identity’ (in search of a positive space within the multicultural ideal of ‘unity in diversity’) and a desire to elaborate their lived experiences of hybridity and creolization. In the four main ethnographic chapters, Boswell describes the different manifestations of this tension she encountered in four fieldsites across Mauritius.

In Chapter 4, Boswell examines the increasing prestige associated with involvement with the Catholic Church in Flacq, a large and rapidly changing commercial village in central Mauritius, concluding that church structures often reinforce existing social hierarchies, thus maintaining the status quo in which Creoles are relegated to the political and socio-economic margins. In Chapter 5, Boswell focuses on Karina, an isolated village serving a sugar estate in eastern Mauritius, where dispossessed Creole inhabitants make claims to land based on their parallel claims of descent from a (white) Franco-Mauritian landowner. Chapter 6 explores the invocation of homeland discourses in Roche Bois and the River Camp, two deprived neighbourhoods on the outskirts of the capital Port Louis, where significant numbers of migrants from the island of Rodrigues and displaced islanders from the Chagos Archipelago have settled. Finally, Chapter 7 examines contestations between villagers and outsiders over landscape and the past in Chamarel and Le Morne, two rural villages in the south-west of the island, where ‘authenticity’ has become particularly significant in the context of heritage and tourism projects. Boswell chose these fieldsites because each is locally understood to be in some way an archetypal ‘Creole’ settlement. Since the book deals with hybridity and boundary maintenance, however, it might have benefited from a lengthier examination of Boswell’s informants’ accounts of their interactions with non-Creole Mauritians...