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Reviewed by:
  • Ecritures féminines et dialogues critiques: Subjectivité, genre et ironie / Writing Women and Critical Dialogues: Subjectivity, Gender, and Identity by Françoise Lionnet, and: Le Su et l’incertain: Cosmopolitiques créoles de l’Océan Indien / The Known and the Uncertain: Creole Cosmopolitics of the Indian Ocean by Françoise Lionnet
  • Peter Hawkins
Ecritures féminines et dialogues critiques: Subjectivité, genre et ironie / Writing Women and Critical Dialogues: Subjectivity, Gender, and Identity BY FRANÇOISE LIONNET Trou d’eau douce, Mauritius: L’Atelier d’écriture, 2012. 315 pp. 9990336687 paper.
Le Su et l’incertain: Cosmopolitiques créoles de l’Océan Indien / The Known and the Uncertain: Creole Cosmopolitics of the Indian Ocean BY FRANÇOISE LIONNET Trou d’eau douce, Mauritius: L’Atelier d’écriture, 2012. 316 pp. 9990336695 paper.

These two collections of essays by Françoise Lionnet, herself based in Los Angeles, have been unusually published in Mauritius, thereby breaking away from the monopoly of academic and literary publishing of the Western and metropolitan academic presses. Since their literary subject matter is largely Mauritian in inspiration, they also have the advantage of, thus, being more accessible to a local readership. Most of the essays are reworked versions of articles published elsewhere, in academic journals and collective volumes, over a long period from 1991 to 2011, in a mixture of French and English with occasional untranslated quotations in Mauritian Creole. The articles have been linked together with a common theme: in the first volume, recent women’s writing from Mauritius, by figures such as Marie-Thérèse Humbert, Ananda Devi, Lindsey Collen, and Natacha Appanah; in [End Page 183] the second, reflections on the nature of the Creole identity of the two Mascarene islands of Mauritius and Reunion, contrasting the political status of the two islands, the former an independent republic in the Commonwealth, the latter an overseas Department of France and part of the European Union.

The frame of reference of the essays ranges more widely than this would suggest, however. The first volume introduces contextual references to the social tensions of Mauritian society, the exile of the Chagos islanders displaced for a United States airbase on Diego Garcia, as well as literary comparisons drawing on Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, Henry James, and modern postcolonial theory. The second volume covers an even wider field, from Amitav Ghosh to Edouard Glissant, from Bernardin de Saint-Pierre to Charles Baudelaire. A major chapter is devoted to the Mauritian Creole dramatist Dev Virahsawmy and several chapters analyze the aberrations of the French administration of Reunion, such as the forced displacement of Reunionese children to metropolitan France, or the inadequate medical response to the epidemic of chikungunya fever. The discussions are always stimulating, although the thread of argument is not always very clearly focused, probably because of the composite origins of the volumes. In the first volume, for instance, however poetic the insight may be, it is hard to take seriously the proposition that the sari provides a theoretical model for the narrative strategies of Ananda Devi’s novels. In the second volume, when contrasting cosmopolitanism with creolization, how can one fail to point out that the latter is essentially a linguistic phenomenon, whereas the former is not? The debates are rewarding, however, and the range of scholarly reference is impressive: the two volumes provide an overview of twenty years’ reflection by an acknowledged critical expert on the cultures of the francophone Indian Ocean islands. [End Page 184]

Peter Hawkins
University of Bristol
p.g.hawkins@bristol.ac.uk
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