Julia Waters

On 12 March 2018, Mauritius celebrated fifty years as an independent nation amidst much fanfare. Yet behind the nation's official image of multicultural 'unity in diversity' lurk deep socio-economic inequalities and inter-ethnic tensions that are insistently critiqued in its literature. Against this backdrop, this book analyses how the idea of belonging - a sense of attachment to, and identification with, a place or people - is problematised in a range of contemporary francophone Mauritian novels. The island-nation's complex history and the multi-ethnic composition of its modern-day population mean that belonging is a central but fraught issue in both reality and fiction. Waters explores how diverse forms of affirmative, affective belonging intersect with, and are frequently inhibited by, exclusionary 'politics of belonging' at communal, national or international levels. Using an eclectic theoretical approach to the central concept of belonging, Waters offers in-depth textual analyses of novels by leading Mauritian writers Nathacha Appanah, Ananda Devi, Shenaz Patel, Bertrand de Robillard, Amal Sewtohul and Carl de Souza. Despite their thematic and formal diversity, these novels are shown to be characterised by a common rejection of dominant discourses of ethnic, diasporic affiliation and by a common commitment to the ongoing, future-orientated project of Mauritian nationhood. As such, this book offers an original insight into the dynamics of belonging and exclusion in diverse, multi-ethnic societies.

Fictions of Belonging

The Mauritian Novel

Adalgisa Giorgio

Womenâ (TM)s writing has, in recent decades, been one of the most exciting and productive areas of literary creativity and critical analysis. Thirty years on from the initial, spectacular blossoming of womenâ (TM)s writing and from pioneering critical projects to (re)construct a female literary tradition, Womenâ (TM)s Writing in Western Europe: Gender, Generation and Legacy is the first study to investigate the legacy of this earlier generation of writers, texts and theories for contemporary women writers from across western Europe. This important and timely book brings together original analyses by different generations of critics from around the globe, from internationally renowned feminist scholars to promising doctoral students. Their sophisticated studies uncover a complex web of explicit and implicit intertextual links between contemporary writers and such iconic figures as Aleramo, Beauvoir, Colette, Cixous, Duras, Irigaray, Kristeva, Morante, Morgner, Wolf and Woolf, so attesting to the existence of a truly international womenâ (TM)s culture across ever more fluid national borders. Womenâ (TM)s Writing in Western Europe is a major intervention in the field of feminist literary criticism which offers new, comparative understandings of such key theoretical concepts as intertextuality, intergenerational relations, gender, identity and legacy. â oeCovering an enormous range of writers and national traditions, Womenâ (TM)s Writing in Western Europe: Gender, Generation and Legacy attests to the vibrancy and the currency of feminist criticism and theory in the new Europe. These essays give us new paradigms to think and read with in the future.â â "Professor Marianne Hirsch, Columbia University, New York. â oeThirty years after the creative outburst of womenâ (TM)s writing and feminist theory of the early 1970s, can we still speak of a womenâ (TM)s tradition of writing, of gender and generation, of the iconic role of the mother figure? This dense and wide ranging collection of essays engages with the dynamics of legacy and conflict, of recognition and denial, to map out some of the many complex strands and relationships marking the textual relations of womenâ (TM)s writing across time and geographic boundaries. No simple tradition of womenâ (TM)s writing emerges, but the powerful hold exerted by some of the most canonical writers â " Beauvoir, Woolf, Cixous, Irigaray, Kristeva, Rich â " and the evidence of the construction of new relationships between and across texts by women points to a continuing network of transmission in which womenâ (TM)s texts are enmeshed. This is an important collection and a large readership will be grateful for this probing of issues which are at the heart of the reading of womenâ (TM)s writing.â â "Professor Elizabeth Fallaize, St. Johnâ (TM)s College Oxford

Julia Waters

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