Rainbow Colors

The narratives under consideration in Rainbow Colors depict Mauritius's history of competing colonial forces, describe its intricate social geography of free and forced migrations, and portray the anxieties of mixed race persons and cultures in postcolonies.Through a rigorous analysis of novels from Loys Masson's L'etoile et la clef (1945) to Ananda Devi's Moi, l'interdite (2000), this study argues that there is no single grand narrative of cultural hybridity and ethnic pluralism in Mauritius. By conceptualizing literature as the overlapping space of ethnic-cultural realities, national and transnational identities, and a poetics of alterity, Rainbow Colors explores how different literary ethno-topographies of Mauritius are produced at this intersection. This original work considers Mauritian writing in French in its own right and not as a minor literature within the Francophone tradition. Furthermore, while significant monographs on ethnicity and nation have been published on the African and Caribbean novel (in English and in French), this is the first such single-authored book-length study on Mauritian novels to date.

Her study, a literary ethno-topography, investigates the complex relations between ethnicity, identity, and nation on the island., This useful book explores the relations between ethnicity, identity and nation in the literary texts which have emerged in the French language recent times from Mauritius. These texts show how Mauritian writers using French have emerged from the exoticizing shadow cast by early French representations of the island to embrace and engage with the modern realities of this complex, multi-layered society. This is a well-researched and timely account of a place in which diasporic identity is the universal condition. It speaks to issues which are becoming central to all studies of the postcolony and to the situation of the erstwhile metropoles.

Srilata Ravi is senior lecturer of European Languages and Studies at the University of Western Australia.