Transoceanic Dialogues: Coolitude in Caribbean and Indian Ocean Literatures

Abstract

At the point in time when the abolition of slavery was being celebrated, another system of servitude was underway: indentureship. Indenture\nlabor resulted in the transportation of one million Indians - called coolies - into British and French colonies. Unable or unwilling to return, a great\nmajority of them stayed in the countries they had been shipped to and participated in the creation of new, creole cultures.\nThis book offers a close reading of literary works in French and in English by women writers whose ancestors originally came to the Caribbean\nor across the Indian Ocean as indentured laborers. Positing a dynamic and open approach, the author adopts the concept of coolitude to\nexamine how their works capture, on the one hand, the Indian element of the creolization process and, on the other hand, the creolization of the\nIndian diasporic inheritance.\nOrganized around the paradigm of the crossing - historical, geographical, gender-based, corporeal, identitary - this study offers insightful\ntransoceanic, transregional and transcolonial dialogues between Caribbean and Indian Ocean literatures. Focusing on themes of displacement,\nentrapment, metamorphosis and marginalization, the author explores the entanglements and tensions that characterize creole pluricultural\nlandscapes while she underscores Caribbean and Mauritian literature's engagement with alterity.

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