‘Tiger in Paradise’: Reading global Mauritius in shifting time and space

Abstract

This article consists of a reading of global financial magazines and tourist literature in the context of Mauritius' more recent self-promotion as an economic ‘Asian tiger’ miracle. This new representation signals a burgeoning hybrid postcolonial Mauritian identity that re-inscribes Asian diasporic history. Such a re-alignment decenters colonial Europe and regionalises Mauritius as part of Asia. Mauritian modernity is engendered by neo-Orientalist narratives inspired by a resurgence of colonial constructions of Mauritius as an erotic paradise, and a recycling of Asian tiger ethos. Collapsing Mauritius into the tiger cultural geography is particularly problematic for a multicultural nation since this emergent self-representation denies the contribution of people of non-Asian heritage. Inspiring itself from Asian ‘alter/native’ modernity, Mauritian global modernity also derives from a male-oriented capitalist paradigm and a subscription to discriminatory macho Asian tiger ideologies. It is the jingle ‘Tiger in paradise’ (Financial Times, 27 September 1994) which, I will conclude, most clearly interweaves the ambivalent colonial and diasporic constituents of postcolonial Mauritius.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 13 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.