Cross-cultural Labyrinths in the Literatures of the Indian Ocean

Abstract The insular Indian oceanic space is distinguished by a long history of migrations, encounters, conflicts, exchanges, interbreeding, and interculturality. Violence and negotiation lie at the heart of their historical, anthropological, and linguistic processes. The literatures of the Indian Ocean islands, in particular, articulate their representations, their fictional universes and speeches, as well as their modes of writing, with a perpetual interrogation about travels, meetings, frontiers, which constitute the ways of living in places and telling about them. Composed on the basis of dialogue and intertextuality in order to account for complex worlds, they also house ghosts which make them labyrinthine. Experiences peculiar to each society also connect them with the global history of colonial predation and disobedience, migrations, and exchanges, as well as intercultural relationships. From this point of view, such literatures allow one to read the labyrinthine and spectral insertion of the colonial world into European literatures. This paper is based on a French-language Indian oceanic corpus and aims to put forward a political reading (in the sense of Jacques Rancière) of the aesthetics of intercultural meetings and of its unplanned effects.