The Postcolonial and Creolisation: Mapping India from the Caribbean in E. Moutoussamy’s Chacha et Sosso and V.S Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas

Résumé 0

The demise of postcolonial studies has been predicted for years, yet the field still produces abundant research output and creatively engages with historical and contemporary forms of colonialism and imperialism. This article reads two (post)indenture novels by Francophone and Anglophone Indo-Caribbean writers through Edouard Glissant’s theory of creolisation to shift away from a subcontinental understanding of the Indian postcolonial and adopt a diasporic and metasporic perspective that undermines the tension between the singular, the specific and the universal. I argue that postcolonial theory is a form of creolised discourse whose heuristic force is best deployed through critical research that re-inflects locally postcolonial theory’s major tropes such as marginality and cultural translation. To illustrate this point, this article interrelates the local/specific and the universal/global in a close textual reading which redefines the Indian topoi of caste and Mother India through the Caribbean reinvention of the kala pani trope.