Belonging – a sense of attachment to, and identification with, a place or people – is a particularly fraught issue in the small, postcolonial island nation of Mauritius. Although belonging is always a highly fluid and subjective concept, there are several interrelated, locally specific factors that make belonging especially contentious in modern-day Mauritius. These include, but are not limited to: the diverse, multiethnic composition of its population; the absence of an indigenous, precolonial culture; the island's history of double (French and British) colonisation; its relatively recent transition to independence (in 1968); and its official, ethnically delineated, multicultural model of ‘unity in diversity’. The usual purportedly ‘natural’ bases for the postulation of a cohesive sense of collective, national belonging – indigenousness, ethnic homogeneity, shared origins, history, language and culture – do not therefore readily apply in the young, multi-ethnic, immigrant nation of Mauritius. To an even greater degree than in other contexts, notions of belonging are intertwined and often conflated with questions of nation, community and ethnic identity – all of which are particularly divisive and contested in contemporary Mauritius. This book will examine how the universal longing to belong – often expressed as a problem of belonging – is articulated, and how alternative forms of affective belonging are imagined, in a representative selection of recent fiction from Mauritius. My aim is to explore the diverse fictions of belonging evoked in the novels: both in the sense that Mauritian fiction is centrally concerned with issues of belonging and exclusion; and in the sense that the notion of belonging is always a highly performative and imaginative act of fiction.

Historical overview

With no original, in-dwelling inhabitants, Mauritian society is made up entirely of the descendants of immigrants – mainly from France, Africa, Madagascar, the Indian subcontinent and China – who were brought to the island at different times over the past three centuries by the brutal transnational flows of slavery, indenture, imperialism, global capitalism and economic migration. As a result, as Mauritian academic Kumari Issur points out, ‘à Maurice, nous connaissons la difficulté de définir une identité nationale. La nécessité de toujours qualifier le Mauricien par Indo-, Sino-, Franco-, etc. nous révèle bien l’absence de cristallisation d’une identité homogène’.