At the opposite extreme from the ‘microscopic’, intimate and individual forms of belonging depicted in Robillard's works, the novels of Amal Sewtohul portray the epic, transnational, intergenerational quests to belong of a multi-ethnic cast of Mauritian protagonists. To a far greater extent than his contemporaries so far discussed, Sewtohul is concerned with questions of collective, national belonging and of imagining what it means to be ‘Mauritian’ today. In many ways, these concerns echo those of earlier proponents of mauricianisme (discussed in the Introduction) who, during the independence period, sought to promote an inclusive sense of national belonging to Mauritius rather than to discrete ethnic communities with ancestral origins elsewhere. Like these precursors, Sewtohul seems to offer a vision – or, in fact, a range of possible visions – of an inclusive, locally grounded sense of Mauritian nationhood, transcending the population's ethnic differences and diverse histories of displacement and immigration. In returning to these abiding concerns, however, Sewtohul's novels also acknowledge the important contemporary forces of economic migration, mobility and global capitalism that have increasingly made Mauritius a place of emigration (definitive, temporary or seasonal) as well as of multiple immigrations: forces which problematise traditional, rooted and homogenous conceptions of national identity and collective belonging.

In his influential theorisation of the nation as an ‘imagined political community’, Benedict Anderson famously asserts that ‘[the nation] is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’. The ‘images of communion’ that underpin traditional models of national identity are predominantly based on ethnic homogeneity and on the fixed, deep-rooted relationship of people to place. As Kumari Issur argues in her study of nationalism, transnationalism and postnationalism in Sewtohul's Made in Mauritius, however, ‘le discours ambiant à Maurice, visiblement influencé par les modèles européens visant à promouvoir l’homogénéité d’une nation, ne peut être entretenu’. As Sewtohul's novels amply reflect, the multi-ethnic, multilingual, multifaith composition of Mauritius's population, like the complex, multi-diasporic history from which it springs, radically challenge homogenous, fixed models of national communion, as proposed by Anderson. Sewtohul's novels show that national belonging need not – indeed, in the case of Mauritius, cannot – be imagined on such terms.