Overview

It is something of a commonplace in postcolonial criticism to divide the world into metropolitan centres and colonial or postcolonial peripheries. The centre–periphery metaphor provides a useful image for describing what is essentially a power relationship, one of domination and control, rather than a seriously spatial one. Yet space and geography are not totally irrelevant to the way it functions. The metaphor also includes perhaps the notion of the centre as a privileged vantage point. Itself always visible to the outside world, always the focus of attention, it struggles, at times, to focus its vision over long distances and those situated at too great a distance from the centre may well fall from view. Hence the islands of the Indian Ocean (the Arabian Sea as the Indians themselves call it) often refer to themselves as the periphery of the periphery. Geographically distant and scattered, the francophone presence in the Indian Ocean also emerges from a chequered history that evolved in a remarkably fragmented and ad hoc fashion.

When dealing with the francophone presence on the large continental land masses of Canada, sub-Saharan Africa or even the Maghreb, there is little alternative but to resort to generalisations that blunt the edges of the cultural and linguistic differences that distinguish Acadia, for example, from Quebec, Congo from Senegal, or the Moroccan Berber from the Tunisian Jew. When dealing with the francophone presence in the Indian Ocean, the opposite is the case.