Creole Vernacular Theatre: Transcolonial Translations in Mauritius

Creole-language literatures from the Caribbean or the Indian Ocean generally fall into two broad categories: "content" or source of knowledge about the local culture, and mimetic or pedagogical activity aimed at transposing European classics into vernacular languages. Creole literatures are rarely studied as technically innovative interventions capable of pushing the existing boundaries of genre and the parameters of literary analysis. In this essay, Lionnet argues that the Mauritian dramatist Dev Virahsawmy's creative adaptation and "translation" of Shakespeare's Tempest allows him to "provincialize" this classic and to develop a theory of power and sexuality that puts him in dialogue with African novelists and dramatists. Virahsawmy's play articulates a new transcolonial logic. He underscores the horizontal connections among different cultures of the "peripheries" while questioning the epistemological foundations of the means by which stories can get told, understood, translated, and disseminated both internally within their culture of origin, and globally in the contemporary market of ideas.