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.
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