SEM Transculturalismes: Sandrine Soukaï (Université Gustave Eiffel), « ‘Paysan de l’écriture’: Writing the Indo-Guadeloupean Memory of Indenture »

Following 1848 French the abolition of slavery more than 42,000 Indian indentured were brought to Guadeloupe as plantation labour. Till recently, the island had neglected memorializing its Indian heritage and there has not been any systematic study of its cultural and political manifestations, including its relationship to the prominent memorialization of slavery and to Guadeloupean Creole identity. I intervene within this lacuna by studying the literary corpus of the most prolific francophone and creolophone Indo-Guadeloupean writer, Ernest Moutoussamy. Combining trauma studies, oral history, archival research and close reading, I analyse the oeuvre of this “paysan de l’écriture” (Moutoussamy). By investigating the relationship between Caribbean, French/European, Indian diasporic, and Creole identities, filtered through literary forms and linguistic choices, I present new paradigms for postcolonial studies through the traversal of Francophone, Creolophone, and Anglophone cultural spheres. In so doing, I mobilize literary memorialization to foster cross-cultural ethical engagement and push forward recent developments in memory studies.

Dr Sandrine Soukaï is Lecturer in British and Postcolonial Literatures at Gustave Eiffel University (LISAA). Her research areas include (post-)colonial, memory and trauma studies. She specialises in South Asian literatures, in particular related to Partition, and is the author of a thesis entitled The Shadows of Partition in Indian and Pakistani novels in English. Her current work moves away from peninsular India to examine creolised Indianness in Caribbean literatures, histories and memories of indenture and their articulation with slavery across Francophone, Creolophone and Anglopone cultural areas. She has published several articles and book chapters on South Asian literatures and is working as co-editor on a collective volume Island Indias: Archipelagic Memory (Brill, forthcoming) which will include part of her latest work on Indo-Guadeloupean literature on indenture.