Introduction: Mauritius in/and global culture: politics, literature, visual arts

Independent since 1968, Mauritius is often cited as a unique example of peaceful and proud multiculturalism and multilingualism. Political scientists, sociologists and cultural critics have stressed the nation's enviable diversity and its cosmopolitan Creole culture. A British Crown colony between 1810 and 1968, Mauritius is part of the Commonwealth but remains strangely invisible in Anglophone postcolonial discourse. Even the 2004 Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies, which opens with a useful and detailed chronology of the relevant political, historical and literary events that took place between 1898 and 2003, makes no mention of this island-nation when listing the dates of independence for countries in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean. This collection of essays on contemporary Mauritius, its artists and writers seeks to establish an interdisciplinary critical conversation about historical and current dynamics, globalization and its gendered inequalities, visual and literary culture, creolization and cosmopolitanism. The volume brings to a bilingual public a small sample of the vitality of Mauritian artists active in many media.