The issue of identity is receiving the most attention in recent times. Communities, groups and individuals tend to ask themselves who they are after the colonial period. The dawn of modern democracy and the fall of the Berlin Wall have become important sites of self-definition. In this study, I examine narratives of self-invention and selflegitimisation from a variety of texts ranging from poetic to dramatic voices. The author creates characters who represent his wishes, desires and fears in dramatic form. The other characters re-present the other members of his family. He uses autobiographical voices to re-create and re-present history, particularly his family history which has been dismembered by memory's inability to recover the past in its entirety. Memory, visions and dreams are used as tropes to negotiate the pain of loss. These narratives assist him to recapture that which has been lost dearly, and imaginatively re-members what has been dismembered. The autobiographical I shifts into an autobiographical we where the author uses his poetry to lambast the injustices of apartheid. The study further examines some aspects of postcolonial identity, which include the status of African writing and the role of africalogical discourse, the conception of home in apartheid South Africa as well as the juxtaposition of power between indigenes and settlers. These reflect the problem of marginality as a postcolonial condition and how the marginals can be returned to the centre of power. Marginalisation of the indigenes occurs by coercion, inferiorisation, tabooing certain political and cartographical spaces, harassment, torture and imprisonment. Despite these measures, the poetry of NS Puleng persisted to remove the fetish of apartheid disempowerment and disenfranchisement. / African Languages / D.Litt. et Phil. (African Languages)

Ce travail de recherche interroge un large corpus romanesque de l’île Maurice, produit en français et en anglais pendant les années 1990 et 2010, sur ses différentes inscriptions de la postcolonialité. Ces dernières années voient un mouvement d’innovation et de rupture esthétique, thématique et poétique parmi une jeune génération d’écrivains francophones tandis qu’un tel dynamisme, à quelques exceptions près, semble moins à l’œuvre dans la littérature mauricienne d’expression anglaise. Alors que les voix novatrices des uns se caractérisent par une écriture de la transgression, de la démystification, de l’anti-tropicalisation ainsi qu’une mise en scène complexe d’interrogations sur des questions identitaires, celles des autres restent confinées dans un certain immobilisme. Le constat d’un champ littéraire clivé à plusieurs égards est inévitable. Une lecture croisée, entre ces différentes scénographies, qui s’articule autour des leitmotivs de la violence et de l’interculturalité permettra d’analyser de façon critique un certain nombre de tendances scripturaires romanesques actuellement en coprésence à Maurice. Selon quelles modalités se fait la représentation et la négociation des espaces-temps insulaires ? Quelles logiques ethnoculturelles et dynamiques idéologiques sous-tendent ces textes ? Comment le roman met-il en scène les facteurs de l’ethnicité, de la classe, du genre ? En d’autres mots, comment pense-t-il – ou refuse de penser – la complexité de la nation multiculturelle ? Notre démarche comparatiste visera à comprendre les spécificités dominantes d’un espace littéraire éclaté et en déséquilibre et de problématiser dans quelle mesure le renouveau poétique offre des réflexions novatrices sur les enjeux identitaires contemporains de la société et la littérature mauriciennes. / This research project explores the different inscriptions of postcolonial identities in an extensive corpus of Mauritian novels written in French and English between 1990 and 2010. Over these last few decades, aesthetic, thematic and poetic innovation can be observed in a young generation of Francophone Mauritian writers, whereas such tendencies are rare among their Anglophone counterparts. While the former can be characterized by their subversive, demystifying and anti-exoticising postures, as well as their complex ways of interrogating issues of identity, the latter rather seem artistically stagnant. The Mauritian literary field clearly reveals itself as unequal as far as quantity and quality are concerned. A postcolonial ‘cross-reading-against-the-grain’ of these different texts, which focuses on leitmotivs of violence and interculturality, allows us to interrogate critically a certain number of literary tendencies currently found in Mauritius. How do the novels negotiate the island’s topographies and temporalities? Which ethno-cultural logics and ideological dynamics can be found underlying these contemporary texts? How do the novels represent complex factors such as ethnicity, class, gender? In other words, how do the Mauritian writers reflect on – or refuse to do so – the complexity of their multicultural nation? This comparative endeavour aims at understanding the dominant characteristics of a very heterogeneous literary field and seeks to analyze to what extent the new aesthetic tendencies offer original perspectives on contemporary issues of identity in Mauritian society as well as its literary production.

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In this thesis, I examine a critical procedure appropriate to Black South African autobiography of the 1950s and early 1960s. In particular, I examine these autobiographies as examples of counterhegemonic writing in which the self counters the hegemonic apartheid notion of identity, based on racial and cultural purity, and I propose that the hybrid selves encoded in these narratives have the capacity to inform a new South African nationhood. Chapter One necessitates an autocritique, in which I locate my own discourse within the intersecting discursive strands of Western and local theory, an effort that is guided by the imperatives that emerge from the autobiographies themselves. In Chapter Two, I suggest that the postcolonial autos displaces Humanist, and appropriates postmodernist, conceptions of the "I". Rewriting the terms of the autobiographical pact, the authority of grapos is re-instated in counternarratives that give privileged status to the bios - to lives that claim "I AM!" and selves that reconstruct identity. A related concern is the relationship between autobiographical criticism in South Africa and hegemony. In the chapters that follow, I examine the various ways in which counterhegemonic selves are constructed in Tell freedom, Down Second Avenue, Drawn in colour: African Contrasts and The Ochre People. Peter Abrahams's autobiography is discussed largely in terms of Frantz Fanon's insights on identity construction and the notion of a "hybrid I". Es'kia Mphahlek's (re)writing of the self - whose main feature is ambivalence - forms the focus of Chapter Four. These notions are developed in the final chapter, which focuses on Noni Jabavu's narratives that encode an "in-between" cultural identity and, as in the autobiographies of Abrahams and Mphahlele, a metonymic "I". / English Studies / D. Litt. et Phil. (English)

In this thesis, I examine a critical procedure appropriate to Black South African autobiography of the 1950s and early 1960s. In particular, I examine these autobiographies as examples of counterhegemonic writing in which the self counters the hegemonic apartheid notion of identity, based on racial and cultural purity, and I propose that the hybrid selves encoded in these narratives have the capacity to inform a new South African nationhood. Chapter One necessitates an autocritique, in which I locate my own discourse within the intersecting discursive strands of Western and local theory, an effort that is guided by the imperatives that emerge from the autobiographies themselves. In Chapter Two, I suggest that the postcolonial autos displaces Humanist, and appropriates postmodernist, conceptions of the "I". Rewriting the terms of the autobiographical pact, the authority of grapos is re-instated in counternarratives that give privileged status to the bios - to lives that claim "I AM!" and selves that reconstruct identity. A related concern is the relationship between autobiographical criticism in South Africa and hegemony. In the chapters that follow, I examine the various ways in which counterhegemonic selves are constructed in Tell freedom, Down Second Avenue, Drawn in colour: African Contrasts and The Ochre People. Peter Abrahams's autobiography is discussed largely in terms of Frantz Fanon's insights on identity construction and the notion of a "hybrid I". Es'kia Mphahlek's (re)writing of the self - whose main feature is ambivalence - forms the focus of Chapter Four. These notions are developed in the final chapter, which focuses on Noni Jabavu's narratives that encode an "in-between" cultural identity and, as in the autobiographies of Abrahams and Mphahlele, a metonymic "I". / English Studies / D. Litt. et Phil. (English)