Abstract
At the beginning of October 2009, UNESCO announced that the culture of maloya, a genre of song and dance from the island of Réunion, would henceforth become an international heritage item. The Geneva committee, in placing this endangered form of culture under their protection, defined it as a ‘type of music, song and dance native to the island of Réunion’. There is nothing unusual in the fact that a marginal item of ‘immaterial’ culture, originating from a tiny speck of France in the Indian Ocean, should be noticed by an international organisation and ‘protected’ in this way. This discussion paper investigates versions of creole and créolité and the role of theory in the kind of advocacy that promoted maloya. It argues that ‘moorings’ (Vergès and Marimoutou), as a concept for creolisation studies, is more robust, concrete and precise than Bhabha’s ‘in-between’.
Highlights
An old Malbar is wandering in the countryside at night, and, seeing a light, approaches a cabin.1 It is open, so he goes in
Estimated to number 180,000, these diasporic Tamils had lost their language and taken up the local lingua franca, Creole, spoken among the Madagascans, French, Chinese and Africans making up the population of Réunion in the Indian Ocean
At the beginning of October 2009, UNESCO announced that the culture of maloya, a genre of song and dance from the island of Réunion, would become an international heritage item (‘Fet kaf 2009’)
Summary
Northern Territory, where Kriol is an official language name. Creole culture, as in the Caribbean depends for its evolution on a single powerful colonizing culture and language, with a subaltern and linguistically diverse population of slaves or indentured labourers with the need for a lingua franca. A cultural form is understood as traces of life engendered by partners These are constituted as chains of intimately connected transformations that work with alterities, as Vergès and Marimoutou say: ‘a creativity of a world subject to continual conflicting inputs.’. The mode of analysis sketched here is a tracing of pathways, via the cultural translations, that take us from maloya to UNESCO; or from maloya to Warner music, as the song in question is promoted and sold There is another pathway which is the one followed by the intellectual whose practice allows her to ‘read’ or observe a maloya performance, link it to a struggle over national or regional identity, and various other elements in a hybrid assemblage, eventually leading to a piece of writing that is submitted for publication. Cultural politics and advocacy involves an on-going participation in such worlds
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