Kinships of the Sea: Comparative History, Minor Solidarity, and Transoceanic Empathy

Abstract

Creole literatures and expressive cultures from the Mascarene Islands and the Caribbean region have long trained our minds to think transversally. Not only do they foreground narratives of migration and displacement that have put diverse peoples, cultures, and languages into close contact over extended historical periods, but they also bring together trajectories and epistemologies that turn minor-to-minor solidarities into a rhetoric of a new humanism. This essay focuses on the figure of the migrant in the works of transnational artists and writers such as Nathacha Appanah, Nirveda Alleck, Ananda Devi, and Patrick Chamoiseau. At stake is the construction of new kinships, which destabilize historical, geographical, and cultural divides inherited from colonialism and engage anew with questions of comparative history, minor solidarity, and human empathy.