The Female Pioneer in Monique Agénor’s L’Aïeule de l’Isle Bourbon

Abstract

Reunionese writer Monique Agenor inscribes her first novel within a process of navigation that charts movement as a crossing of boundaries and barriers. In so doing, Agenor subscribes to the use of travel as a trope in the Indian Ocean's history, migration, and regionalism, that recurs with persistence in Indian Ocean literary imagination. But while Agenor attempts to undo the erasures that typify the travel-writing genre, specifically the marginalization of women's subjective experiences, she legitimates the hegemony of dominant French metropolitan history. Accordingly, the novel privileges a colonialist legacy buttressed by assimilationist impulses that are discordant with regional exigencies.