![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Abstract
At the independence of Mauritius, multiculturalism policy, as part of the decolonisation agenda of “Mauritianisation”, was instituted in education. The official English language, through the curriculum, was buttressed to police the population according to the moral standards of multiculturalism. In this article, popular culture as manifested through ethnographic research into students’ negotiations of official multiculturalism implemented through school textbooks, will be shown to flout policy. It will be demonstrated that resistive cultural practices of Mauritian students, embodied by vernacular Creole, contest the cultural essentialism promoted by the government. Creole language, in particular, and various in‐between cultural experiences articulate the hybrid, diasporic and global dimensions of the lives of ordinary postcolonial Mauritians.
Notes
1. As a genuine “terra incognita” and “terra nullus”, Mauritius was written into existence by imperial history when it was discovered by the Portuguese (who did not, however, settle on the island) in 1510. The Dutch settled for two brief periods on the island between 1638 to 1658 and 1664 to 1710, and named it “Mauritius”, but left no lasting legacies other than the island’s name and environmental debacles such as the extinction of the dodo bird. French occupation of Mauritius from 1725 to 1810 (the island was claimed for France in 1715, but settled in 1725) was in fact the formal beginning of the colonial process in Mauritius, which at the time was called “Ile de France”.
2. Two national plans (1971–1975) and (1975–1982) lay the foundations for the implementation of Mauritianisation in the early 1970s. Free education at all levels, the diversification of curricula and the construction of schools throughout the country constituted the mainstay of the decolonisation agenda. Curricular reform was geared toward the growth of a national consciousness within the framework of multiculturalism. Early editions of textbooks have been regularly upgraded in order to respond to changing Mauritian society and, particularly, to fashion students for their roles as citizens of an increasingly industrialised nation.
3. N. Aumeerally, “Tiger in Paradise”: A Reading of Postcolonialism in Global Mauritius. Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Melbourne, October 2001.
4. See Smith Simmons (Citation1982); Lau Thi Keng (Citation1991); Eriksen (Citation1992).
5. Lau Thi Keng (Citation1991, p. 19) notes that the whole debate around independence was clearly ethnicised and led to riots between Muslims and Creoles in January and February 1968, just before independence, which led to the establishment of a government of national unity in 1969 through a coalition between Parti Mauricien Social Democrate (Creole‐dominant) and Labour (Hindu‐dominant).
6. The Best Losers System stipulates that “there shall be 8 seats in the Assembly additional to the 62 seats for members representing constituencies which shall so far as is possible be allocated to persons belonging to parties who have stood as candidates for election but have not been returned as members to represent constituencies” (Constitution of Maurtius, First Schedule, section 31(2)).
7. Parsooramen was Minister of Education and Culture throughout the 1980s.
8. It should be noted that, irrespective of government policy on languages, there are increasing motivation levels in learners in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) contexts. Lamb (Citation2004, p. 5) argues that even in such societies as Indonesia or Jordan that are reputedly anti‐British or anti‐American, the desire to learn English is very strong. The discursive construction of English from the period of nationalism to the era of globalisation has shifted from being emblematic of neo‐colonialist forces to being associated with a spreading international culture incorporating, inter alia, business, technological innovations, consumer value, democracy, world travel, and the multifarious icons of fashion, sports and music.
9. Schools situated in different parts of the island – urban, peri‐urban and rural areas reflecting different ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds, State and private schools, all‐girl, all‐boy and mixed schools, “star” schools and low‐achieving ones were researched in order to have a representative sample.
10. I am aware of the inequitable power relations such a procedure might elicit. In the course of the interviews, I attempted to mitigate the differential positioning by using Creole language and other in‐group expressions that would enable a more fluid rapport with students.
11. It is necessary to contextualise the research as well as point out some of the difficulties encountered in the process. The informal framework of the interview, along with the time constraints, constituted major obstacles to obtaining consistent data. Groups of students from the urban regions could be categorized as English as a Second Language (ESL) students, while the ones from the rural region would more readily fit into an EFL situation. The interview process was problematic given that the girls and boys from the rural college did not always seem to understand the texts they were reading.
12. As Bhabha (Citation1990, p. 127) has argued in relation to colonial mimicry, it involves a “[deformation] and [displacement] of the image of the coloniser, which although it materializes as a form of power over the other, also involves a loss of agency”. It is crucial to recognise that, through mimicry, the selves of the coloniser and colonised are, using Bhabha’s (1990a, p. 127) terms, “curiously elided”, fissuring the authority of the colonial apparatus.
13. This concept harks from the Southeast Asian tiger economies, where the government has been campaigning for the rediscovery of indigenous Asian values in order to stem the tide of Westernisation. In particular, “new Asia” celebrates a synergy between traditional Asian values and Western economic ideology
