Suchergebnisse

International audience ; Composed of four small islands, Grande Comore, Anjouan, Moheli, and Mayotte the Comoros archipelago is fractured by the political status of Mayotte, former French colony dependent on Madagascar and today the 101st department of France. In spite of this political separation, the islands are closely linked by their Muslim identity and they are all attached to Central Africa, Madagascar and Zanzibar by several centuries of migrations. While Mayotte benefits from its membership of the European Union, the multi-island state of Comoros remains one of the poorest countries in the world. This economic gap has destabilized the human geography of an archipelago defined historically by movements of people and goods between the islands. Today, such natural movements having ceased, detention centers in Mayotte are overcrowded and 40% of its population are undocumented. How does literature represent this "balkanization" of the Comore Archipelago (Taglioni, 2008)? How does the creation of a «false otherness» created by neocolonial interventions impact upon the identities of the Comorians? How can writing heal this imposed fracture? Our paper will deal with these issues through a reading of Salim Hatubou's novel titled, Hamouro (2005). ; Constitué de quatre petites îles, Grande Comore, Anjouan, Mohéli, et Mayotte l'archipel des Comores se trouve fracturé par le statut politique de Mayotte, ancienne colonie française rattachée à Madagascar et aujourd'hui, 101e département de la France. En dépit de cette séparation politique, les îles sont intimement liées par leur identité musulmane et elles sont toutes rattachées à l'Afrique centrale, à Madagascar et à Zanzibar par les migrations anciennes. Alors que Mayotte bénéficie de son appartenance à l'Union européenne, l'État multi-insulaire des Comores reste l'un des pays les plus pauvres du monde. Cet écart économique a déstabilisé la géographie humaine d'un archipel défini historiquement par les mobilités entre les îles. Aujourd'hui, les mouvements naturels de ...

International audience ; Composed of four small islands, Grande Comore, Anjouan, Moheli, and Mayotte the Comoros archipelago is fractured by the political status of Mayotte, former French colony dependent on Madagascar and today the 101st department of France. In spite of this political separation, the islands are closely linked by their Muslim identity and they are all attached to Central Africa, Madagascar and Zanzibar by several centuries of migrations. While Mayotte benefits from its membership of the European Union, the multi-island state of Comoros remains one of the poorest countries in the world. This economic gap has destabilized the human geography of an archipelago defined historically by movements of people and goods between the islands. Today, such natural movements having ceased, detention centers in Mayotte are overcrowded and 40% of its population are undocumented. How does literature represent this "balkanization" of the Comore Archipelago (Taglioni, 2008)? How does the creation of a «false otherness» created by neocolonial interventions impact upon the identities of the Comorians? How can writing heal this imposed fracture? Our paper will deal with these issues through a reading of Salim Hatubou's novel titled, Hamouro (2005). ; Constitué de quatre petites îles, Grande Comore, Anjouan, Mohéli, et Mayotte l'archipel des Comores se trouve fracturé par le statut politique de Mayotte, ancienne colonie française rattachée à Madagascar et aujourd'hui, 101e département de la France. En dépit de cette séparation politique, les îles sont intimement liées par leur identité musulmane et elles sont toutes rattachées à l'Afrique centrale, à Madagascar et à Zanzibar par les migrations anciennes. Alors que Mayotte bénéficie de son appartenance à l'Union européenne, l'État multi-insulaire des Comores reste l'un des pays les plus pauvres du monde. Cet écart économique a déstabilisé la géographie humaine d'un archipel défini historiquement par les mobilités entre les îles. Aujourd'hui, les mouvements naturels de population ayant été entravés par les autorités, les centres de détention à Mayotte sont surpeuplés et environ 40 % de la population de l'île est constituée de personnes sans papiers. Comment la littérature représentet- elle cette « balkanisation » de l'archipel des Comores (Taglioni, 2008) ? Comment la création d'une « fausse altérité » créée par des interventions néocoloniales influe-t-elle sur l'identité des Comoriens ? Comment l'écriture peut-elle guérir cette fracture imposée ? Notre réflexion traitera de ces questions à travers la lecture du roman de Salim Hatubou intitulé Hamouro (2005).

What links Bernardin de Saint Pierre's 1788 novel about Isle de France, Paul et Virginie, with V.S. Naipaul's 1972 piece, An overcrowded Barracoon? What is common to Joseph Conrad's 1910 novella, A Smile of Fortune, and tourist brochures of La Grande Baie? What brings together the story of the ruins of Babylon and the Ghats of the Ganges? Actually, these seemingly disjointed narratives make up a vast library of inter-connecting Indian Ocean island stories. In this study I will use the image of 'Banaras' as the locus of an inter-textual reading exercise connecting the literary spaces of Mauritian writer and filmmaker Barlen Pyamootoo with other stories like those mentioned above. Pyamootoo's literary universe reveals to us the dynamic, multilayered and polyphonic nature of Indian Ocean island cultures.

AbstractCultural perceptions of exotic nations do not depend solely on transparence of representation or immediacy of experience, they are also based on complex processes that involve interpretation and re-invention. The (con)fusion of the real and the imaginary that informs any form of writing about the Other stems not only from the existential experience of the one who perceives but also from the socio-historical factors that define his presence in the Other space. This article will be looking at how this complex relation that exists between literature, imperialism and imagined space is reflected in André Malraux's La Voie royale (1930) and Henri Fauconnier's Malaisie (1930).

In 2005-6, the French Indian Ocean island of Réunion experienced a massive epidemic of the mosquito-borne viral infection Chikungunya. Reporting on the epidemic in the print media demonstrates a considerable lag compared to the realtime evolution of the epidemic, and this paper explores possible reasons for that delay. We analyse the content of print media articles about Chikungunya from two Reunionese newspapers (Témoignages and Clicanoo) and two newspapers from metropolitan France (Le Figaro and Le Monde). In the Reunionese newspapers, the delay in acknowledging the public health risk posed by the virus suggests passive denial in the early stages of the epidemic, followed by acceptance with blame attributed to the French metropolitan government – reflecting the uneasy historical relationship between the Reunionese and the government. In the French metropolitan newspapers, the delay is even greater and may reflect the influence of residual colonialist thinking on the priority placed on reporting on an epidemic in a remote tropical location: once a risk to metropolitan France is identified, reporting intensifies considerably. The media representations also highlight the importance of belief systems as modulators of people's risk perception and their subsequent health-protection behaviour. We suggest that a better understanding of these drivers of health behaviour in multicultural societies may provide important opportunities to reduce the community burden of disease.

AbstractIn this paper we examine whether discourses of tropicality were affected by paradigm shifts in Western thinking about medicine. If tropicalist thinking reflects latent Western assumptions about the 'Other', tropicalism should persist through major shifts in Western thought. Here we explore whether or not such persistence is evident in representations in the scientific literature of mosquito-borne diseases on the Indian Ocean island of Réunion and where discrete epidemics occurred before, during and after a paradigm shift in Western thinking about disease causation. Late in the 19th Century, miasma theory (epidemics caused by unhealthy air) was replaced by microbial theory (epidemics caused by transmission of microbes) as the dominant scientific understanding of disease causation. We analyse representations of mosquito-borne epidemics in the contemporaneous scientific literature about Réunion for evidence of both tropicalism and a shift in the scientific paradigm. In pre-microbial representations, the unhealthy tropical environments thought to be responsible for miasmatic disease transmission are associated predominantly with the non-white population; in microbial representations non-whites are directly blamed for the spread of tropical infections. The paper argues that the persistence of tropicalist thinking through a major paradigm shift in the Western understanding of disease causation supports Said's (1979) contention that 'Othering' is a generalisable ahistorical phenomenon, and discusses issues of economic exigency that may have supported an ongoing tropicalist influence on public health practice in French overseas departments.