Creolising Indianité and Cosmopolitanism in Ernest Moutoussamy’s Il ne fait jamais nuit

Bibliographic Data

ID21992973
AuthorsSandrine Soukaï (0009-0003-4026-7543)
Year2025
Volume19
Publication date2025-01-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueArchipélies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2110-7130 • E-ISSN: 2777-5909
PublisherOpenEdition (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.4000/14qgv
LanguageFR
Citations received1
References cited20

In his historical novel Il ne fait jamais nuit (2013), Guadeloupean Ernest Moutoussamy, a writer and political figure of Indian descent, traces the unsung life of Caroupin Ramsamy, an Indian who migrated to Guadeloupe during the period of indentureship, who is portrayed as a staunch defender of universal humanism. While the novel often conjures a Hindu India within the archipelago’s multicultural fabric, it also depicts Guadeloupe as a cradle where cultures, languages and peoples intersect, dramatising the negotiations through which Indianness is reframed as creolised Indianité. Drawing on postcolonial and diasporic studies, and research on creolisation, indenture, and cosmopolitanism, this article analyses Indianité as a creolising force that helps shape a universal humanism rooted in a form of creolised cosmopolitanism. It argues that Moutoussamy’s fictionalisation of history reinvents Indianness through a linguistic and cultural poetics of creolisation, and shows how creolisation fosters an ethos of universal humanism grounded in localised, creolised cosmopolitanism

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