A creolizing curriculum: Multicultural education, ethnopolitics, and Teaching Kreol Morisien

Abstract

In January 2012, Kreol Morisien, the main lingua franca of the Republic of Mauritius, was officially introduced within the National Curriculum Framework as one of the country’s ancestral languages. Since the colonial period, the teaching of ancestral languages has served to preserve the ancestral heritage, cultural identity, and ethnic ‘purity’ of the various diasporic communities that make up the Mauritian population. But while the Creole island prides itself of its long-standing commitment to multilingualism, the terms of this late adoption by the education system remains a controversial subject. Given its significance as a transethnic language that is also unique to Mauritius, many have advocated for the nationalization of Kreol Morisien since the country’s access to independence in 1968. As such, while the institutional recognition of this local vernacular is largely justified by claims for equity, social justice, and historical reparation vis-à-vis the mixed descendants of enslaved groups, its official status as the ancestral language of (Afro-)Creoles brings to the fore the tensions and paradoxes that result from the normalization of the Rainbow nation’s ethnocultural politics by the multicultural curriculum. Investigating these tensions and paradoxes, this dissertation historicizes the ethnonationalist discourse of the Mauritian curriculum; its endorsement of ethnic separatism; and its subsequent abjection of the local Creole people, culture, and language, as they relate to the legacy of slavery, and to processes of métissage and creolization. Focusing on the emergence of an Afrocentric Creole identity movement in the 1990s and 2000s, the project further discusses how the gradual essentialization of the local Creole people and culture correlates with the ‘ethnicization’ of Kreol Morisien and its adoption as the ancestral language of (Afro-)Creoles within the national curriculum. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that, beyond the scripted guidelines of the ancestral language framework, the presence of Kreol Morisien in schools paradoxically generates a ‘creolizing of the curriculum’ that unsettles official categorizations of culture and ethnic identity long represented as stable, bounded, and fixed by the multicultural curriculum.