ABSTRACT
The Southwest Indian Ocean, where every island has its own creole language, and where diverse groups have been brought together by coercion, is a laboratory for understanding linguistic and cultural creolization. The study of marginality called creolization will have set up a model for a new literary criticism. Indian Ocean folktales use the complexities of converging social systems as both their code of available metaphor and the object of their commentaries. The Southwest Indian Ocean Literary Mode of Production (LMP) is in constant variation. But then, so is any system of literary production and consumption. Literary systems are defined not by homogeneity but by “a variability whose characteristics are imminent, continuous, and regulated in a very specific mode”, namely by the effects of power differentiation. The new LMP exemplifies creolization, a concept that returns agency to the colonized and powerless. Necessary conditions were the convergence of different languages and traditions and a strong differentiation of power.
