Robert Rouphail, Susquehanna University
Race, Cyclones, and the End of Empire in Mauritius
In February of 1960, the most powerful and destructive cyclone in Mauritian history, Carol, made landfall. In its wake, the British colonial state embarked on a reconstruction effort that would reshape the material and social worlds of Mauritius for decades to come. This article analyzes the responses to both the storm itself and to one of the hallmark efforts of the rebuilding process: the construction of cités, “cyclone-proof” housing estates that were meant to permanently shelter those left homeless. Using colonial state papers, songs, poetry, and oral history, this paper shows how both the landfall Carol and the cités that emerged in its wake were understood to be transformative historical events and processes for Afro-descendant Creole Mauritians. In so doing, this paper demonstrates the importance of the natural world to narratives of diasporic community in the southwest Indian Ocean.
Dr Rouphail is Assistant Professor in History at Susquehanna University. He holds a PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is primarily interested in the social and cultural histories of race, gender, empire and the environment in East Africa and the Indian Ocean world. His current research is on the modern histories of cyclonic weather in Mauritius, a multiethnic and religiously plural island nation off the coast of southeastern Africa, and the Indian Ocean World. His book manuscript, Cyclonic Lives: Disaster and Society in Modern Mauritius, is an environmental history from below. It seeks to understand how everyday people reckoned with these meteorological phenomena in Mauritius. This project traces how popular ideas of race, gender and national belonging in Mauritius transformed in relation to the destruction caused by tropical cyclones and reconstruction efforts that followed. He is also broadly interested in the intersecting histories of Afro-Asian politics, decolonization, technology and the natural world in the 20th century Indian Ocean World.
Date
-