Paper short abstract:

In their fonnkèr, the poets of Reunion Island bear witness to the uprooting caused by coloniality. Their performances indicate an alternative historicization, based on Creole diasporization, but also show a racialization in its intention to blackization.

Paper long abstract:

Reunion Island, a French territory in the Indian Ocean, is a post-slavery society. In the mid-2000s, slam-poetry began to develop here, presenting itself as popular, but rooted in a white American background. Reunion's oral poetry, fonnkèr, which has its roots in the colonial period, brings to light a hidden discourse (Scott, 2019): that of uprootedness. Its poets express their rejection of the "whitization" (Telep, 2018) and their attraction to a long-invisibilized Creole literature. Their choice of fonnkèr rather than slam-poetry is an opportunity for them to establish a filiation with local authors and enslaved ancestors, as well as to assert a hidden anti-colonial discourse. By historicizing their African and Asian origins, from which most enslaved people originated, they valorize miscegenation and put forward a pancreole diasporization, in which we perceive a blackization, which underlines both the logic of resistance put in place, but also the construction of an "inverted image of apartheid" (Tagg, 2008), in which persists the "discursive functioning of race" (Hall, 2019).

Hall Stuart, 2019, Race, ethnicité, nation, Editions Amsterdam, Paris.

Scott James C., 2019, La domination et les arts de la résistance, Editions Amsterdam, Paris.

Tagg Philip, 2008, « Lettre ouverte sur les musiques « noires », « afro-américaines » et « européennes » », Volume ! La revue des musiques populaires, 6, p. 135‑161.

Telep Suzie, 2018, « “Moi je whitise jamais.” Accent, subjectivité et processus d’accommodation langagière en contexte migratoire et postcolonial », Langage et société, 2018, vol. 165, p. 31‑49.