Paper short abstract:

Focusing on the interplay between institutional orientation and postcolonial literary activism, the chronicle of two Mauritian literary prizes' rise and fall in the early 2000s - one sponsored by a hotel, and the other by the vernacular movement.

Paper long abstract:

This essay is a comparative case study of two Mauritian literary prizes, held respectively by the market-oriented global hotel chain Le Prince Maurice and the market-critiquing local activist organization Ledikasyon Pu Travayer. Focusing on the interplay between institutional orientation and self-conscious postcolonial literary positioning, the chronicle of these prizes' rise and fall in the first decade of the 2000s reflects world literary concerns about literary excellence, literary freedom, and the risks and rewards of wielding literature as a object carrying the symbolic power of the centre. Following James English's observation that "today it is more than ever apparent that the economy of cultural prestige is a global one, in which the many local cultural markets and local scales of value are bound into ever tighter relations of interdependence" (259) in which, to follow Sara Broiillette, "difference [is translated] into a surface fetish" (2014: 116), the prizes' utter differences in context yet similarities in intent offer support to Graham Huggan's understanding of the prizes as things which "bring the ideological character of evaluation to the fore" (117). In each examined case - both of the company seeking tourists and the activists asserting significance - the literary prize served as a tool with which a Mauritian institution might perform internationalism; in both cases the trajectory of each prize's failure to break into international consciousness highlights the false hope of each institution that this internationalism could be characterized by an ahistorical equality.