As the preceding chapters have individually and jointly demonstrated, belonging is a central concern in twenty-first-century Mauritian literature. This long-standing concern, renewed and exacerbated by the violent unrest of 1999, is commonly expressed in the novels studied as a conundrum, a longing, an ambition or an impossible dream, rather than as a shared, lived reality. The Kaya riots forced an urgent reconsideration, by writers, commentators and politicians, of the successes and limitations of Mauritius's postcolonial, multicultural model of ‘unity in diversity’ and, crucially, of what it means to be ‘Mauritian’ today. As all recognise, the island is too small and the nation too young to be able to accommodate the threat posed by communalist unrest to the largely peaceful cohabitation of its multi-ethnic population, or to be able to ignore its underlying causes. All of these novels are haunted by the spectre of violence and by the ever-present danger of its resurgence. None of the novels analysed attempts to re-establish the pre-riots status quo, by bolstering the fractured edifice of Mauritius's ‘community system’ or repeating the discourses of ethnic belonging that underpin it. In contrast to the celebratory rhetoric of a convivial, harmonious ‘rainbow nation’ promoted in externally facing political discourse, the twenty-first- century novels of my corpus portray Mauritius as a profoundly unequal, ethnically segregated place in which those who do not ‘belong’ are relegated to the geographic and social margins. The prevalent communalist model of belonging, based on discourses and practices of ancestral, diasporic allegiance, is criticised in all of the novels studied for contributing to deep economic and social divisions between different ethnic groups – divisions that contributed to the Kaya unrest. These dominant forms of ethnic, diasporic belonging are commonly portrayed as inhibiting broader social cohesion and preventing the development of more inclusive forms of belonging, such as those previously postulated, but ultimately abandoned, by mid-twentieth-century proponents of mauricianisme.

The focus of my investigation has been on literary texts. Although the novels of my corpus do engage with the real-life social, geographic and political realities of modern-day Mauritius, they do so in highly exaggerated, selective and non-realist ways. My aim has not been to examine interethnic tensions or social cohesion in reality, but rather to analyse the images of contemporary Mauritian society and of Mauritius’s imagined future that emerge from my literary corpus.