Who were you talking to?: Diasporic folktales

By looking at a locally situated communicative interaction, Haring argues that we are able to see the ongoing, "globalizing" process of diaspora. His article demonstrates this proposition through specific examples of Southwest Indian Ocean tales collected during fieldwork. It begins by suggesting how folklorists may contribute to an understanding of globalization. The first section traces the history of Indians in Mauritius, which typifies one kind of enforced diaspora. The second section asserts that contact with non-Indian people has given Indo-Mauritians a capacity for self-reflection that is expressed in jokes. Two narratives of this group exemplify a recurrent and worldwide process. The third section interprets one story performance as introducing into the literary system what Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett calls a "heightened awareness of cultural diversity and ambiguity." The fourth section, connecting the disciplines of linguistics and folkloristics, shows narrating processes analogous to linguistic creolization in nineteenth-century Mauritius. The fifth examines a tale of kind and unkind sisters, demonstrating that Bhojpuri speakers have relied on narratives as a means of maintaining their identity. The final section asserts that in Mauritius and other places of cultural convergence, verbal art rules the limited domain in which a minority language can flourish, thus ending the essay by placing the phenomenon cited in the context of a larger issue.