Identité Culturelle et Diasporique Dans L'œuvre de Shenaz Patel

This article examines the construction of cultural and diasporic identity in the works of Shenaz Patel, a prominent Mauritian Francophone writer. Drawing on her four major novels such as Le Portrait Chamarel (2002), Sensitive (2003), Le Silence des Chagos (2005), and Paradis bleu (2014) . Further, the study analyses how Patel articulates identity not as a fixed essence but as a dynamic process shaped by exile, memory, language, and resistance. Situating her work within the theoretical frameworks of postcolonial studies and diaspora theory particularly the contributions of Stuart Hall, Homi Bhabha, Avtar Brah, Paul Gilroy, and Édouard Glissant. The article demonstrates that Patel portrays diaspora in its multiple dimensions: geographical and forced exile in Le Silence des Chagos, psychological and interior displacement in Sensitive, patrimonial loss in Le Portrait Chamarel, and socio-economic dispossession driven by neoliberal globalisation in Paradis bleu. A central argument of the article is that Patel's deliberate alternation between French and Mauritian Creole constitutes an aesthetic and political strategy of hybridisation, challenging colonial linguistic hierarchies and affirming the plural nature of Mauritian identity. The feminist dimension of her work is equally foregrounded, as her female protagonists such as Fi, Charlesia, and Mylène that embody diverse forms of resistance against patriarchal silencing and colonial erasure. Ultimately, the article argues that writing itself functions in Patel's oeuvre as an identity space which is a site of memory, struggle, and symbolic justice and positioning her work as a significant contribution to Francophone, postcolonial, and diasporic literary studies.