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This chapter investigates the concept of becoming otherwise in Ananda Devi’s writing as a form of resistance to socio-cultural hierarchies of difference in Indo-Mauritian and Indian contexts. The chapter begins by exploring metamorphoses as examples of Deleuzian becoming-animal, before proceeding to analyse the space in between subjects as a transformative encounter that collapses transcendent relations between characters, as well as between writer and text. In its analysis of Devi’s work, the chapter also opens out dialogues between Deleuze and Irigaray, looking in particular at the concept of mutual engenderment, as a means of shaping an affective philosophy of polyphony through the interlacing of embodied and creative lines of flight.

This chapter presents a reading of three authors from two different geographical areas and temporal eras who share a similar postcolonial poetic sensibility articulated in terms of resistance to conventional models of either aesthetics or politics. These are the contemporary New Englander Susan Howe, who is known as a ‘postmodern’ rather than ‘postcolonial’ figure; and two Indian Ocean writers: the eighteenth-century Évariste Parny from the then Île Bourbon (Reunion Island today) and Ananda Devi, the well-known Mauritian novelist. The reading of Howe and Devi sets the stage for the reconsideration of Parny's neglected Creole poetic voice, one of the very first to denounce his culture's practices of slavery and imperial excesses across the Indian Ocean world from the Île Bourbon to India, and across the Atlantic from the Cape of Good Hope to Brazil and Haiti.

These excerpts from written exchanges between Julia Waters and Ananda Devi offer valuable insights into the translation and publishing processes from the point of view of an author who is also a translator. The main topics that are addressed are: Devi's publishing trajectory, from small local publishers to the main list of a major Parisian publishing house; the use of Creole and French in her novels; her contrasting experiences as translator and self-translator.

The introduction explores the terrain of women’s writing in French over the course of the late twentieth century and into the new millennium. It locates the place of women’s writing on the contemporary French literary scene, arguing for the ongoing fertility of the term in relation to contemporary feminist and postfeminist debates, and analysing the evolving relationship between body and text. It identifies an emphasis on the transformative becoming of the body in contemporary culture and begins to open out the possible intersections between feminist criticism, the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and authors Amélie Nothomb, Ananda Devi, Marie Darrieussecq and Nina Bouraoui.