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Stars and Keys: Folktales and Creolization in the Indian Ocean.

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Stars and Keys: Folktales and Creolization in the Indian Ocean. By Lee

Haring with translations by Claude Ricaud and Dawood Auleear. Bloomington: Indiana

UP, 2007. xxv + 413 pp., preface, acknowledgments, chronology, 5 maps, photographs,

appendix, notes, bibliography, index.

This is not your ordinary collection of folktales. After thirty years of work in the multicultural islands of the Indian Ocean, Lee Haring offers us instead a masterful translation (both linguistic and cultural) of storytelling across traditions, and a manifestation of what may well be called "creolized scholarship." Stars and Keys: Folktales and Creolization in the Indian Ocean is thus a fresh collection of folktales in which traditions from Africa, South Asia, Europe, and the Middle East blend together to produce a corpus of creolized verbal art.

Diverging from standard practice, Haring innovates on the well-known genre of the "folktale collection volume" by joining his voice in a dialogic manner with that of traditional old-time and current storytellers. In the preface, he describes his presentation of the stories as follows, addressing the reader directly: "Some are cited without interruption; a few are translated only in part, or summarized. Into others, I interpolate commentary as if I were reading to you and then looking up to...

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