Édouard Glissant's Decolonial Theatre Practice: Histoire de nègre (Tale of Black Histories)

Abstract

Whereas the scholarship on the Martinican writer focuses on his theoretical writings, this article illuminates Édouard Glissant's theatre practice, an important aspect of his work as director of the Institut Martiniquais d'Études. With his schoolteachers, Glissant devised an interactive play, Histoire de nègre, and toured it throughout Martinique in 1971. In contrast with the French history taught in public schools, the play enacted a Caribbean-centered, composite tale of black histories. Placing Glissant's activism in dialogue with his writings on history, theatre, and creolization, and our contemporary efforts to translate and restage this play, I put forth an understanding of Glissant's decolonial theatre practice as a constantly renewing process of restaging and reflecting on histories of (neo)colonial oppression and resistance in disjointed time, for the sake of a co-created justice-oriented future.