Thinking with Glissant

Abstract

In Spring 2022, the Theory Center Reading Group at Indiana University- Bloomington was devoted to the work of Martinican writer and thinker Édouard Glissant. We focused on his Poetics of Relation (Poétique de la Relation 1990, English tr. 1997), while also engaging with the recently translatedTreatise on the Whole-World (Traité du Tout-Monde, 1996, English tr. 2020). An award-winning fiction and poetry writer, Glissant (1928-2011) is arguably the most influential Caribbean thinker of the 20th century, who over the course of his career developed a unique aesthetic and philosophical lexicon that has shaped the language and perspectives of successive generations of theorists in poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and globalization. His works cover virtually all genres and forms, from lyrical poetry to scholarly studies, from historical and experimental fiction to philosophical essays and political manifestos on topics as enduring and as urgent as slavery, racism, (neo)colonialism, creolization, and the “chaos-world.” Concepts such as opacity, Relation, “archipelagic” and “trembling” thinking, rhizomatic identity, and the “Whole-World” generated conversations with thinkers like Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Derek Walcott, Abdelkebir Khatibi, Achille Mbembe and others. Moreover, Glissant and his late idea of the “entour” have also influenced a younger generation of scholars in environmental humanities, intermediality and visual arts, and alter-globalization. In 2020, the Glissant Translation Project started publishing Glissant’s works in English in a comprehensive manner, attesting to the growing interest in his work far beyond the confines of his native Antilles and a Francophone audience to readers across the globe.