Towards a Vernacular Poetics of World-making: Edouard Glissant, Abdelkébir Khatibi, and Kaouther Adimi

Abstract

Drawing on a select group of literary and intellectual voices from the Francosphere, this article examines how writers and theorists from outside Europe deploy experimental linguistic and literary forms to deconstruct dominant definitions of the world and the kinds of world-making processes widely understood to constitute it. Rereading works by the Martinican writer, poet, and thinker Edouard Glissant and the Moroccan sociologist and literary critic Abdelkébir Khatibi, and applying their insights to the work of the Algerian writer Kaouther Adimi, the article advances an account of what it refers to as a “vernacular poetics of world-making”. Through an analysis of these writers’ works, the article shows how they implicitly deploy vernacular poetics to simultaneously destabilise and rearticulate ideas of “world” and posit a poetics of world literature “from below”. In so doing, the article advocates for a mode of reading that engages a slower, more contemplative, self-reflexive thinking, arguing that the power of a vernacular poetics is in its capacity not so much to change the world but to reveal the world as it is, in its founding epistemic heterogeneity.