Treatise on the Whole-World by Édouard Glissant, and: Introduction to a Poetics of Diversity by Édouard Glissant, and: The Baton Rouge Interviews (with Alexandre Leupin) by Édouard Glissant

Abstract

Reviewed by: Treatise on the Whole-World by Édouard Glissant, and: Introduction to a Poetics of Diversity by Édouard Glissant, and: The Baton Rouge Interviews (with Alexandre Leupin) by Édouard Glissant Neil Campbell, emeritus Édouard Glissant, Treatise on the Whole-World. Translated by Celia Britton. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2020, 158 pp. Paper, £19.99. Édouard Glissant, Introduction to a Poetics of Diversity. Translated by Celia Britton. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2020, 134 pp. Paper, £19.99. Édouard Glissant, The Baton Rouge Interviews (with Alexandre Leupin). Translated by Kate M. Cooper. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2020, 94 pp. Paper, £19.99. These three slim volumes are part of The Glissant Translation Project jointly run by Louisiana State University and Liverpool University. Édouard Glissant was born in Martinique in 1928 and died in Paris on 3 February 2011 and is one of the most influential figures in Caribbean thought and cultural analysis, offering poetic insight into the challenges and opportunities associated with colonization and globalization. For many years references to Glissant’s work appeared in influential publications, such as those of Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, Walter Mignolo, and more recently Macarena Gómez-Barris, and yet far too much of his writing remained untranslated. This series aims to correct this error and to provide access to some important later essays, lectures, and interviews, all of which throw light on his developing ideas on identity, community, and place in a globalizing world. Before these new books his most cited works were Caribbean Discourse (French 1981, English translation 1989) and Poetics of Relation (French 1990, English translation 1997), with [End Page 339] the latter providing the most significant introduction to his philosophical and literary method. Hans Ulrich Obrist once referred to Glissant’s work as a “toolbox,” and I would argue his framing ideas provide a wonderfully productive resource for critical regionalist thought in western studies (“Glissant”). His writings reflect on slavery, racism, and colonialism, but always in the wider contexts of cultural exchange, globalization, and what became increasingly his central concern, “Whole-World” or “world-mentality.” His writing returns repeatedly to the dangers of reductionism, and even though he is often writing out of Martinique and the specificities of region, his work refuses to see these approaches as limiting. For him local places open into the world through “Relation” (always capitalized in Glissant’s work): “the place that we live in, that we speak from, can no longer be separated from this mass of energy that calls to us in the distance” (Treatise 73). Exclusive places, he argues, cannot exclude, for they relate to the world in multiple and complex ways. As he states, “my place joins up with others” in a view of the world that is material, imaginative, chaotic, and full of echoes all at the same time (74). Through Glissant’s philosophical rumination on place and world his work has a genuine relationship with the critical concerns of western studies and its interest in regionality, colonization, globalization, and place-making. Unsurprisingly one of Glissant’s favorite novelists was the American “regionalist” William Faulkner whose “questioning of the legitimacy of . . . closed place” (49) inspired parallels with his own Caribbean experience and emerged in his book Faulkner, Mississippi (49). In Treatise on the World-World, the most important of the three volumes, Celia Britton’s careful and accessible translation captures the poetic, playful, idiosyncratic, and challenging nature of Glissant’s language, with its tendency to fragmented, hybrid forms. As one reads his work it moves, leaps, and relates, as blocs of writing float and echo across the page, entangling with each other like waves shifting on the shore, referring both backward and forward, local to global, from essay to essay, and lecture to poem. It is perhaps no wonder Glissant’s major influence has been Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, which he defines as “a root reaching out to other roots” (Introduction 11), stressing the poetics [End Page 340] of relation for both identity and culture. As he writes, “if I reach out to contact the other then I am no longer myself” (11), for in Glissant’s work the “vertiginous art of salutary wanderings” away from a “root-identity” carries...