“What sense of disquiet?” Novelization, creolization, world literature

Abstract

This article aims to locate the antecedents of Glissant’s poésie du Tout-Monde, outlined in La Terre, le feu, l’eau et les vents (2010), in his delineation of the “poetics of creolization” in Caribbean Discourse (1989 [1981]). The concept of creolization contains the seeds of a critical version of world literature, one that is averse to mondialisation and envisages mondialité, a concept Glissant develops in his later writings. Despite clear differences in their approach, Glissant’s conception of world literature shares with Moretti’s notion of a world literary system an emphasis on the inequality of the globe. This is not to claim Glissant for a materialist perspective proper. But to read him as underwriting a triumphalist discourse of globalization would be unfair. In Glissant’s sense, literature is world literature to the extent that it registers oppression and unevenness.