Edouard Glissant Research Articles

Letters to the Landscape (or an Alphabet in Ruins)

This article is a crossing through the Anthropocene. Between the body and the landscape, between the past and the future, between concepts and dances, between Edouard Glissant and the Atlantic Ocean, between tremor and uncertainty, between the Forest and Monoculture, between dance and the visual arts, between poetry and concepts, between the body and philosophy, between the animal and the plant, between what I desire and what I get, between Emanuele Coccia and the butterfly, between the thousand names of Gaia, the anthropology and what remains of our planet. They are letters thrown into the sea, directed to the landscapes that inhabit me, written with pieces of images and sounds that were inside my body/computer in these last years of journey. Shared in a list, like an alphabet in ruins, a (un)alphabetical order. Each letter carries a journey in itself: a way of doing and thinking about dance, an invention of a world that is possible to imagine today.

Glissant and the Politics of Coordination

This is an ironic moment for Edouard Glissant’s growing community of readers. So many are discovering Glissant’s work for the first time, myself included, in part because a fervent commitment to a politics of recognition now dominates in many corners of the humanities. This is ironic largely because while the choice to engage with Glissant might be motivated by an all too generalized logic of recognition, to read Glissant is to learn about how the basic premises underpinning this logic are deeply misguided. The politics of recognition, as a term of art, after all, is built on the conceptual planks made available by the standardizing impulses of the nation-state form and capitalism combined. Glissant, on the other hand, is nothing if not a theorist calling fervently for a path forward that does not depend on the complicities found in the conceptual imperialism inherent to the bureaucratic standardizing practices that bolster both the nation-state and contemporary capitalism. Glissant calls instead for an approach that offers the philosophical building blocks for a politics of coordination, which is described in Patchell Markell’s book, Bound by Recognition (2003) as a politics of acknowledgement. This politics entails forgingan alternative approach to the self and other, to identity and place, and to social orders in general than what the politics of recognition espouses.

“Queer Errantry” In The Work Of Cristina Rivera Garza

In this essay I consider two books by the Mexican writer Cristina Rivera Garza – Había mucha neblina o humo o no sé qué (2016) [There Was a Lot of Fog or Smoke or I Don’t Know What] and Autobiografía del algodón (2020) [Autobiography of Cotton] which conjugate journeys to sites in Mexico where agricultural and industrial labour played a critical role in the country’s post-revolutionary reconstruction. I illustrate how these works not only spotlight the long-term effects of dispossession, transnational migration, and “slow violence” but also articulate an epistemology of what I call “queer errantry”. Drawing on ideas from Edouard Glissant, Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Sara Ahmed, I argue that, in the context of significant environmental and gender violence in Mexico and its “visceraless” state, for Rivera Garza travel and pedestrianism function as acts of relation, forms of reckoning with the rapid acceleration of capitalist modernity. As a way of reading and representing the world, “queer errantry”, I suggest, comprises a decolonial feminist praxis of orientation and remembrance.

The Other Americans: Michael Dash and the UWI Generation

This article engages with the legacy of a generation of scholars working at the University of the West Indies (UWI), principally at Mona, Jamaica, in the late 1960s. Drawing on interviews with some of the scholars, the article argues that the UWI generation was pioneering in its teaching of and research into Caribbean writing in French, and that it is a key element in the evolution of Francophone Postcolonial Studies more generally. Framed by David Scott’s ideas on Caribbean generations, it argues that the UWI generation was from the beginning wary of exclusionary notions of race and culture and, inspired especially by the examples of Haitian literature, and the writings of Edouard Glissant, it developed a particularly sophisticated, enduring scholarly understanding of the region, its peoples, and cultures. The article is a tribute to the UWI generation, and in particular to the late J. Michael Dash.

Les « lieux-communs » de la pensée archipélique et la problématique de l’universel chez Édouard Glissant

Chantre de l’antillanité, Édouard Glissant, poète, romancier et philosophe martiniquais, n’a de cesse de rattacher sa rhétorique à une littérature qui tient à la fois lieu de rupture avec l’atavisme et le silence imposés aux Caribéens et de dépassement de la mystification et du fixisme qui sclérosent leur culture et entravent son progrès. Somme toute, l’écrivain s’emploie à promouvoir la pensée archipélique, dont l’objectif est non seulement de remettre en question l’universel généralisant dans la poétique de Saint-John Perse, mais également d’adouber une transmodernité, à même d’assurer une jouvence culturelle à toutes les communautés du chaos-monde. Pour ce faire, le penseur repense les lieux-communs, notamment ceux de la différence et de l’opacité, en les plaçant sous le double signe de la non-violence et du vivre-ensemble. C’est ainsi que les divers imaginaires artistiques des différentes régions du monde entrent en interactions illimitées, dont les résultantes sont imprévisibles et inestimables.

Beyond the canon: un-learning the “Muslim woman” in UK higher education classroom with a “pedagogy of opacity”

My contribution to this special issue is non-orthodox. Far from Islamic Feminism's hermeneutics, and bearing in mind the limitations of anthropological works and representative paradigms in Orientalist critique, I take cues from postcolonial scholar Edouard Glissant’s (1990) seminal work, Poetics of Relations, notably his notions of détour, retour, and érrance, and draw on my experience in teaching gender studies in relation to the Middle East in UK higher education institutions to posit a “pedagogy of opacity” when producing knowledge on Othered bodies —in this instance, the fictive category of the “Muslim woman”. We see how a pedagogy of opacity forces home, self, and early mis/information about the other to realign and confront each other. This triadic realignment showcases the workings of home (the UK)—not of a geographically distant Islamic culture—in the manufacturing of the Muslim woman Other.

The Tout-Monde of disaster studies.

Exploring the Tout-Monde of disaster studies will constitute a radical and forward-looking postcolonial agenda; radical in the sense that it will challenge many of our scholarly assumptions, popular discourses as well as common-sense policies and practices.

Translating the Francophone Caribbean: Centering Black Production, Decentering Translation Practices

In her article, “A Tree as a Record: On Translating Mahagony by Edouard Glissant,” translator Betsy Wing recounts how Martinican writer Edouard Glissant expressed his disinclination to respond to translators’ questions and justified his intention by saying, “I wrote it once, now it’s your turn to write it” (124). According to Glissant, translating and writing are similar in nature. The art of translation therefore does not lie in the process of translating words into another language but in the skill to compose a text anew, that is to say to develop unique ways of ‘writing’ and therefore to deconstruct the idea of translation as a simple act of transferal. As such, this article considers various translators who have ‘written’ Caribbean texts anew. It will specifically look at three works from Black French-speaking Caribbean authors which were all translated into English, namely Patrick Chamoiseau, L’esclave vieil homme et le molosse (1997) translated by Linda Coverdale as Slave Old Man (2019); Gisèle Pineau’s La Grande drive des esprits (1993) translated by J. Michael Dash as The Drifting of Spritis (1999); and Yanick Lahens’s Tante Résia et les Dieux (1994) translated by Betty Wilson as Aunt Résia and the Spirits and Other Stories (2010).

SUZAN-LORI PARKS AND NAOMI WALLACE IN RELATION: PLAYING THE AMERICAN GAME FOR REAL AND BEYOND.

wo American women whose writings for the theatre have been both nationally and internationally recognized, Suzan-Lori Parks and Naomi Wallace have drawn on the notion of game-playing to explore and undermine the inextricability of the power relations that govern their vision of America. Because theatre is about playing, games occupy a central position around which meaning revolves and multiplies on stage, infinitely magnified by Parks’s and Wallace’s poetic imagination. As far apart and unique as they are, their voices deeply resonate with the American landscape and beyond, echoing each other in ways that call for an examination of the correspondences that make their plays related, in the sense Edouard Glissant gave to the term, of a totality that does not exclude differences, of a meeting of pluralities, which is the stable/unstable ground of games, and of a place from where infinite beauty can spring. Parks’s The America Play and Wallace’s The War Boys, both written in the early 90s, evolved through a creative process that feeds on itself into the widely acclaimed Topdog/Underdog that earned Parks a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 and The Breach, which was produced at the Avignon Theatre Festival in 2019, expanding Wallace’s popularity in France. Through a comparative analysis of the poetics at work in these four plays, the aim of this article is to bring these two women’s voices together, placing them in relation without erasing their particularities to delineate the contours of a “relational poetics,” to again use Glissant’s terminology, one that evokes rather than explains, one that resurrects the past to reinvent our present and divine the future: an art of divination.

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

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.

La Lézarde (1958) et Malemort (1975) d’Édouard Glissant : dire l’esthétique archipélique depuis la Martinique et l’aire des Caraïbes

In this work, we will mainly focus on Edouard Glissant’s archipelago aesthetics. Indeed, the West Indian novelist-orator uses in La Lézarde (1958) and Malemort (1975) a kind of rhetoric which reflects not only the history of the slave trade, but also the Caribbean island landscape. This is how the writer cultivates Caribbean ethnopoetics, without falling into the trap of standardisation or reductionism. In others words, the fiery indictment that the writer has drawn up against the oppressors is inextricably linked to a plea made to defend the cause of West Indian culture, by exhorting the Caribbean people to recover their historical memory and to take their destiny into their own hands. It is specifically in that context that the Edouard Glissant’s romantic epic and sublime beauty are fully in line with his archipelago aesthetics.

POSTCOLONIAL THEORY AND AMERICAN LITERARY STUDIES: CONTACT ZONES

The paper discusses the expedience and eff ectiveness of applying tenets of Postcolonial Theory for researching history and the current state of American literature. It argues that the United States was added to the domain of Postcolonial Studies as its legitimate object at the turn of the 21st century causing considerable controversy among representatives of both disciplines – Postcolonial, as well as American Studies, since this step required revision and extension of both fi elds. A brief overview is provided of some recent publications on the subject, including, in particular, the two 2000 monographs (Postcolonial America and Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature), edited, respectively, by Richard King, and Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt. The paper explores four zones of inquiry which seem to boast the greatest potential for the most productive encounters between American literary studies and postcolonialism. These include, but are not limited to 1) approaching American literature from postcolonial perspective in terms of its eff orts to assert its national identity; 2) studying American ethnic literatures in postcolonial light proceeding from the notion of “inner colonization”; 3) exploring the consequences of globalizing/migratory processes for US literature as generating hybridity and metissage; 4) and, fi nally, factoring in professional connections many renowned theorists of postcolonialism (such as Homi Bhabha, G. Ch. Spivak, Edward Said, and Edouard Glissant) have established with America. Propositions put forward in the paper are illustrated by referring to three American novels authored by recent migrants to the USA from the African postcolonial states: Teju Cole (Open City, 2001), David Eggers (What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, 2006), and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Americanah, 2014). It is concluded that a set of tools (terms, concepts and reading practices) fi rst devised for Postcolonial Studies may be (and already are) eff ectively used to analyze and interpret texts produced in the USA. Its relevance is enhanced by contemporary neoliberal global developments resulting in the emergence of broader and less visible forms of exploitation, which, in their turn, presuppose, in Simon During’s words, the turn from subalterneity to precarity. Key words: Postcolonial Theory, American Studies, American literature, ethnic literatures, globalization, subalterneity.

"Here we go into the grey": Moses Sumney's Song Writing of opacity in grae (2020).

As a decidedly indeterminate confessional, græ is simultaneously a plea and evasion to be understood, one which finds Sumney articulating his own opacity. As theorised by the Martiniquan philosopher Edouard Glissant, opacity is to be understood as an unmeasured difference, a diversity that exceeds categorisation. While Western liberal society has moved to understand and acknowledge difference, this recognition often comes with ‘a requirement for transparency’: ultimately an negation of that very difference, under the sign of a false universality.

Le projet politique chez Édouard Glissant : la fonctionnalité sociétale du roman au sein de la ville insulaire

Dans le cadre de cet article, l’on tentera de montrer comment le projet politique qui se profile dans l’œuvre romanesque d’Édouard Glissant est essentiellement tributaire de la visée délibérative dont se distingue sa rhétorique archipélique. En somme, le réquisitoire enflammé que l’écrivain dresse, dans son œuvre romanesque, à l’encontre des oppresseurs est indissociablement lié au plaidoyer qu’il entreprend pour défendre la cause et la culture antillaises, et ce, en exhortant les Antillais à recouvrer leur mémoire historique et à prendre leur destin en main. C’est ainsi également que le romancier-orateur incite ses auditeurs à assumer leur responsabilité sociétale et à se livrer aux actions citoyennes dans leur ville insulaire.

Urban Ecosophy for a Post-Colonial Ecohumanism of the City

Ecosophy traces its etymological roots to the ancient Greek wisdom (sophia) of the household (oïkos), and can be understood as a form of ethics to inhabit the earth. Reflecting on the current challenges of the city, like the relation to the nature, or the social and ethnic inequalities in the urban space and through the ecosophical gaze of Arne Næss and Felix Guattari allows us to address core issues of an urban ecosophy. Within Næss ecosophy of the “self-realization”, the paper is pointing the link with his ontology of the relation with Gandhi´s insight on non-violence and the importance of the “sense of place” with the understanding and identification to the local environment. Guattari´s ecosophy as the paper will show, leads also to the concepts of relation and of the “Tout-monde” from the post-colonial thinker, and friend of him, Edouard Glissant. Furthermore, Stiegler´s concept of neguanthropocene and considering cities as “complex exorganisms” echoes Guattari´s urban ecosophy with the emergence of the “data city” performing a new kind of colonialism with data in the urban space. Finally, the essay will demonstrate how the urban ecosophy, as a practical ecosophy, in correspondence with ecohumanism, is proposing a decentring of humanism by considering the ecology in the city. It makes then possible to reconcile a modernist philosophy of individual and collective emancipation and deployment of subjectivities in the city, the idea of universalism with a world citizenship, with an emerging philosophy of respect and ethic for the living.

Virgin Forest and the “Intrusion” of Gaïa: ecomusicological questions, relational listening, and the music of Lionel Loueke of Benin

ABSTRACT The recent emergence of the subfield of ecomusicology has raised provocative questions about theory and method in music studies, as well as relationships between sound, humans, and the environment. This paper responds to these questions through an examination of two albums by the Beninese guitarist Lionel Loueke, informed by ethnographic interviews with Loueke and fieldwork in Benin and the U.S. Each of the two albums deals with a distinct set of musical materials and strategies to convey their respective ecological orientations. The album Virgin Forest does this through creating ambient atmospheres that blur the lines between human and animal sound, while the second album, Gaïa, deploys guitar distortion and “out-of-joint” grooves to channel an angry earth goddess. This analysis explores connections between the albums and concepts of sacred sound and interdependence in the Nichiren Buddhist practice that Loueke has adopted, and in vodun ancestral practices in Benin. I propose a concept of relational listening, building on Edouard Glissant’s la Relation and Steven Feld’s acoustemology, which embraces humans’ interdependence with the environment while respecting the radical alterity of other beings, including human, non-human, and more-than-human. Loueke’s music suggests that this relational listening necessarily leads to relational sounding: interactive improvisation.

Champurrias

This is a text by the Chilean artist, Paula Montecinos Oliva. The text is a confluence of written streams, influenced by conversations, practices and creative processes shared with Johan Mijail, Flavia Pinheiro, Pedro Matias, Devika Chotoe, Veza Fernandez, Papaya Kuir Collective and accompanied by the writings of Gloria Anzaldua, Edouard Glissant, Fred Moten and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, among others.

L’écriture romanesque d’Édouard Glissant : une stratégie rhétorique subversive, une anti-poétique et une esthétique composite

Edouard Glissant denounces all forms of standardization, which model cultures to which he proposes an erratic and eccentric thought. It is specifically in that context that our article reexamined the question of Glissant’s subversive rhetorical strategy by relating it to the judicial impetus. In fact, it’s a question of a counter-rhetoric that underpinned not only anti-poetic, but also composite aesthetic. This is how the West Indian novelist-orator tries to annul cultural typicality and cultivate the intermixing between different human imaginations.

Edouard Glissant's Rhetorical Marronnage or the Abolition of Generic Artistic Boundaries in his Fictional Work

The present article seeks to analyse Edouard Glissant’s intellectual marronage, which is closely linked to his rebellious rhetoric, by which the Martinican writer tries to use a patent suit to tackle imperialist systems, which cultivate monolithic and unidirectional western rhetoric. For this reason, he transcends generic boundaries by abolishing the artistic and cultural barriers. In this perspective, he needs to experience his new dynamics of trans-rhetorical, which is based on the implementation of the intermixing between oratorical genres (judicial impetus, epidictic eloquence and deliberative aim) in his novels. Correlatively, the West Indian novelist, ethnographer and philosopher makes use of his trans-generic aesthetics, which is coextensive with the trans-rhetorical, in order to incorporate not only historiography, ethnography, poetry and theatre in his romantic fiction, but also music, painting, sculpture and arts of photography and filmmaking. This is how he places his new geopoetics under the label of intermixing between different human imaginations.

Pouvoir de mort et art de la Relation : une étude de Moi, Tituba sorcière… de Maryse Condé

Power of death and art of Relation: a study of Moi, Tituba sorcière… by Maryse Condé This study of the well-known novel Moi, Tituba sorcière… Noire de Salem (1986) by Maryse Condé will focus on the role of death in the narration. We will see how two different conceptions of death will here be in action: one, where death is nothing but a moment between two lives that still connect; the other, where death is used to enhance the power of white man. The aim is to see how Tituba reacts to the oppression by building a different approach to people, a path that is the “Relation” Edouard Glissant wrote about.