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Marronage between Past and Future

Neil Roberts

in Freedom as Marronage

This chapter examines Édouard Glissant’s thought within the wider discourses on creolization and creolizing political theory. It also marks a shift in the book to describing marronage’s relevance for ... More

This chapter examines Édouard Glissant’s thought within the wider discourses on creolization and creolizing political theory. It also marks a shift in the book to describing marronage’s relevance for late modernity. The chapter provides a philosophical reading of two Glissant texts (one novel, one essay collection) from his early and middle period that engage historical and imaginative forms of marronage. By exploring types of marronage in these works Glissant develops original concepts framing what the chapter contends is Glissant’s four-stage blueprint for sociogenic marronage: 1) rearticulating a philosophy of history, 2) retour (reversion/return) and détour (diversion/detour), 3) resistance, and 4) Antillanité (Caribbeanness). The chapter subsequently explores Glissant’s use of the rhizome idea and how lines of flight explain modes of marronage as an economy of survival, state of being, and condition of becoming, whether through fleeting fugitive acts, attempts at liberation, or the constitution of freedom. The implications of Glissant’s conception of marronage for contemporary debates over France’s commemoration of abolition, the Arab Spring, and relation between mainland France and French overseas départements including Martinique are addressed. The ending briefly discusses immigration politics and the figure of the refugee-immigrant as a late modern maroon.Less

Spectres of Glissant: Dealing in Relation

in Friends and Enemies: The Scribal Politics of Post/Colonial Literature

This chapter examines the work of Édouard Glissant. It begins a descriptive overview of Glissant's insistently creolizing vision, based on his 2005 collection of essays, La cohée du Lamentin. It then ... More

This chapter examines the work of Édouard Glissant. It begins a descriptive overview of Glissant's insistently creolizing vision, based on his 2005 collection of essays, La cohée du Lamentin. It then considers the diachronic approach to his career trajectory that was taken in Islands and Exiles, arguing that notwithstanding the remarkable consistency of Glissant's vision over the past five decades when it comes to championing a cross-cultural poetics of Relation, his most recent work is characterized by the concerted attempt to ‘desuture’ that poetics from any and all oppositional politics of the sort with which he himself had once associated it. After examining this post-political turn in relation to an important watershed in the marketing of his oeuvre, the chapter goes one to examine what, if anything, remains of the logic of the political in late Glissant's work. It suggests that this logic does, inevitably, continue to inform aspects of his archly poeticizing vision, but not necessarily in a way that we might expect.Less

Go Slow Now: Saying the Unsayable in Édouard Glissant's Reading of Faulkner

Michael Wiedorn

in American Creoles: The Francophone Caribbean and the American South

William Faulkner has been castigated for his loyalty to the reactionary attitudes of the traditional white South and his tolerance of its racism. This chapter demonstrates Édouard Glissant's ... More

William Faulkner has been castigated for his loyalty to the reactionary attitudes of the traditional white South and his tolerance of its racism. This chapter demonstrates Édouard Glissant's rehabilitation of Faulkner as an anti-racist, white Southern novelist. Glissant's admiration for Faulkner is evident throughout his career, culminating in the book Faulkner, Mississippi, which proclaims Faulkner's affiliation with the South. Glissant reclaims Faulkner as a ‘Creole’ writer and argues that his novels are politically progressive in their intuition of the possible future creolization of American society.Less

The Sorcerer and the Quimboiseur: Poetic Intention in the Works of Miles Davis and Édouard Glissant

Jean-Luc Tamby

in American Creoles: The Francophone Caribbean and the American South

This chapter examines and compares Édouard Glissant's writings and Miles Davis's music. This comparative approach leads to reflections on the connection of their strategies of resistance and their ... More

This chapter examines and compares Édouard Glissant's writings and Miles Davis's music. This comparative approach leads to reflections on the connection of their strategies of resistance and their individual formal concerns. Based on Glissant's remark that his writing style and Davis's jazz style are identical, the chapter suggests that the literature of the Caribbean and jazz music in the United States belong to areas of cultural activity which have comparable histories despite their dissimilarities.Less

“L’Ethnologue de Soi-même”: Édouard Glissant and Francophone Anthropology

Tim Watson

in Culture Writing: Literature and Anthropology in the Midcentury Atlantic World

This chapter analyzes the early novels of Édouard Glissant set in Martinique, which are more anthropological than critics have realized up to now, as well as his early essays. Glissant studied ... More

This chapter analyzes the early novels of Édouard Glissant set in Martinique, which are more anthropological than critics have realized up to now, as well as his early essays. Glissant studied anthropology in Paris (where Michel Leiris was his adviser), and even though he was an anticolonial writer and activist, he turned in his literary work toward the human science that was most marked by its birth under colonialism, anthropology. The chapter ends by arguing that Glissant’s literary meditation, Soleil de la conscience, can be read as a kind of ethnographic chronicle of Paris in the 1950s, a Caribbean anthropology of the French Métropole.Less

Righting/Writing the Faulted House in Édouard Glissant’s La Lézarde

Jason Herbeck

in Architextual Authenticity: Constructing Literature and Literary Identity in the French Caribbean

Set in Martinique, Glissant’s La Lézarde (1958) focuses on the years leading up to the departmentalization of France’s overseas colonies in 1946. In exploring the “spatial logic” (Hitchcock) of ... More

Set in Martinique, Glissant’s La Lézarde (1958) focuses on the years leading up to the departmentalization of France’s overseas colonies in 1946. In exploring the “spatial logic” (Hitchcock) of Martinican space found in the novel, and the links that characters have with specific parts of this signifying landscape, initial textual analyses demonstrate how these individualized relationships inform each person’s views and actions, and, together, are representative of the competing interests and perspectives involved when attempting to negotiate expressions of French-Caribbean identity. In the context of these conflicting positions articulated by different members of the novel’s young revolutionary group with respect to determining Martinique’s future and chronicling the country’s elusive past, both the conspicuous placement and (in)occupancy of the novel’s principle architectural structure—the Maison de la Source—and LaLézarde’s own (meta)construction serve to illustrate how identity-building in the French Caribbean is fraught with conflict and uncertainty.Less

‘Un art de la fugue’: Translating Glissant's Poetry, Fiction and Prose d'idées

Claire Bisdorff

in Intimate Enemies: Translation in Francophone Contexts

Édouard Glissant's innovative approach to language, be it in his poetry, fiction or prose d'idées, is now well documented. Glissant's work certainly fascinates Anglo-American academics and critics, ... More

Édouard Glissant's innovative approach to language, be it in his poetry, fiction or prose d'idées, is now well documented. Glissant's work certainly fascinates Anglo-American academics and critics, as the recent proliferation of work on his oeuvre clearly shows. Celia Britton's book Édouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory: Strategies of Language and Resistance (1999) stands as evidence of the importance of Glissant (and the wider French Caribbean) for contemporary postcolonial theory - and translations have a clear role to play in the dissemination of prose d’idées from the French Caribbean to an English-speaking audience. Through the lens of linguistic transfer, this article uses translation as a privileged tool to analyse Glissant's poetics and to show how the very idea of translation is embedded in Glissant's fiction and poetry.Less

Local, National, Regional, Global: Glissant and the Postcolonial Manifesto

Charles Forsdick

in Caribbean Globalizations, 1492 to the Present Day

This chapter examines the influence of literary form on thinking about globalization in the Caribbean by focusing on the re-emergence of the manifesto in late twentieth- and early ... More

This chapter examines the influence of literary form on thinking about globalization in the Caribbean by focusing on the re-emergence of the manifesto in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century debates around globalization in the francophone Caribbean as a tool of political provocation and collective intervention. In particular, it considers a series of statements and documents with which Édouard Glissant was associated as signatory in the final decade of his life. The chapter first analyses the cultural activism of the littérature-monde manifesto, with which Glissant’s involvement is ultimately ambivalent. It then looks at the limitations of a notion of world literature in which poetics eclipses discussion of the politics of literary production. It also uses the littérature-monde manifesto and related forms to address the relationship between local, national, and transnational frames. Finally, it suggests alternative configurations of space, culture, and politics in relation to globalization.Less

Édouard Glissant: Dealing in Globality

Chris Bongie

in Postcolonial Thought in the French-speaking World

Édouard Glissant, a novelist, poet, and theorist from Martinique, has carved a niche in the French literary scene. In Paris, he published his first volumes of poetry in the early 1950s and his first ... More

Édouard Glissant, a novelist, poet, and theorist from Martinique, has carved a niche in the French literary scene. In Paris, he published his first volumes of poetry in the early 1950s and his first novel, La Lézarde, in 1958. Glissant was also known as a staunch advocate of ‘creolity’ and has had a major impact on postcolonial theory in the Anglo-American academy. This chapter examines his vision of creolity by focusing on his collection of essays, La Cohée du Lamentin (2005). It argues that Glissant's later work reflects a turn away from the political and its necessarily partisan commitments, a shift which necessitates a certain reconsideration of his work as a whole and its implications for postcolonial thought. The chapter also looks at Glissant's translations of globalisation into globality as well as his poetics of relation.Less

The Archipelago Goes Global: Late Glissant and the Early Modern Isolario

Richard Scholar

in Caribbean Globalizations, 1492 to the Present Day

This chapter examines the connection between Caribbean globalizations past and present. More specifically, it considers contemporary francophone Caribbean theorizations of global interconnectedness ... More

This chapter examines the connection between Caribbean globalizations past and present. More specifically, it considers contemporary francophone Caribbean theorizations of global interconnectedness in relation to early modern European cartographic literature. It compares and contrasts the role played by the figure of the archipelago in the late nonfiction of Édouard Glissant and the sixteenth-century printed isolario (‘book of islands’). It discusses Glissant’s characterization of globality as a Caribbean alternative to Western political and economic globalization and suggests that the isolario offers an opportunity for early modern writing to ‘talk back’ to contemporary Caribbean thought by contesting the dominant discourse of globalization.Less

The Theme of the Ancestral Crime in the Novels of Faulkner, Glissant and Condé

Celia Britton

in American Creoles: The Francophone Caribbean and the American South

This chapter examines William Faulkner's theme of ancestral crime and his influence on two Caribbean novels: Édouard Glissant's Le Quatrième Siécle (1964) and Maryse Condé's Traversée de la mangrove ... More

This chapter examines William Faulkner's theme of ancestral crime and his influence on two Caribbean novels: Édouard Glissant's Le Quatrième Siécle (1964) and Maryse Condé's Traversée de la mangrove (1989). Glissant sees Faulkner's novels as showing the impossibility of founding a pure lineage. In Le Quatrième Siécle, Glissant reworks Faulkner's interest with ancestral crime or the ‘original sin’ that has to do with the foundation of a lineage. Condé's allusions to Faulknerian themes differ from Glissant's in the sense that she is not at all interested in the idea of founding a lineage: the hidden crimes in her case are not original but are ancestral.Less

Creolizing Jazz, Jazzing the Tout-monde: Jazz, Gwoka and the Poetics of Relation

Jerome Carnal

in American Creoles: The Francophone Caribbean and the American South

This chapter reflects on the debates concerned with the usefulness of the concept of creolization in globalization studies in order to emphasize the fluid and unstable nature of culture. It tests the ... More

This chapter reflects on the debates concerned with the usefulness of the concept of creolization in globalization studies in order to emphasize the fluid and unstable nature of culture. It tests the usefulness of creolization through a study of US saxophonist David Murray's collaboration with Guadeloupean musicians. It also compares understandings of Édouard Glissant's créolisation with the meaning of creolization for the musicians involved in the Creole Project in Guadeloupe. The chapter shows that ‘creolization’ and its related terms ‘Creole’ and ‘créolité’ continue to hold specific and disputed meanings in Guadeloupean society.Less

Reading (with) Rhythm for the Sake of the (I-n-)Islands: A Rastafarian Interpretation of Samson as Ambi(val)ent Affective Assemblage

A. Paige Rawson

in Religion, Emotion, Sensation: Affect Theories and Theologies

This essay reframes the Bible as both a Caribbean text and a rhythmic text. It argues, moreover, that the Bible, in its illimitable capacity to affect and be affected, is also what Gregory Seigworth, ... More

This essay reframes the Bible as both a Caribbean text and a rhythmic text. It argues, moreover, that the Bible, in its illimitable capacity to affect and be affected, is also what Gregory Seigworth, Melissa Gregg, and Kathleen Stewart would term an affective bloom-space, an exceedingly fertile concept. The essay proceeds to assemble a Rastafari hermeneutic that effectuates a rhythmic reasoning whereby the resonances of Glissantian orality and Deleuzian affect throb together upon the pulsating pages of the biblical Samson story. Orality as musicality meets affect theory in the essay’s reactivation of the Samson story, a reading acutely attentive to rhythm and to the intra-action of narrative and interpretive bodies in/as ambient affective assemblage.Less

The Door of No Return: An Africana Reading of Complexity

Elías Ortega-Aponte

in Entangled Worlds: Religion, Science, and New Materialisms

This chapter traces how ancestral fragments evidenced in the embodied epistemology of afro-Caribbean “bomba” dancing and drumming haunt social and material reality as well as their theorization. ... More

This chapter traces how ancestral fragments evidenced in the embodied epistemology of afro-Caribbean “bomba” dancing and drumming haunt social and material reality as well as their theorization. Opening a space in affect studies for conversation between complexity theory, Dionne Brand, and Édouard Glissant, the chapter argues that the ghosts created by trauma, and the knowledge-fragments they keep, not only inform justice claims fragments, but may shape the fabric of reality.Less

Tropical Apocalypse: Globalization and the Caribbean End Times

Martin Munro

in Caribbean Globalizations, 1492 to the Present Day

This chapter examines the relationship between the theory and experience of the apocalypse in the complex, globalized, present, and in Caribbean history. It first considers images of the apocalypse ... More

This chapter examines the relationship between the theory and experience of the apocalypse in the complex, globalized, present, and in Caribbean history. It first considers images of the apocalypse and strands of millenarian thought in Caribbean literature argues that the apocalyptic reality of the present, globalized world is a reflection of processes and discourses that have long informed Caribbean thought and lived experience. In contrast to Édouard Glissant’s assertion that the world is creolizing, this chapter suggests that the world is apocalypsizing and that the world is catching up with a reality that has long informed Caribbean experience. Finally, it shows how the processes of modernization and globalization lead societies ever closer to an apocalyptic abyss.Less

Composite Cultures, Chaos Wor(l)ds: Relational Poetics, Textual Hybridity, and the Future of Opacity

Jonathan Monroe

in Tradition, Translation, Trauma: The Classic and the Modern

This chapter examines the work of Édouard Glissant’s work and how it moved through and beyond the legacies of the colonial past that remained frozen within the Cold War frame, and towards the ... More

This chapter examines the work of Édouard Glissant’s work and how it moved through and beyond the legacies of the colonial past that remained frozen within the Cold War frame, and towards the thinking-imagining of a liberated ‘new world’ on the other side of the Cold War’s binary structures and hegemonic powers. Valuing poetry’s importance as, a ‘language of inquiry’, Glissant encourages a thinking-imagining that moves beyond oppositional aethetics and politics to an emphasis on multiplicities, and alternatives to dualistic thinking in all its destructive manifestations.Less

Luddism

Matt Tierney

in Dismantlings: Words against Machines in the American Long Seventies

This chapter explains why Luddism is a metaphor that threads through the Long Seventies in the work of poets, activists, and thinkers, each of whom applies literature to the task of dismantling the ... More

This chapter explains why Luddism is a metaphor that threads through the Long Seventies in the work of poets, activists, and thinkers, each of whom applies literature to the task of dismantling the technocentric world. It includes Édouard Glissant who offers an optimistic promise of literature's power to break systems, writing poetry that can “thicken” the “machine that the world is.” Audre Lorde is more skeptical, opening the possibility that even literature may be one among the “master's tools” that are inapposite to the task of dismantling. Joanna Russ is more skeptical still, in her insistence that scholars and science-fiction writers should “give up talking about technology” and W.S. Merwin imagines an intelligent machine that is fated to be relinquished. Such literary and theoretical practices do not oppose technology as such, but instead oppose large-scale forms of exploitation by dismantling the machines at their disposal. The chapter also talks about Epistemological Luddism, a specific form of Luddism that provides a critical defense against late-twentieth century technological politics and a dedramatization of the false choice for or against technology.Less

“World Galaxy”

Kara Keeling

in Queer Times, Black Futures

This chapter turns to a consideration of Glissant’s broader concept of “Relation.” Here, Alice Coltrane’s errant sonic experiments with Asian musical forms offer a way to think about a different ... More

This chapter turns to a consideration of Glissant’s broader concept of “Relation.” Here, Alice Coltrane’s errant sonic experiments with Asian musical forms offer a way to think about a different constellation of Afrofuturism, one that turns not toward outer space, as in the case of Sun Ra’s Space Is the Place, but toward an exploration of inner worlds as harbingers of another organization of things within the present. From Alice Coltrane’s Afro-Asian imagination, I turn to Nnedi Okorafor’s and Wanuri Kahui’s recent speculations on Africa, in particular Okorafor’s 2010 novel,Who Fears Death, and Kahui’s short film,Pumzi, from 2009. These fictional texts offer errantry, myths, and stories as generative strategies through which the dystopian speculations of Africa on which corporate scenarios rely might be resisted and the worlds those dystopian imaginations work to suppress can be felt.Less