FRANCE AUTHOR · CIVILIZATION · HISTORY
Edouard Glissant
Also known as: E. Glissant, Glissant E
Most acclaimed
Poetics of relation
In Poetics of Relation, French-Caribbean writer and philosopher Edouard Glissant turns the concrete particulars of Caribbean reality into a complex, energetic vision of a world in transformation. He sees the islands of the Antilles as enduring an "invalid" suffering imposed by history, yet also as a place whose unique interactions will one day produce an emerging global consensus. Arguing that the writer alone can tap the unconscious of a people and apprehend its multiform culture in order to provide forms of memory and intent capable of transcending "nonhistory," Glissant therefore defines his "poetics of relation" - both aesthetic and political - as a transformative mode of history, capable of enunciating and making concrete a French-Caribbean reality with a self-defined past and future. In Poetics of Relation, we come to see that relation in all its senses - telling, listening, connecting, and the parallel consciousness of self and surroundings - is the key to transforming mentalities and reshaping societies. The issues raised about identity as built in relation and not in isolation are central to current discussions not only of Caribbean creolization but of U.S. multiculturalism as well.
The fourth century
""The Fourth Century tells of the quest by young Mathieu Be;luse to discover the lost history of his country, Martinique. Aware that the officially recorded version he learned in school omits and distorts, he turns to a quimboiseur named Papa Longoue;. This old man of the forest, a healer, seer, and storyteller, knows the oral tradition and its relation to the powers of the land and the forces of nature. He tells of the love-hate relationship between the Longoue; and Be;luse families, whose ancestors were brought as slaves to Martinique. Upon arrival, Longoue; immediately escaped and went to live in the hills as a maroon. Be;luse remained in slavery. The intense relationship that had formed between the two men in Africa continued and came to encompass the relations between their masters, or, in the case of Longoue;, his would-be master, and their descendants. The Fourth Century closes the gap between the families as Papa Longoue;, last of his line, conveys the history to Mathieu Be;luse, who becomes his heir.""--Publisher's description."
Le Soleil de la conscience
"Soleil de la Conscience (Sun of Consciousness) was Martinican philosopher Édouard Glissant's first published work, and opened the Poétique (Poetics) strain of his oeuvre. This book-length essay, which is characterized by its exploratory, intimate character, announces Glissant's concerns with créolisation (creolization), mondialité (worldliness, as against globalization), or opacité (opacity) and inscribes in this work a refusal of colonialism and of inverted exoticism. The sense of estrangement experienced by the author who arrives as a 'foreigner' in a country to which he is bound by 'the first page of his passport' is the author's principal preoccupation. By positioning himself as both different and same, Glissant opens a space for the writing of a(nother) history: that of the Caribbean."--