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Added by: Zoé Grange-MarczakAbstract:
Published in French in 1990, this book is among the later conceptualizations of postcolonial and racial relations. Glissant is a novelist, and his attention to politics operates through an interest in linguistics: studying creole languages, he exposes how colonized people transformed the tool of the master, leading to the creation of a new, creolized culture and expression. He reads the long-term effects of the slave trade, where people were forcibly taken from their cultural and linguistic milieu an put in another one, characterized by an extremely violent relation of subjection. In this context, he elaborates the notion of antillanité, as a French West Indies description of the unpredictable linking and blending of cultures and languages, extending and specifying the idea of négritude found in Césaire and Senghor in the 1930s. This complex analysis leads to two seemingly contradictory concepts: first, his idea of opacity argues in favor of untranslatability and of irreducible yet non-hierarchical differences. Second, his poetics of relation leads to an understanding of identity as an extension of the connection to the other. From there, he sketches a new definition of culture, taking into account power dynamics, which is also a departure from the idea of authenticity or autochtony. Against a binary reading of colonialist relations of power, Glissant explores the formation of identities through the process of creolization, where a new language is invented as a mean of resistance, thus undermining any possibility for a pure, uniform identity.
Comment: Glissant's usage of poetic language, as well as the specific French colonial and postcolonial context might add difficulties to a book which which must be understood in its specificity—and, maybe, untranslatability. However, this particularity leads to Glissant's general philosophy of culture, allowing for a particularly original and thought-provoking viewpoint on social relations.
Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation
1997, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
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