Edouard Glissant: a Poetics of Resistance

Edouard Glissant was a leading voice in contemporary debates centering on the postcolonial condition and on the present and future of globalisation respectively. Prolific as both a theorist and a literary author, Glissant started his career as a contemporary of Frantz Fanon in the early days of francophone postcolonial thought. In the latter part of his career, by contrast, Glissant’s vision pushed beyond the boundaries of postcolonialism to encompass the contemporary phenomenon of globalisation. In Edouard Glissant: A Poetics of Resistance, Sam Coombes offers a detailed analysis of Glissant’s thought, setting out the reasons why Glissant’s vision for a world of intercultural interaction both reflects but also seeks to provide a correction to some of the leading tendencies commonly associated with contemporary theory today.Offering detailed analyses of key concepts such as `creolisation’, `Relation’, `errantry’, `opacity’ and the `detour’, Sam Coombes analyses the manifold ways in which Glissant’s oeuvre of the last twenty or so years, being both illuminating and critical of the world we live in, could prove vital to our collective futures. Glissant’s oeuvre paves the way for an alternative vision for the 21st century, one which makes full use of the opportunities for mass intercultural communication which globalisation and the information revolution have provided but which nevertheless guarantees full respect for minoritarian cultures and languages.

Reviews of Edouard Glissant: a Poetics of Resistance

Arguing that the tension between minoritarian and hegemonic cultures is at the heart of Edouard Glissant's entire theoretical enterprise, Coombes offers us a spirited and informed refutation of charges of political quietism in Glissant's later works. Far from being a sign of political naivete, the utopian nature of Glissant's political thought is shown to be a necessary prelude to a new progressive, liberatory politics. This is a welcome introduction to the ideas of a major contemporary political theorist. — J. Michael Dash, Professor of French Literature, Thought and Culture, New York University, USA To divide the thought of Edouard Glissant into an early period of Caribbean radical politics on the one hand and a mature phase advancing a depolitized cosmopolitan life of the mind on the other distorts Glissant's legacy. Sam Coombes rescues Glissant from facile naysayers upholding this misrepresentation. He does so through examination of the late Glissant on creolization, immigration, neoliberal political economy, negotiations of universalism and particularism, and visions of human existence that acknowledge nation-state politics while also providing alternative futures for everyday people to resist enslaving dynamics of globalization. A single word captures that project's implication: freedom. — Neil Roberts, President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association and Associate Professor of Africana Studies, Williams College, USA