Edouard Glissant in Theory and Practice: A Diasporic Poetics of Politics.

Abstract

My dissertation explores the oeuvre of Edouard Glissant (1928-2011), a prominent Martinican essayist, poet, novelist, playwright, philosopher, and theorist, who has played a considerable role in the emergence and recognition of French Caribbean literature as a whole. Through a central focus on his theoretical concept and literary expression of Antillanité, I analyze his poetic and political representation of contemporary Martinique and by extension the world in general, years after the “end” of the historic and historical events of slavery and colonialism. To give a more complete and updated assessment of the aftermath of these particular events, I examine his lesser known works published just before his death in 2011 namely Une nouvelle région du monde, Quand les murs tombent, Mémoires des esclavages, L’intraitable beauté du monde: Adresse à Barack Obama, Philosophie de la Relation, Les entretiens de Baton Rouge, Manifeste pour les produits de haute nécessité and Traité pour le Grand Dérangement. I argue that, in these “political interventions,” Glissant bridges the traditional divides between the poetic and the political, the theoretical and the practical, the aesthetical and the ethical, as well as the fictional and the realistic to re-actualize and give meaning to his main concepts and political ideologies presented in his previous foundational and far more widely read essays, treatises, novels, and manifestoes such as Le discours antillais, Poétique de la Relation, Traité du Tout-monde, Tout-monde, and Introduction à une poétique du Divers. In this dissertation, I redefine Glissant as a diasporic “poetician” who capitalizes on the événementiel to expose in an engaging and relatable fashion the controversial issues of identity, race, immigration, and globalization in our current world, which he imaginatively defines as a “Tout-monde.” I examine his key theoretical notions of relation, imagination, intuition, and mondialité as centrally characteristic tropes, which he poetically and politically uses to challenge and propose alternatives to the “chaos” prevalent in the world in its totality from the West to the “Rest,” specifically in Africa, the French Caribbean archipelago, and France as respectively developed in the first, second, third and fourth chapters of this dissertation.