Édouard Glissant

Edouard Glissant (born in Sainte-Marie, Martinique in 1928) is a French writer, poet and literary critic. He is widely recognised as being one of the most influential figures in Caribbean thought and cultural commentary.

Glissant left Martinique in 1946 for Paris, where he received his PhD, having studied ethnography at the Musée de l'Homme and History and philosophy at the Sorbonne. He established, with Paul Niger, the separatist Front Antillo-Guyanais pour l'Autonomie party in 1959, as a result of which Charles de Gaulle barred him from leaving France between 1961 and 1965. He returned to Martinique in 1965 and founded the Institut martiniquais d'études, as well as "Acoma", a social sciences publication. He now divides his time between Martinique, Paris and New York, where he has been visiting professor of French Literature at CUNY since 1995. In January 2006, Édouard Glissant was asked by Jacques Chirac to take on the presidency of a new cultural centre devoted to the history of slave trade. An English translation of Chirac's speech can be found [http://www.ambafrance-uk.org/Speech-by-M-Jacques-Chirac,6848.html here]

Writings

Shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in 1992, when Derek Walcott emerged as the recipient, Glissant is the pre-eminent critic of the "Négritude" school of Caribbean writing and father-figure for the subsequent Créolité group of writers which includes Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant. While his first novel portrays the political climate in 1940s Martinique, through the story of a group of young revolutionaries, his subsequent work focuses on questions of language, identity, space and history. Glissant's development of the notion of "antillanité" seeks to root Caribbean identity firmly within "the Other America" and springs from a critique of identity in previous schools of writing, specifically the work of Aimé Césaire, which looked to Africa for its principal source of identification. He is notable for his attempt to trace parallels between the history and culture of the Creole Caribbean and those of Latin America and the plantation culture of the American south, most obviously in his study of William Faulkner. Generally speaking, his thinking seeks to interrogate notions of centre, origin and linearity, embodied in his distinction between atavistic and composite cultures, which has influenced subsequent Martinican writers' trumpeting of hybridity as the bedrock of Caribbean identity and their "creolised" approach to textuality. As such he is both a key (though underrated) figure in postcolonial literature and criticism, but also he often pointed out that he was close to two French philosophers, Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, and their theory of the rhizome.

Bibliography

Novels:
*" _fr. La Lézarde". (1958) Nouvelle édition, Paris: Gallimard, 1997.
*" _fr. Le Quatrième Siècle". (1964) Paris: Gallimard, 1997.
*" _fr. Malemort". (1975). Nouvelle édition, Paris: Gallimard, 1997.
*" _fr. La Case du commandeur". (1981) Nouvelle édition, Paris: Galliamard, 1997.
*" _fr. Mahagony". (1987) Nouvelle édition, Paris: Gallimard, 1997.
*" _fr. Tout-Monde". Paris: Gallimard, 1993.
*" _fr. Sartorius": le roman des Batoutos. Paris: Gallimard, 1999.
*" _fr. Ormérod". Paris: Gallimard, 2003.

Poetry:
* _fr. La Terre inquiète. Lithographies de Wilfredo Lam. Paris: Éditions du Dragon, 1955.
* _fr. Le Sel Noir. Paris: Seuil, 1960.
* _fr. Les Indes, Un Champ d'îles, La Terre inquète. Paris: Seuil, 1965.
* _fr. L'Intention poétique. (1969) (Poétique II) Nouvelle édition, Paris: Gallimard, 1997.
* _fr. Boises; histoire naturelle d'une aridité. Fort-de-France: Acoma, 1979.
* _fr. Le Sel noir; Le Sang rivé; Boises. Paris: Gallimard, 1983.
* _fr. Pays rêvé, pays réel. Paris: Seuil, 1985.
* _fr. Fastes. Toronto: Ed. du GREF, 1991.
* _fr. Poèmes complets. (Le Sang rivé; Un Champ d'îles; La Terre inquiète; Les Indes; Le Sel noir; Boises; Pays rêvé, pays réel; Fastes; Les Grands chaos). Paris: Gallimard, 1994.
* _fr. Le Monde incréé: Conte de ce que fut la Tragédie d'Askia; Parabole d'un Moulin de Martinique; La Folie Célat. Paris: Gallimard, 2000.

Essays:
* _fr. Soleil de la conscience. (1956) (Poétique I) Nouvelle édition, Paris: Gallimard, 1997.
* _fr. Le Discours antillais. (1981) Paris: Gallimard, 1997.
* _fr. Poétique de la Relation. (Poétique III) Paris: Gallimard, 1990.
* _fr. Discours de Glendon. Suivi d'une bibliographie des écrits d'Edouard Glissant établie par Alain Baudot. Toronto: Ed. du GREF, 1990.
* _fr. Ethnicité d'aujourd'hui Paris : Gallimard, 2005.
* _fr. Racisme blanc. Paris: Gallimard, 1998
* _fr. Introduction à une poétique du divers. (1995) Paris: Gallimard, 1996.
* _fr. Faulkner, Mississippi. Paris: Stock, 1996; Paris: Gallimard (folio), 1998.
* _fr. Traité du Tout-Monde. (Poétique IV) Paris: Gallimard, 1997.
* _fr. La Cohée du Lamentin. (Poétique V) Paris: Gallimard, 2005.

Theatre
* _fr. Monsieur Toussaint. (1961) Nouvelle édition: Paris: Gallimard, 1998.

Translations of Glissant's works
*A list of translations can be found on [http://www.edouardglissant.com/bibliographie.html Loïc Céry's Glissant page] . Note that this site only works properly in IE.

Interviews with Glissant

* [http://www.regards.fr/archives/98/9801/9801crc06.html 1998: ‘Nous sommes tous des créoles’, interview in Regards (Jan.)]
* [http://hlm.le-village.com/ATALAIA/glissant.html 1998: ‘De la poétique de la relation au tout-monde’, interview in Atalaia]
* [http://www.lemonde.fr/dossiers/esclave/0804.html 1998: ‘Penser l’abolition’, Le Monde (24th April)]
* [http://www.arts.uwa.edu.au/MotsPluriels/MP898ash.html 1998: ‘L’Europe et les Antilles’, interview in Mots Pluriels, No.8 (Oct.)]
*1998: interview in Le Pelletier, C. (ed.), Encre noire - la langue en liberté, Guadeloupe-Guyane-Martinique: Ibis Rouge.
* [http://www.france.diplomatie.fr/label_france/FRANCE/DOSSIER/2000/15creolisation.html 2000: ‘La «créolisation» culturelle du monde’, interview in Label France]

External links

* [http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/ile.en.ile/paroles/glissant.html Ile en Ile Glissant Profile (in French)]
* [http://www.edouardglissant.com/bibliographie.html Loïc Céry's Glissant page]

Writings on Glissant

Book-length studies

*Dash, M. 1995: [http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521402736 Edouard Glissant, Cambridge: CUP]
*Britton, C. 1999: [http://www.upress.virginia.edu/books/britton.htmlEdouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory; Strategies of Language and Resistance, Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia]

Articles
*Britton, C. 1994: ‘Discours and histoire, magical and political discourse in Edouard Glissant’s Le quatrième siècle’, French Cultural Studies, 5: 151-162.
*Britton, C. 1995: ‘Opacity and transparency: conceptions of history and cultural difference in the work of Michel Butor and Edouard Glissant’, French Studies, 49: 308-320.
*Britton, C. 1996: ‘“A certain linguistic homelessness”’: relations to language in Edouard Glissant’s Malemort’, Modern Language Review, 91: 597-609.
*Britton, C. 2000: ‘Fictions of identity and identities of fiction in Glissant’s Tout-monde’, ASCALF Year Book, 4: 47-59.
*Dalleo, R. 2004: ‘Another “Our America”: Rooting a Caribbean Aesthetic in the Work of José Martí, Kamau Brathwaite and Édouard Glissant’, Anthurium, 2.2: [http://scholar.library.miami.edu/anthurium/volume_2/issue_2/dalleo-another.htm http://scholar.library.miami.edu/anthurium/volume_2/issue_2/dalleo-another.htm] .

"Conference proceedings"
*Delpech, C. & Rœlens, M. (eds). 1997: Société et littérature antillaises aujourd’hui, Perpignan: Presses Universitaires de Perpignan.

Academic theses

* [http://web.mac.com/nick.coates/iWeb/Cabinet%20of%20Curiosities/Places_files/Thesis-masterB.pdf Nick Coates. "Gardens in the sands: the notion of space in recent critical theory and contemporary writing from the French Antilles" (UCL: 2001)] Coates devotes a chapter to Glissant's later fiction ("Mahagony, Tout-monde, Sartorius"), while the thesis is heavily indebted to Glissant's writings on space and chaos in particular in thinking about post-colonial treatments of space more widely.