Édouard Glissant

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

Glissant received his PhD, having studied ethnography at the Musée de l'Homme and  History and philosophy at the Sorbonne. He established the separatist Front antillo-guyanais party in 1959, which provoked his exile from 1959 to 1965 from his native island. 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 here

Contents 1 Writings 2 Bibliography 3 Interviews with Glissant 4 External links 5 Writings on Glissant 5.1 Academic theses

[edit] 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 pointed very often that he was close of Two French philosophers : Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze and their theory of the rhizome .

[edit] Bibliography

Novels:

• La Lézarde. (1958) Nouvelle édition, Paris: Gallimard, 1997.
• Le Quatrième Siècle. (1964) Paris: Gallimard, 1997.
• Malemort. (1975). Nouvelle édition, Paris: Gallimard, 1997.
• La Case du commandeur. (1981) Nouvelle édition, Paris: Galliamard, 1997.
• Mahagony. (1987) Nouvelle édition, Paris: Gallimard, 1997.
• Tout-Monde. Paris: Gallimard, 1995.
• Sartorius: le roman des Batoutos. Paris: Gallimard, 1999.
• Ormérod. Paris: Gallimard, 2003.

Poetry:

• La Terre inquiète. Lithographies de Wilfredo Lam. Paris: Éditions du Dragon, 1955.
• Le Sel Noir. Paris: Seuil, 1960.
• Les Indes, Un Champ d'îles, La Terre inquète. Paris: Seuil, 1965.
• L'Intention poétique. (1969) (Poétique II) Nouvelle édition, Paris: Gallimard, 1997.
• Boises; histoire naturelle d'une aridité. Fort-de-France: Acoma, 1979.
• Le Sel noir; Le Sang rivé; Boises. Paris: Gallimard, 1983.
• Pays rêvé, pays réel. Paris: Seuil, 1985.
• Fastes. Toronto: Ed. du GREF, 1991.
• 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.
• 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:

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

Theatre

• Monsieur Toussaint. (1961) Nouvelle édition: Paris: Gallimard, 1998.

Translations of Glissant's works

• A list of translations can be found on Loïc Céry's Glissant page. Note that this site only works properly in IE.

[edit] Interviews with Glissant

• 1998: ‘Nous sommes tous des créoles’, interview in Regards (Jan.)
• 1998: ‘De la poétique de la relation au tout-monde’, interview in Atalaia
• 1998: ‘Penser l’abolition’, Le Monde (24th April)
• 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.
• 2000: ‘La «créolisation» culturelle du monde’, interview in Label France

[edit] External links

• Ile en Ile Glissant Profile (in French)
• Loïc Céry's Glissant page

[edit] Writings on Glissant

Book-length studies

• Dash, M. 1995: Edouard Glissant, Cambridge: CUP
• Britton, C. 1999: 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.

Conference proceedings

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

[edit] Academic theses

• 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.