Édouard Glissant

A major work by this prominent Caribbean author and philosopher, available for the first time in English

Poetics of Relation

Edouard Glissant's Caribbean Discourse is an unflaggingly ambitious attempt to read the Caribbean and the New World experience, not as a response to fixed, univocal meaning imposed by the past, but as an infinitely varied, dauntingly inexhaustible text.

Selected Essays

Caribbean Discourse

Hans Ulrich Obrist

Sebastian Clark

India Ennenga

Archipelago Conversations

The Caribbean writer examines the racial complexities of Faulkner's works set in the fictitious Yoknapatawpha County

Faulkner, Mississippi

The Fourth Century tells of the quest by young Mathieu Bäluse to discover the lost history of his country, Martinique. Aware that the officially recorded version he learned in school omits and distorts, he turns to a quimboiseur named Papa Longouä. This old man of the forest, a healer, seer, and storyteller, knows the oral tradition and its relation to the powers of the land and the forces of nature. He tells of the love-hate relationship between the Longouä and Bäluse families, whose ancestors were brought as slaves to Martinique. Upon arrival, Longouä immediately escaped and went to live in the hills as a maroon. Bäluse remained in slavery. The intense relationship that had formed between the two men in Africa continued and came to encompass the relations between their masters, or, in the case of Longouä, his would-be master, and their descendants. The Fourth Century closes the gap between the families as Papa Longouä, last of his line, conveys the history to Mathieu Bäluse, who becomes his heir.

The Fourth Century

Ansätze zu einer Poetik der Vielheit

Kultur und Identität

Recueil de douze articles publiés entre 1980 et 1989, soit comme textes d'observation, soit comme contributions en forme d'exposés, ce qui convient bien à cet ensemble dont le titre traduit l'intention première: fonder une esthétique écologique qui permet à chacun de se retrouver, à tout moment, solidaire de l'"entour", terme que l'auteur préfère à environnement.

Poétique de la relation

The multiple narrators in this novel grapple with their unrecorded history on Martinique, first as slaves and then in relation to the wider world.

A Novel

Mahagony

This volume collects and translates--most for the first time--the nine volumes of poetry published by Edouard Glissant, a poet, novelist, and critic increasingly recognized as one of the great writers of the twentieth century. The poems bring to life what Glissant calls "an archipelago-like reality," partaking of the exchanges between Europe and its former colonies, between humans and their geographies, between the poet and the natural world. Reciting and re-creating histories of the African diaspora, Columbus's "discovery" of the New World, the slave trade, and the West Indies, Glissant underscores the role of poetic language in changing both past and present irrevocably. As translator Jeff Humphries writes in his introduction, Glissant's poetry embraces the aesthetic creed of the French symbolists Mallarme and Rimbaud ("The poet must make himself into a seer") and aims at nothing less than a hallucinatory experience of imagination in which the differences among poem, reader, and subject dissolve into one immediate present.

The Collected Poems of Édouard Glissant

Analyse, à partir du cas martiniquais, les forces à l'oeuvre dans les cultures antillaises.

Le discours antillais

Édouard Glissant (1928-2011) foi um pensador da diáspora que elaborou um impactante projeto filosófico e poético para refletir sobre os efeitos da colonização. Para isso, liberou-se das matrizes conceituais do Ocidente, abrindo espaço para que o sujeito afrodiaspórico se tornasse protagonista da análise de sua própria experiência estética e cultural. Um dos seus mais importantes conceitos é o da Relação, um processo de contaminação de todas as diferenças reunidas sob as correntes da escravidão e do colonialismo. A Relação pressupõe conhecer o abismo dessa experiência, pois é a partir dela e da abertura da imaginação que se dá a partilha de mundos unidos pela própria separação. Poética da Relação, ensaio filosófico atravessado por uma linguagem poética, se tornou uma referência em todo o mundo, além de título essencial da bibliografia de Glissant, autor de uma obra colossal, englobando ensaios, poesia, romances e teatro. Prefácio de Ana Kiffer e Edimilson de Almeida Pereira. A capa tem imagem do artista visual brasileiro Arjan Martins, acompanhada de texto do curador Paulo Miyada.

Poética da Relação

Introduction à une poétique du divers

Poetica del diverso

This challenging book covers a wide range of subject matter, but all linked together through the key ideas of diversity and 'Relation'. It sees our modern world, shaped by immigration and the aftermath of colonisation, as a multiplicity of different communities interacting and evolving together, and argues passionately against all political and philosophical attempts to impose uniformity, universal or absolute values. This is the 'Whole-World', which includes not only these objective phenomena but also our consciousness of them. Our personal identities are not fixed and self-sufficient but formed in 'Relation' through our contacts with others. Glissant constantly stresses the unpredictable, 'chaotic' nature of the world, which, he claims, we must adapt to and not attempt to limit or control.

Treatise on the Whole-world

Eduardo Jorge

Marcela Vieira

Poética da relação

This volume reproduces the texts of four lectures, followed by discussions, and two interviews with Lise Gauvin published in 'Introduction à une poétique du divers' (1996); and also four further interviews from 'L'Imaginaire des langues' (Lise Gauvin, 2010). It covers a wide range of topics but key recurring themes are creolisation, language and langage, culture and identity, 'monolingualism', the 'Chaos-world' and the role of the writer.

Introduction to a Poetics of Diversity

J. Michael Dash

This is the tragic story of Toussaint Louverture, the charismatic leader of the only successful slave revolt in history, that led to Haiti's independence 200 years ago. Translated by the author himself in collaboration with J. Michael Dash, this new edition captures the striking essence of the original French play, first published in 1961.

A Play

Monsieur Toussaint

Édouard Glissant’s novels, closely tied to the theories he developed in Poétique de la Relation (Poetics of relation), are rich explorations of a deported and colonized people’s loss of their own history and the ever-evolving social and political effects this sense of groundlessness has caused in Martinique. In Mahagony Glissant identifies both the malaise of and the potential within Martinican society through a powerful collective narrative of geographic identity explored through multiple narrators. These characters’ lives are viewed back and forth over centuries of time and through tales of resistance, linked always by the now-ancient mahogany tree. Attempting to untangle the collective memory of Martinique, Mathieu, the contemporary narrator, creates a conscious history of these people in that place—a record that unearths the mechanics of misrepresentation to get at the fundamental, enduring truths of that history, perhaps as only the mahogany tree knows it.

"A novel in three parts, Mahagony's multiple narrators grapple with the history of slavery on Martinique and their place in the wider world"--

The Fourth Century tells of the quest by young Mathieu Béluse to discover the lost history of his country, Martinique. Aware that the officially recorded version he learned in school omits and distorts, he turns to a quimboiseur named Papa Longoué. This old man of the forest, a healer, seer, and storyteller, knows the oral tradition and its relation to the powers of the land and the forces of nature. He tells of the love-hate relationship between the Longoué and Béluse families, whose ancestors were brought as slaves to Martinique. Upon arrival, Longoué immediately escaped and went to live in the hills as a maroon. Béluse remained in slavery. The intense relationship that had formed between the two men in Africa continued and came to encompass the relations between their masters, or, in the case of Longoué, his would-be master, and their descendants. The Fourth Century closes the gap between the families as Papa Longoué, last of his line, conveys the history to Mathieu Béluse, who becomes his heir.

Édouard Glissant

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