Édouard Glissant
Encyclopedia
Édouard Glissant was a Martinican writer, poet and literary critic. He is widely recognised as one of the most influential figures in Caribbean thought and cultural commentary.
, Martinique
. He studied at the Lycée Schoelcher, named after the abolitionist Victor Schoelcher
, where the poet Aimé Césaire
had studied and to which he returned as a teacher. Césaire had met Léon Damas
there; later in Paris they would join with Léopold Senghor, a poet and the future first president of Senegal
, to formulate and promote the concept of négritude
. Césaire did not teach Glissant, but did serve as an inspiration to him (although Glissant sharply criticized many aspects of his philosophy); another student at the school at that time was Frantz Fanon
.
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. Glissant divided his time between Martinique, Paris
and New York
; since 1995, he was Distinguished Professor of French at the CUNY Graduate Center . 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.
in 1992, when Derek Walcott
emerged as the recipient, Glissant was 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, Félix Guattari
and Gilles Deleuze
, and their theory of the rhizome
.
Glissant died in Paris, France at the age of 82.
Life
Glissant was born in Sainte-MarieSainte-Marie, Martinique
Sainte-Marie is a town and the fifth-largest commune in the French overseas department of Martinique. It is located on the northeast side of the island of Martinique.-External links:* *...
, Martinique
Martinique
Martinique is an island in the eastern Caribbean Sea, with a land area of . Like Guadeloupe, it is an overseas region of France, consisting of a single overseas department. To the northwest lies Dominica, to the south St Lucia, and to the southeast Barbados...
. He studied at the Lycée Schoelcher, named after the abolitionist Victor Schoelcher
Victor Schoelcher
Victor Schoelcher was a French abolitionist writer in the 19th century and the main spokesman for a group from Paris who worked for the abolition of slavery, and formed an abolition society in 1834...
, where the poet Aimé Césaire
Aimé Césaire
Aimé Fernand David Césaire was a French poet, author and politician from Martinique. He was "one of the founders of the négritude movement in Francophone literature".-Student, educator, and poet:...
had studied and to which he returned as a teacher. Césaire had met Léon Damas
Léon Damas
Léon-Gontran Damas was a French poet and politician. He was one of the founders of the Négritude movement.-Biography:...
there; later in Paris they would join with Léopold Senghor, a poet and the future first president of Senegal
Senegal
Senegal , officially the Republic of Senegal , is a country in western Africa. It owes its name to the Sénégal River that borders it to the east and north...
, to formulate and promote the concept of négritude
Négritude
Négritude is a literary and ideological movement, developed by francophone black intellectuals, writers, and politiciansin France in the 1930s by a group that included the future Senegalese President Léopold Sédar Senghor, Martinican poet Aimé Césaire, and the Guianan Léon Damas.The Négritude...
. Césaire did not teach Glissant, but did serve as an inspiration to him (although Glissant sharply criticized many aspects of his philosophy); another student at the school at that time was Frantz Fanon
Frantz Fanon
Frantz Fanon was a Martiniquo-Algerian psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary and writer whose work is influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory and Marxism...
.
Glissant left Martinique in 1946 for Paris, where he received his PhD
PHD
PHD may refer to:*Ph.D., a doctorate of philosophy*Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*PHD finger, a protein sequence*PHD Mountain Software, an outdoor clothing and equipment company*PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...
, having studied ethnography
Ethnography
Ethnography is a qualitative method aimed to learn and understand cultural phenomena which reflect the knowledge and system of meanings guiding the life of a cultural group...
at the Musée de l'Homme
Musée de l'Homme
The Musée de l'Homme was created in 1937 by Paul Rivet for the 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne. It is the descendant of the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro, founded in 1878...
and History
History
History is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians...
and philosophy
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
at the Sorbonne
University of Paris
The University of Paris was a university located in Paris, France and one of the earliest to be established in Europe. It was founded in the mid 12th century, and officially recognized as a university probably between 1160 and 1250...
. He established, with Paul Niger, the separatist
Separatism
Separatism is the advocacy of a state of cultural, ethnic, tribal, religious, racial, governmental or gender separation from the larger group. While it often refers to full political secession, separatist groups may seek nothing more than greater autonomy...
Front Antillo-Guyanais pour l'Autonomie party in 1959, as a result of which Charles de Gaulle
Charles de Gaulle
Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle was a French general and statesman who led the Free French Forces during World War II. He later founded the French Fifth Republic in 1958 and served as its first President from 1959 to 1969....
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. Glissant divided his time between Martinique, Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
and New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
; since 1995, he was Distinguished Professor of French at the CUNY Graduate Center . In January 2006, Édouard Glissant was asked by Jacques Chirac
Jacques Chirac
Jacques René Chirac is a French politician who served as President of France from 1995 to 2007. He previously served as Prime Minister of France from 1974 to 1976 and from 1986 to 1988 , and as Mayor of Paris from 1977 to 1995.After completing his studies of the DEA's degree at the...
to take on the presidency of a new cultural centre devoted to the history of slave trade.
Writings
Shortlisted for the Nobel PrizeNobel Prize
The Nobel Prizes are annual international awards bestowed by Scandinavian committees in recognition of cultural and scientific advances. The will of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in 1895...
in 1992, when Derek Walcott
Derek Walcott
Derek Alton Walcott, OBE OCC is a Saint Lucian poet, playwright, writer and visual artist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992 and the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2011 for White Egrets. His works include the Homeric epic Omeros...
emerged as the recipient, Glissant was the pre-eminent critic of the Négritude
Négritude
Négritude is a literary and ideological movement, developed by francophone black intellectuals, writers, and politiciansin France in the 1930s by a group that included the future Senegalese President Léopold Sédar Senghor, Martinican poet Aimé Césaire, and the Guianan Léon Damas.The Négritude...
school of Caribbean writing and father-figure for the subsequent Créolité
Créolité
Créolité is a literary movement first developed in the 1980s by Martinican writers Patrick Chamoiseau, Jean Bernabé and Raphaël Confiant. The trio published Eloge de la créolité in 1989 as a response to the perceived inadequacies of the négritude movement...
group of writers which includes Patrick Chamoiseau
Patrick Chamoiseau
Patrick Chamoiseau is a French author from Martinique known for his work in the créolité movement.-Biography:Chamoiseau was born on December 3, 1953 in Fort-de-France, Martinique, where he currently resides. After he studied law in Paris he returned to Martinique inspired by Édouard Glissant to...
and Raphaël Confiant
Raphaël Confiant
Raphaël Confiant is a Martinican writer known for his literary commitment towards Creole literature.-Biography:Raphaël Confiant was born in 1951 in Le Lorrain, Martinique. He studied English and Political Science at the University of Aix-Marseille...
. 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
Antillanité
Antillanité is a literary and political movement developed in the 1960s that stresses the creation of a specific West Indian identity out of a multiplicity of ethnic and cultural elements.- Background :...
seeks to root Caribbean
Caribbean
The Caribbean is a crescent-shaped group of islands more than 2,000 miles long separating the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, to the west and south, from the Atlantic Ocean, to the east and north...
identity firmly within "the Other America" and springs from a critique of identity in previous schools of writing, specifically the work of Aimé Césaire
Aimé Césaire
Aimé Fernand David Césaire was a French poet, author and politician from Martinique. He was "one of the founders of the négritude movement in Francophone literature".-Student, educator, and poet:...
, 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
Creole peoples
The term Creole and its cognates in other languages — such as crioulo, criollo, créole, kriolu, criol, kreyol, kreol, kriulo, kriol, krio, etc. — have been applied to people in different countries and epochs, with rather different meanings...
Caribbean and those of Latin America and the plantation culture of the American south, most obviously in his study of William Faulkner
William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...
. 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, Félix Guattari
Félix Guattari
Pierre-Félix Guattari was a French militant, an institutional psychotherapist, philosopher, and semiotician; he founded both schizoanalysis and ecosophy...
and Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Deleuze , was a French philosopher who, from the early 1960s until his death, wrote influentially on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus , both co-written with Félix...
, and their theory of the rhizome
Rhizome (philosophy)
Rhizome is a philosophical concept developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their Capitalism and Schizophrenia project...
.
Glissant died in Paris, France at the age of 82.
Novels
- . (1958) Nouvelle édition, Paris: Gallimard, 1997.
- . (1964) Paris: Gallimard, 1997.
- . (1975). Nouvelle édition, Paris: Gallimard, 1997.
- . (1981) Nouvelle édition, Paris: Galliamard, 1997.
- . (1987) Nouvelle édition, Paris: Gallimard, 1997.
- . Paris: Gallimard, 1993.
- : le roman des Batoutos. Paris: Gallimard, 1999.
- . Paris: Gallimard, 2003.
Translations of Glissant's works
- A list of translations can be found on the "pensée archipélique" Glissant page.
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 (24 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 [BROKEN LINK]
External links
- Ile en Ile Glissant Profile (in French)
- Loïc Céry's Glissant page
- A Plea for "Products of High Necessity" (manifesto)
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.
- 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.
- Oakley, S. 2008: 'Commonplaces: Rhetorical Figures of Difference in Heidegger and Glissant', Philosophy & Rhetoric 41.1: 1-21. Print.
Conference proceedings
- Delpech, C. & Rœlens, M. (eds). 1997: Société et littérature antillaises aujourd’hui, Perpignan: Presses Universitaires de Perpignan.
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.
- Schwieger Hiepko, Andrea 2009: 'Rhythm 'n' Creole. Antonio Benítez Rojo und Edouard Glissant - Postkoloniale Poetiken der kulturellen Globalisierung.'http://www.kv-kadmos.com/.