Ebook: Édouard Glissant: A Poetics of Resistance

Édouard Glissant was a leading voice in debates centering on the postcolonial condition and on the present and future of globalisation. Prolific as both a theorist and a literary author, Glissant started his career as a contemporary of Frantz Fanon in the early days of francophone postcolonial thought. In the latter part of his career Glissant's vision pushed beyond the boundaries of postcolonialism to encompass the contemporary phenomenon of globalisation.

Sam Coombes offers a detailed analysis of Glissant's thought, setting out the reasons why Glissant's vision for a world of intercultural interaction both reflects but also seeks to provide a correction to some of the leading tendencies commonly associated with contemporary theory today.

Review
Arguing that the tension between minoritarian and hegemonic cultures is at the heart of Edouard Glissant's entire theoretical enterprise, Coombes offers us a spirited and informed refutation of charges of political quietism in Glissant's later works. Far from being a sign of political naïveté, the utopian nature of Glissant's political thought is shown to be a necessary prelude to a new progressive, liberatory politics. This is a welcome introduction to the ideas of a major contemporary political theorist.

To divide the thought of Edouard Glissant into an early period of Caribbean radical politics on the one hand and a mature phase advancing a depolitized cosmopolitan life of the mind on the other distorts Glissant's legacy. Sam Coombes rescues Glissant from facile naysayers upholding this misrepresentation. He does so through examination of the late Glissant on creolization, immigration, neoliberal political economy, negotiations of universalism and particularism, and visions of human existence that acknowledge nation-state politics while also providing alternative futures for everyday people to resist enslaving dynamics of globalization. A single word captures that project's implication: freedom.

About the Author
Edouard Glissant (1928 - 2011) was a Martinican philosopher, poet, author and literary critic. Sam Coombes is Lecturer in French at the University of Edinburgh, UK.