douard Glissant, long recognized in the French and francophone world as one of the greatest writers and thinkers of our times, is increasingly attracting attention from English-speaking readers.
Betsy Wing\'s recent translations include Lucie Aubrac\'s Outwitt. --Judith Graves Miller, University of Wisconsin, Madison douard Glissant is Distinguished Professor of French at City University of New York, Graduate Center.
He is central not only to the burgeoning field of Caribbean studies, but also to the newly flourishing literary scene in the French West Indies. . . .
The most important theoretician from the Caribbean writing today.
This translation of Glissant\'s work preserves the resonating quality of his prose and makes the richness and ambiguities of his voice accessible to readers in English.
In Glissant\'s view, we come to see that Relation in all its senses--telling, listening, connecting, and the parallel consciousness of self and surroundings--is the key to transforming mentalities and reshaping societies. multiculturalism.
Glissant\'s notions of identity as constructed in Relation and not in isolation are germane not only to discussions of Caribbean creolization but also to our understanding of U.
S.
Arguing that the writer alone can tap the unconscious of a people and apprehend its multiform culture to provide forms of memory capable of transcending nonhistory, Glissant defines his Poetics of relation--both aesthetic and political--as a transformative mode of history, capable of enunciating and making concrete a French-Caribbean reality with a self-defined past and future.
He sees the Antilles as enduring suffering imposed by history, yet as a place whose unique interactions will one day produce an emerging global consensus.
In Poetics of Relation, Glissant turns the concrete particulars of Caribbean reality into a complex, energetic vision of a world in transformation.
Some of the metaphors of local identity Glissant favored--the hinterland (or lack of it), the maroon (or runaway slave), the creole language--proved lasting and influential.
When he returned to his native land in the mid-sixties, his writing began to focus on the idea of a relational poetics, which laid the groundwork for the cr olit movement, fueled by the understanding that Caribbean culture and identity are the positive products of a complex and multiple set of local historical circumstances.
Born in Martinique in 1928, Glissant earned a doctorate from the Sorbonne. douard Glissant, long recognized in the French and francophone world as one of the greatest writers and thinkers of our times, is increasingly attracting attention from English-speaking readers
