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In this essay, I suggest an entangled analysis of sexual difference theory via Luce Irigaray and creolization via Édouard Glissant. I argue that these two distinct discourses share a critical stance against Western sameness and assimilation into a closed metaphysical system. However, each is born of particular historical socio-political struggles that should not be collapsed. I bring them together to demonstrate that their claims are productively entangled and that a critical re-reading of melancholia can unite readers to locate sources of sexual-racial-colonial violence in disparate locations and epochs, holding collective memory and acting beyond critique. Relying on Francoise Vergès’s account of métissage and anamnesis, I will suggest that Antillean geographical vantages reveal complexities of racial and colonial relation to one’s mother, the state, and the sea. By interrogating psychoanalytic and linguistic claims, I forward a South-South circulation of coordinated but distinctive political reimaginations that challenge static notions of race, gender, and sexual difference.

In a conversation with Manthia Diawara aboard the Queen Mary II in 2009, Édouard Glissant elaborated his definition of Relation, a concept that he formally presented in his book Poétique de la relation in 1990, but that emerged out of years of writing about creolization and cultural action in the Caribbean. Sitting at the ship’s window, with the Atlantic Ocean crashing around him, Glissant explains that “the truth that is increasingly coming to light about Black reality in the New World is the truth of multiplicity, the truth of the step towards the Other.”

Cette communication s’interroge sur l’écopoétique dans l’œuvre de Glissant à partir du concept de la résonance. Glissant propose une écopoétique ancrée dans la matérialité concrète du paysage, menant à une épistémologie intuitive de l’ailleurs et de l’avenir pourtant imprévisible. Le but de sera ici d’explorer la fonction de la sonorité pour entretenir la relation entre pensée et paysage afin de comprendre comment l’écopoétique de Glissant s’articule en partie comme une pratique d’écoute. D’une part, on verra comment le son devient vecteur pour faire résonner présent et passé. D’autre part, on analysera la manière dont l’écriture glissantienne s’engage dans un procédé paradoxal, voire contradictoire, qui consiste à faire de la dénomination locale du lieu, une poétique de l’extension et de la profusion qui résonne ailleurs.

Världen är oupplösligt sammankopplad i sina relationer och förhållanden, ändå finner människan sätt att separera och låta skillnader hindra henne från att leva och samexistera i sin mångfald. Friedrich Nietzsche skriver ”Kanske uttrycker vårt ord ’människa’ (manas) ännu något av denna självkänsla: människan betecknade sig själv som det väsen som mäter värden, som värderar och mäter, som det ’värderande djuret i sig’.” I den här uppsatsen börjar jag i Nietzsches genealogi och filosofi som utgångspunkt för att förstå hur och när den europeiska filosofin började plocka isär sig själv inifrån och titta närmare på människans subjekt och hennes värden. Jag vill genom det se på den moderna filosofins sätt att skildra och förstå människan i världen. Vidare anser jag att filosofin måste öppna sig för en bredare kanon för att i det moderna samhället kunna vara en praktik som inkluderar alla levda erfarenheter. Min uppsats har även syftet att utforska en sådan möjlig brygga för var filosofin kan få en materiell och aktivistisk mening. Vägen jag tar för att föreslå en sådan brygga är som nämnt från Nietzsches genealogi. Sedan fortsätter analysen framåt genom Frantz Fanons avkolonialiserande tänkande som tar utgångspunkt i levd erfarenhet. Av särskild vikt är något jag här kallar för en teori om skillnad som ovärderlig, som utarbetas i närhet till Édouard Glissant framför allt, och som vilar på ett fokus på detaljen och hur den måste förstås på ett icke-hierarkiserande sätt för att ingå i Glissants tanke och term Relation. Skillnaden som ovärderlig öppnar i det dekoloniala tänkandet upp för kunskapen utanför den traditionellt överlägsna diskursen och leder oss in i Glissants filosofi och relationens tänkande., In this paper I am asking the question about the European human values and their effect on philosophy and thought through three different philosophers. What I want to examine is how we can get past thinking human subjects as constituted by the hierarchical and often oppositional differences that were installed by means of a normalizing universal with colonial roots. The essay begins with Nietzsche’s geneological account of how and when European philosophy began to disassemble itself from within, focusing on his idea of the need for a new man. Then I turn to Frantz Fanon and the decolonization of European thought and power, as one based on violence and hiererachy. Édouard Glissants poetics of Relation is then essential for thinking man today in the entangled, constantly changing world that we live in.

Si ce que le philosophe et poète Édouard Glissant appelle une poétique de la Relation peut être comprise comme une réaction à la prétention à l’universalisme des humanismes, elle en est aussi une sorte de prolongation dans la mesure où elle propose, à travers la littérature et les arts, de repenser l’homme. Or il s’agit là d’un humanisme non pas articulé à partir du sujet, mais il est saisi dans la relation qu’il entretient avec « la matière même de tous les lieux, leur minutieux ou infini détail et l’ensemble exaltant de leurs particularités, qui sont à poser en connivence avec ceux de tous les lieux. » Pour dénoncer et esquiver la « logique de l’un », il propose donc une écopoétique ancrée dans la matérialité concrète du paysage, menant à une épistémologie intuitive de l’ailleurs et de l’avenir pourtant imprévisible. Cette communication interrogera la manière dont l’écopoétique glissantienne s’engage dans un procédé paradoxal, voire contradictoire qui consiste à faire de la dénomination locale du lieu, une poétique de l’extension et de la profusion qui résonne ailleurs, suggérant une autre République des Lettres, mondiale et diversifiée.

The present thesis focuses on how Edouard Glissant uses othering as a tool while constructing an Antillean identity in two of his works, La Lézarde and La case du commandeur. The proposed identity is more suitable for the confusing reality lived by the Antillean people, consisting of the intertwining of a French culture on the one hand and a creole and African culture on the other. The analysis is based on a selection of excerpts of the two books and aims at a deeper understanding of the use of different strategies of othering for the construction of identity. The theoretical framework consists of Genette’s focalisation and Glissant’s philosophical heritage, as explained in Traité du Tout-Monde. It is concluded that the main goal of the Antillean literature is to create a collective identity for the French West Indies by overcoming othering on a smaller level, i.e., between the different social groups within the French West Indies, thus needing to express othering on a bigger scale, underlining the differences between France and the French West Indies.

Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn made famous the image of the Soviet prison system Gulag as an archipelago. In this paper, Solzhenitsyn’s idea of the Gulag archipelago is juxtaposed with French Caribbean writer and philosopher Édouard Glissant’s notion of archipelagic thinking. The focus is on the mining city Norilsk in Northern Siberia, one of the “islands” in this penal geography, a city that was largely built using forced labour. It is a long way from the Caribbean to Siberia, but both archipelagos (real and conceptual) share a history that can be termed colonial. While the system that created this penal archipelago of the Gulag was, in Glissant’s terms, a manifestation of thoroughly continental thinking, complete with grand, universalizing tendencies, it may also be possible to sense the diversity and interconnectedness that he attributed to the archipelago. The case of Norilsk is examined through the 2017 documentary A Moon of Nickel and Ice by Canadian film-maker Françoise Jacob. Glissant’s ideas are used to open up and pose questions, rather than to provide definitive answers.

Cet article caractérise l’imaginaire de la globalisation que convoquent une série de romans francophones du Sud — 2084 de Sansal, Rouge impératrice et La Saison de l’ombre de Miano, Sartorius de Glissant, Monnè, outrages et défis de Kourouma, Le Terroriste noir et Les Coqs cubains chantent à minuit de Monénembo, Un dimanche au cachot de Chamoiseau. Un tel imaginaire peut en effet être lu comme l’exposé même de la situation des littératures et des sociétés dont relèvent ces romans. Ainsi, loin d’être tenue pour un principe d’uniformisation, la globalisation se trouve en réalité donnée comme l’inévitable confrontation à la diversité du monde. Il en résulte que les romans ici envisagés disposent une figuration et une herméneutique de la friction : toute culture locale se voit irrémédiablement décrite dans son frottement avec d’autres cultures — proches ou lointaines. On s’attache dès lors à saisir et à particulariser la présentation que les romans font d’une telle friction — depuis la dystopie de l’Empire qui prétend la nier jusqu’au récit des origines qui la place dans des temps immémoriaux. Par le biais de cette particularisation, on entend montrer que la friction autorise une appréhension large de la globalisation, qui, loin de la limiter à son actualisation contemporaine, l’identifie tout au long de l’histoire des sociétés du Sud à partir du moment où elles sont dites francophones. Pensée en ces termes, la globalisation se voit ultimement analysée comme une façon, pour les littératures francophones du Sud, de se revendiquer d’une conscience intrinsèque du monde — et donc de répondre de leur caractère éminemment mondial ou global.

The paper offers a cross-cultural literary analysis of Chicana Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints(1992) and Haitian American Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones (1998) and compares the play and the novel on the basis of their shared thematic link of interwoven environmental and racial violence directed against marginalized people of color. Despite the works’ geographically distant contexts—set in the US Southwest and the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, respectively—and the differing collective traumas of genocide the texts dramatize, both narratives foreground the motif of violated nature as a primary critical lens to unveil and critique the on going practices of colonialism permeating twentieth-century US and Caribbean politics. The interlocking images of women-of-colors’ disfigured bodies and the environmental devastation caused by (post)colonial violence underline the pervasiveness of harm done to both the earth and the somatic body., Este artículo ofrece un análisis intercultural dela obra de teatro Heroes and Saints(1992) de la chicana Cherríe Moraga y de la novela The Farming of Bones(1998) de la haitiano americana Edwidge Danticat,así como una comparación de ambas en base a la temática en común sobre violencia medioambiental y racial dirigida a personas de color marginadas. A pesar de la distancia geográfica entre las dos obras, ambientadas, respectivamente, en el Suroeste de Estados Unidos y la isla caribeña de La Española y los distintos traumas colectivos sobre genocidio que los textos escenifican, las dos narraciones tienen como tema central la naturaleza profanada como perspectiva crítica primaria para descubrir y analizarlas prácticas colonialistas de la política estadounidense y caribeña del siglo XX. Las imágenes entrelazadas de cuerpos desfigurados de mujeres de color y la devastación medioambiental causada por la violencia (pos)colonial ponen de manifiesto la generalización del daño perpetuado tanto a la tierra como al cuerpo.

This special issue of Karib includes authors with different disciplinary backgrounds in conversation with the Martinican philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant (1928–2011) and with each other. Glissant has inspired and challenged us to use his essays and imaginary as a vantage point, a base from which to view the world and create the schema of belonging and relational rootedness. The focus is on how Glissant’s work continues to be interpreted in new ways in disciplines other than philosophy or literary studies and on exploring fundamental questions about physical spaces and their ‘imaginaries’ around the world. Glissant used diverse examples and terms, each drawing meaning from the others. The authors of this issue set out to do exactly that as they wander around the globe, drawing specific attention to certain points or to the process itself. The insularity of an island (literally and metaphorically) in Glissant’s writing is also a paradoxical globality: the wandering (errance) does not have a start or a finish. In this case, it seemed symbolically appropriate to set out from the Caribbean and return to it in the final paper of the collection.

Martinican Édouard Glissant has been one of those authors whose poetic and literary work has made a transhumance in academic spaces and militant groups that identify themselves as decolonial. Being the object of a critical rereading of decolonials, the category of creolization (créolisatio) is positioned - according to some - as a true example of decolonial thought, as an archetype of a non-European epistemology from the Caribbean. Against these ideas, there is a wish to show, in this paper, in what sense Glissant's category of creolization, understood as a phenomenon of the past and a horizon of the future in the whole world, as a chaos that promises a future and that is irremediably creol, offers a renewed understanding of two categories of modern thought: cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitization. Indeed, Glissant's thought dialogues with European modernity, and it does not seem to intend a definitive or partial epistemic break., El martiniqués Édouard Glissant ha sido uno de esos autores cuya obra poética, filosófica y literaria ha hecho una trashumancia en los espacios académicos y de los grupos militantes que se autoidentifican como decoloniales. Siendo objeto de relectura critica decoloniales, la categoría de creolización (créolisatio) de Glissant se posiciona —al decir de algunos— como un auténtico ejemplo del pensamiento decolonial radical; como un arquetipo de una epistemología no europea desde el Caribe. A contracorriente con estas ideas, deseo mostrar en qué sentido la categoría de creolización de Glissant, entendida como un fenómeno del pasado y un horizonte del futuro, como un caos que promete un futuro y que es irremediablemente creol, antes de ser una categoría de negación y ruptura total con la filosofía modernidad, ofrece una comprensión renovada de dos categorías del pensamiento moderno: el cosmopolitismo y cosmopolitización. En efecto, el pensamiento de Édouard Glissant dialoga con la modernidad europea y no parece tener como intención una ruptura epistémica definitiva

“Smart city” narratives promise IoT data-driven innovations leveraging biosensing technologies. We argue this overlooks a potential beneft of city living: afrmation. We designed the Heart Sounds Bench, which listens to and amplifes the heart sounds of those sitting on it, as well as recording and playing back the heart sounds of previous sitters. We outline our design intent to invite rest, refection, and recognition of oth- ers’ lives in public space. We share results from a study with 19 participants. Participants expressed feeling connected to a shared life energy including others and the environment, and described heart sounds as feeling intimate yet anony- mous. Finally, we elaborate the concept of life-afrmation in terms of recognition of others’ lives, feeling connection, and respecting diference with opacity, as a way of helping “smart city” designs embrace a multiplicity of desires.

This article answers the question about the character of the Chilean anthropological literature in its hybrid position between science and literature, for it uses the categories of the anthropologist and literary native of the Martinique Édouard Glissant, with regard to his conception of "All World" as a possibility of transcultural understanding, using concepts such as archipelago, rhizome (at its source in the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari), opacity, chaos and creolization. With this we managed to assume the Chilean anthropological literature as a textual form that responds to own definitions of literature and poetry and that is basically defined as an instrument of intercultural communication, with an origin in the social sciences., Este artículo responde a la pregunta sobre el carácter de la literatura antropológica chilena en su posición híbrida entre ciencia y literatura, para ello maneja las categorías del antropólogo y literato originario de Martinica Édouard Glissant, en lo relativo a su concepción de “Todo Mundo” como posibilidad de comprensión transcultural, utilizándose conceptos como los de archipiélago, rizoma (en su fuente en el pensamiento de Gilles Deleuze y Félix Guattari), opacidad, caos y criollización. Con ello logramos asumir a la literatura antropológica chilena como una forma textual que responde a definiciones propias de literatura y poesía, y que se define básicamente como un instrumento de comunicación intercultural, con un origen en las ciencias sociales.

Despite the advancements of European translation studies, the relationships between post-slavery, postcolonial and postmodern languages, identities, and cultures are still rarely studied. In this context, in particular, the atavist notions of diglossia and alienation are still at the heart of debates, forcing the present identities and cultures into a tense relationship. These notions are actually opposed to the free expression and the free development of the individual and of the society they form. It is an ambiguous, controversial and restrictive situation for the researcher, who is permanently faced with relative approaches to the meaning of reality –a dichotomy. For the Creole author and/or translator –defender of the word and of its authenticity, always looking for collective realizations–, restrictions are the reality of a description of what is universal. Today, at a time in which globalization has definitely imposed itself on the world’s destiny, what remains of the Creole utopias? What is the place of the author –of the translator—in the new context of Creole society, where the ancestral and authentic word seems to have lost all its meaning and value? Within which frameworks should the works thus created be included? Which destinies are these works heading towards? Which horizons, which utopias?, Malgré les avancées de la traductologie européenne, les relations des langues, identités et cultures post-esclavagistes, post-coloniales, post-modernes demeurent peu étudiées. Dans ce contexte, les notions ataviques de diglossie et d’aliénation figurent au cœur des débats, engageant encore dans un rapport tendu les différentes langues, identités et cultures en présence. Elles s’opposent – identités, langues et cultures -, en réalité, au libre développement, à la libre expression de l’individu comme de la société qu’elles composent. Situation ambiguë, controversée, contraignante pour le chercheur – l’auteur -, confronté, de manière invariante, à des approches toujours relatives du sens et du réel – dichotomie. Pour l’auteur ou le traducteur créoles, garants tous deux d’une forme authentique de la parole et de son sens - toujours en quête de réalisations collectives -, les contraintes sont réelles d’une description juste de l’universel. Et, aujourd’hui, à l’heure où la Globalisation - la Mondialisation - s’est définitivement emparée des destinées du monde, que reste-t-il des utopies fondatrices des lettres créoles et antillaises ? Quelle place occupe l’auteur créole – le traducteur créole - dans la société créole moderne, société où la parole authentique semble avoir perdu tout sens et toutes valeurs ? Dans quels cadres inscrire les œuvres ainsi produites ? Vers quelles nouvelles destinées tendent-elles, vers quels nouveaux horizons ?, A pesar de los avances de la traductología europea, las relaciones entre las lenguas, identidades y culturas post-esclavistas, poscoloniales y posmodernas siguen siendo poco estudiadas. Es en este contexto particular en el que las nociones atávicas de diglosia y de alienación figuran todavía en el centro de los debates, forzando a las identidades y culturas presentes en una relación tensa. Estas nociones se oponen, en realidad, al libre desarrollo y a la libre expresión del individuo y de la sociedad que las componen. Es una situación ambigua, controvertida y restrictiva para el investigador, confrontado, de manera permanente, con enfoques relativos del sentido de lo real: una dicotomía. Para el autor y el traductor creoles (garantes de la palabra y de su autenticidad, siempre en búsqueda de realizaciones colectivas) las restricciones son la realidad de una descripción de lo universal. Hoy, en el momento en que la globalización se ha impuesto definitivamente sobre el destino del mundo, ¿qué queda de las utopías creoles? ¿Cuál es el lugar del autor –del traductor—en el nuevo contexto de la sociedad creole, donde la palabra, ancestral y auténtica, parece haber perdido todo sentido y todo valor? ¿En qué marcos, por consiguiente, inscribir las obras así producidas? ¿Hacia cuáles destinos se dirigen estas obras, cuáles horizontes, cuáles utopías?

Cet article a pour but d’explorer la façon dont les concepts de l’engagement interculturel, (intercultural engagement) utilisés dans la traductologie littéraire des Caraïbes et dans l’éducation critique pour la citoyenneté mondiale, mettent en question les concepts sous-jacents dans le discours managérialiste de l’internationalisation prédominant actuellement dans les Caraïbes anglophones et dans d’autres systèmes d’enseignement supérieur. En s’appuyant sur l’œuvre d’Édouard Glissant, en particulier, on illustre le potentiel de la pensée caribéenne pour créer de précieuses manières d’interrelation qui reconnaissent elles-mêmes la nature intrinsèquement problématique des interactions interculturelles. La circulation de traductions littéraires entre les Caraïbes anglophones et Cuba s’évoquent comme un possible centre d’intérêt du développement pédagogique et de recherche autour des idées abordées., This paper explores ways in which frameworks of intercultural engagement used in Caribbean Literary Translation Studies and in Critical Global Citizenship Education contest those implied by the managerialist discourse of internationalization currently predominant in Anglophone Caribbean and other higher education systems. The work of Édouard Glissant, particularly, is used to exemplify the potential of Caribbean thought for supplying rich forms of inter-relation that acknowledge the inherently problematic character of intercultural interactions. Literary translation flows between the Anglophone Caribbean and Cuba are invoked as a possible site of pedagogical and research development around the ideas discussed.

This paper examines Edouard Glissant’s Creolization theory as it pertains to the African roots of Antillean culture. Although the discussion of Glissant’s creolization theory may not be particularly innovative, this paper attempts to employ the notion of the cultural rhizome to place Glissant’s theories within the trajectory of Antillean intellectual history. This paper also makes use of Glissant’s poetry, which is greatly informed by his theoretical oeuvre.

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I argue that Glissant conceived of opacity first and foremost in his poetry and in his readings of earlier writers, from Mallarmé to Saint-John Perse to William Faulkner, whose moments of complication or incomprehensibility he found productive. By examining the literary valence of this concept of Caribbean philosophy, I claim that opacity not only protects the subject from the invasive grasp of (neo)colonial thought but also, more affirmatively, invites the reader to join the poet on equal footing in the process of sense-making. It is this kind of collective poetics, a collectivity created in opacity, that Glissant imagines in his broader world vision of Relation and the Tout-Monde.

El Caribe ha sido reconocido por considerarse una pluralidad de espacios que simultáneamente son solo uno. Contrario al contexto de su fragmentada geografía, su segregada historia colonial y su diversidad racial y lingüística, los intelectuales caribeños han establecido puentes de unidad cultural con la intención de configurar una identidad pan-caribeña. Por consiguiente, los ensayistas del siglo XX se enfrentan a la necesidad de examinar críticamente los factores que formulan sus respectivas identidades, en contraste con aquellas tradicionalmente impuestas bajo el discurso colonial y metropolitano. Desde el tercer cuarto del siglo, pensadores como Aimé Césaire (1913-2008), Fernando Ortiz (1881-1969), Fidel Castro (1926-), George Lamming (1927-), Kamau Brathwaite (1930-), Juan I. Jiménes-Grullón (1903-1983), Hubert Devonish (1953-), Edouard Glissant (1928-2011), Antonio Benítez-Rojo (1931-2005), Arcadio Díaz Quiñones y Maryse Condé (1937-), entre otros, cuestionan el sistema colonial, los procesos étnicos y las propuestas lingüísticas, relacionándolos con conceptos tales como la hibridez, el sincretismo, la transculturación y la heterogeneidad. Estas teorías culturales, de alguna manera, reescriben ideas antecedentes en reacción a discursos hegemónicos previos como consecuencia de los cambios políticos que trajeron las guerras de independencia en América Latina durante el siglo XIX. En mi tesis demuestro que estos planteamientos delinean un mapa de modelos epistemológicos de la cultura del Caribe. Para indicar que estas propuestas constituyen metáforas que muestran una consciencia cultural, las proposiciones acerca de la cultura de Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) y Hayden White (1928-) sirven como marco teórico apropiado. Así, a través de las representaciones literarias ensayísticas de los modelos metafóricos de la cultura caribeña, este trabajo redefine algunos aspectos importantes de la identidad cultural vis a vis la mirada parcial que usualmente se utiliza para es

This essay examines the relation between differences and whole as it is played out on an aesthetic level in Glissant's work

The article offers the author's insights on the relation of poststructuralism, negritude, and specter of intention in the works of writer Édouard Glissant. Topics mentioned include the attention of his works in the postcolonial studies focusing on aesthetic and political theories, the concept on poetic intention which are often elided and glossed, and the stand of opacity in his book "Poetics of Relation" in relation of difference.

Paris may have been important for Négritude, but the city is hardly present in Césaire’s work. Likewise, Chamoiseau was educated in the capital but writes little about it. In fact, the only one among the major Martinican writers who represents Paris is the least urban of them all: Édouard Glissant. Considering the cosmopolitan dimension of the thinker of the Tout-monde, the absence of urban poetics is striking, as if his global village is precisely a village. Through the eyes of “the son and the stranger” as he describes himself in relation to Paris in Soleil de la conscience (1956), the metropolis becomes both a place of identification and alienation; Paris is first and foremost an island, linked to his native Martinique. This essay argues that throughout his work, Glissant creates an insular Paris lacking in urban characteristics. Thus, the city is distanced both from the idea of the melting-pot and the multicultural mosaic which Glissant sees as opposites to creolization and Relation.

Totality and Infinity, the title of a well-known work by Emmanuel Levinas, takes up a word which readers of Poetic Intention and of many other texts of Édouard Glissant’s will easily recognize: a term sometimes used in a sense that is clearly positive, sometimes in a sense that is not quite as positive, such as when, for instance, he compares “totalizing Reason” to the “Montaigne’s tolerant relativism.” In his final collection of essays, Traité du tout-monde, Poétique IV, Glissant attempts one more time to clarify the sense in which the reader will have to understand his use of the word “totality,” thinking, and rightfully so, that this word might lead to some confusion: “To write is to say the world. The world as totality, which is so dangerously close to the totalitarian.” Of course, here, it will be necessary to try to ascertain whether or not Levinas’s totality and Glissant’s can peacefully coexist, or, rather, whether this word might, in Glissant, have opposite meanings. Where the second word is concerned, “infinity,” any reader of Glissant will know that he locates its source in those societies he calls atavistic, which are grounded in foundational texts that are the bearers of stories of filiation, of legitimacy, societies whose arrogance and whose errors the author never ceases to decry and whose decomposition, in the very times in which we live, he never ceases to announce (even as Glissant recognizes that there was a time when atavistic cultures undoubtedly must have experienced their own period of creolization, and that, conversely, composite cultures undoubtedly often tend to become atavistic). On this level, “totality” and “infinity,” for him, seem to belong to the same world. Thus, and still in Traité du tout-monde , he proposes that "Hebraism, Christianity, Islam are grounded in the same spirituali

Édouard Glissant passed away on 4 February 2011 at the age of 82. A few words of memory. As a person and thinker, Glissant lived through, then reflected with meditative patience and profundity upon some of the most critical years in the black Atlantic: the aesthetics and politics of anti-colonial struggle, the civil rights movement in the United States, postcolonial cultural anxiety and explosion, the vicissitudes of an emerging cultural globalism, and all of the accompanying intellectual movements from surrealism to negritude to existentialism to those varieties of high modernism and postmodernism for which Glissant himself is such a generative, founding resource. His life bears witness to those years, events, and movements with a poet’s word and a philosopher’s eye. And so Glissant, like all important thinkers, leaves for us an enormous gift – in his case, a new, enigmatic vocabulary of and for the Americas.&nbsp

Increasingly important information and communication technologies (ICT) play a significant role – sometimes as an image, sometimes as a tool – for authors like Ellen Ullman, Melissa Scott, Jeanette Winterson and Pat Cadigan. In their novels they explore patterns of power, hierarchy and colonization through the destabilization of space and transgress boundaries in the space they create. By making connections between post-colonial/post-structural/post-modern theory and technology, I explore the authors’ reasons for making these transgressions. Édouard Glissant explains how computers, and computer-mediated text, can generate a ‘‘space within the indeterminacy of axioms” and how this opens up possibilities to create a space where imaginative and ideological liberation is possible. Glissant’s idea of indeterminacy grows out of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s discussion about space and how it is structured. The virtual, seemingly topographical, space of the Internet has been described, on the one hand, as an information highway (striated space) and, on the other, as a web, where it is possible to surf (smooth space). I connect these concepts to the novels and explore to what extent the authors use these strategies to de-colonize the fictional, digital space their characters inhabit.

Increasingly important information and communication technologies (ICT) play a significant role – sometimes as an image, sometimes as a tool – for authors like Ellen Ullman, Melissa Scott, Jeanette Winterson and Pat Cadigan. In their novels they explore patterns of power, hierarchy and colonization through the destabilization of space and transgress boundaries in the space they create. By making connections between post-colonial/post-structural/post-modern theory and technology, I explore the authors’ reasons for making these transgressions. Édouard Glissant explains how computers, and computer-mediated text, can generate a ‘‘space within the indeterminacy of axioms” and how this opens up possibilities to create a space where imaginative and ideological liberation is possible. Glissant’s idea of indeterminacy grows out of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s discussion about space and how it is structured. The virtual, seemingly topographical, space of the Internet has been described, on the one hand, as an information highway (striated space) and, on the other, as a web, where it is possible to surf (smooth space). I connect these concepts to the novels and explore to what extent the authors use these strategies to de-colonize the fictional, digital space their characters inhabit.