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This paper follows the implications of Gadamer's hermeneutics after Truth and Method in which the forming of social life, and with it the idea of worldly understanding, receives greater attention. I argue that the emphasis in his later writings on worldly understanding draws less on the idea of the hermeneutic circle and problematic of the Geisteswissenschaften in which the concept of tradition is prominent than on the movement in language and the encounter with the other. As in the example of translation, I argue that this movement has the character of passage from one place to another that holds within it an element of opacity. The development of this issue draws on a comparative analysis with the work of the Caribbean philosopher Édouard Glissant. From this analysis I show how Gadamer's hermeneutics addresses the issue of understanding across cultures and in mixed cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article re-reads the essay La Cohée du Lamentin, Poétique V (essay) (Paris, Gallimard, 2005), by Edouard Glissant, and discusses how the proposal to think of the trembles (and not about the trembles) approaches contemporary uncertainties. Uncertainties that will be addressed here in a double aspect: in their relations with the essay form (and therefore with a certain deviation from the theocraticals systems), and in the hypothesis underlying the entire text, which is: that uncertainties become more acute because we go through a moment of change in the modern western episteme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the intervention that Édouard Glissant makes in Hannah Arendt's discourse on political belonging, particularly as this takes shape in her analysis of citizenship. To this end, I consider how Glissant's analysis of the memory of the abyssal beginning of the Middle Passage complicates the promise of belonging that Arendt suggests citizenship makes for those who were once cast out. In view of this, I argue that Glissant provides a basis to reformulate citizenship and political belonging, not in terms of the bounded structure of the nation-state, but in terms of the relational structure of the archipelago. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Caribbean region faces a unique challenge regarding the definition of its cultural identity due to the extended impact of colonization and slavery. The region is a diverse mix of cultures and traditions, blending ethnic and racial groups from various homelands. However, its history of cultural clashes and miscegenation has contributed to a distinct texture and character, with roots tracing back to slavery of earlier days. Many populations were forced to abandon their cultures and assimilate into the colonizers' ways, leading to a widespread diaspora. This has resulted in many individuals feeling uprooted and unbelonging, experiencing a profound sense of displacement from nation, cultural background, linguistic heritage, historical context, as well as individual and collective encounters. Despite these challenges, there is still hope for a brighter future. The Caribbean can redefine itself as a region of inclusivity and diversity, embracing its rich cultural heritage and celebrating the unique identities of its people. During the 1920s and 1930s, Caribbean literature experienced significant transformations and embraced multiracial and multicultural perspectives. This happened alongside the decline of British power and the rise of US influence in the region. While expatriate intellectuals such as George Lamming and V. S. Naipaul promoted "West Indian" literature internationally, national Caribbean literature celebrated and criticized the fundamental changes in geopolitics. It represented multiculturalism, analyzed gendered divisions of labor and space, and explored literature's form and purpose. Some notable works during this period include In the Castle of My Skin (1953), Black Midas (1958), The Mimic Men (1967), and Omeros (1990). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, I connect my work on Archipelago studies with Édouard Glissant’s notions of relationality and Caribbean confederations to formulate what I denominate as the erotics of archipelagic thinking. My main goal is to share my process of thinking with and through Glissant’s work to focus on a series of theoretical gestures that have allowed me to propose modes of reading literary depictions of Caribbean con/federations that go beyond the binary opposition between colonialism and nationalism. I am performing an exercise that I assign to my students when I teach the “Introduction to Critical Theory” course at the University of Miami. Instead of writing an essay with a short theoretical introduction followed by a detailed close reading of literary and cultural texts that illustrate a keyword or a theoretical insight, I conduct a methodological meditation in which I theorize the archipelagic as a form of relationality that configures an erotic imaginary beyond the nuclear family and towards affective networks. To think about the Caribbean as an archipelagic formation, I use my comparative work on the Antillean Confederation in the Hispanic Caribbean (1860-1898) and the West Indies Federation in the English Caribbean (1958-1962) as a historical context in which the region congealed as a network of locations “act[ing] in concert."

The pervasive patterns of neocolonialism long at work in the Francophone Caribbean, whereby the islands have been overseas departments of France for over seventy-five years, operate through a strategic metropolitan praxis of prohibition and exclusion that has long undermined a functional framework that enables and valorizes local sociocultural self-affirmation. While France has effectively sought to efface Guadeloupean and Martinican discourses of nationalism by integrating them into an overarching metropolitan framework of domination of the Other and the disavowal of difference, carried out as part and parcel of a universalizing French policy of ethnopolitical homogeneity, the articulation of nationalist counterdiscourses and cartographies of resistance aimed at asserting the vibrancy and independence of a Franco-Caribbean identity have strategically shifted over time from the purely political to the domains of cultural identity and its corollaries of philosophy and performance.

My contribution to this special issue is non-orthodox. Far from Islamic Feminism's hermeneutics, and bearing in mind the limitations of anthropological works and representative paradigms in Orientalist critique, I take cues from postcolonial scholar Edouard Glissant's (1990) seminal work, Poetics of Relations, notably his notions of détour, retour, and érrance, and draw on my experience in teaching gender studies in relation to the Middle East in UK higher education institutions to posit a "pedagogy of opacity" when producing knowledge on Othered bodies —in this instance, the fictive category of the "Muslim woman". We see how a pedagogy of opacity forces home, self, and early mis/information about the other to realign and confront each other. This triadic realignment showcases the workings of home (the UK)—not of a geographically distant Islamic culture—in the manufacturing of the Muslim woman Other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues for a redefinition of difficulty in relation to the inextricable violence of modernity and examines the consecutive challenge to notions of understanding and interpretation — of a text, of language or of the other — that this repositioning brings. To this end, the article offers a nuanced rereading of Steiner's canonical fourfold categorization of difficulty, in dialogue with, first, Édouard Glissant's opacity and, second, Jonathan Pugh and David Chandler's theorizations of 'abyssal thought', an approach emerging from Caribbean and critical Black studies, exploring the key challenge it poses to forging an unmasterful, after Julietta Singh, comparative literary practice. With an equal attention to the theoretical and pedagogical dimensions of reading difficulty, the article emphasizes the importance of the accretive and embodied nature of the reading process and offers a repositioning of textual difficulty, as a meeting site of opacities, and a reformulation of a difficult, unmasterful reading practice, after catastrophe and with others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reroutes the more radical tendrils of the commonplace by pursuing Christa J. Olson's call for questioning the "terrain of rhetoric." We ask: What if commonplaces and the commonality they entrench are not required for banding together in community? By thinking with Édouard Glissant's Creole garden, we rework the commonplace as common place, which conceives a place that welcomes difference without requiring common ground. To articulate the possibilities of Glissant's common place for rhetorical invention, we demonstrate its movement with examples of marronage in the southern Louisiana Territory of the United States. Marronage helps us to think how the Creole garden gathers the world's thoughts to "illustrate the immeasurable diversity of the world," thus founding a rhetoric that resists even as it relates to settler colonialisms and racial capitalisms (Treatise). This article demonstrates how the terrain of rhetoric may be limited by the pursuit of/for common ground. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

En novembre 1993, face aux menaces pesant sur les champs littéraires et artistiques se forme le Parlement international des écrivains (PIE). Regroupant plus de 300 écrivains et intellectuels du monde entier, le Parlement se voue à écouter « le Cri du Monde » en offrant résidence et hospitalité aux écrivains persécutés et menacés à travers la création du réseau des Villes Refuges. Durant une décennie, le Parlement contribue à la circulation et à la diffusion des œuvres censurées grâce à ses actions et la publication de sa revue Autodafé. Vingt ans après son auto-dissolution, cet article retrace l’itinéraire de ce lieu-parlement en repensant cette assemblée comme une expression particulière du « lieu-commun », tel qu’énoncé par le poète martiniquais Édouard Glissant. Il interroge en quoi le cheminement du Parlement international des écrivains esquisse les fondations d’une approche relationnelle des lieux et de la production culturelle à travers le tissage de réseaux et intrications dans la « totalité-monde ». Enfin, cette contribution avance que le Parlement ouvre sur des prolongements et possibilités poétiques, politiques et relationnelles.

In this article, the authors argue for what Édouard Glissant terms the 'right to opacity' in teaching and assessing communication and language skills in early childhood education (ECE). We draw from Glissant's writing on Relation, and his interrelated concepts of 'opacity' and 'transparency', to consider two vignettes from sensory ethnographic research conducted in ECE settings: a special education classroom and a nursery. We contest the international emphasis on efficiency, clarity, and rationality in ECE communication and language provision as one informed by colonial and ableist logics of 'transparency'. Instead, we argue for an attention to moments of what we call 'opaque reciprocity': of (1) non-dyadic, non-developmentalist, more-than-human exchange, within which (2) authorship becomes distributed inter-subjectively, thereby (3) de-emphasising efficient, clear, and rational notions of meaning-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that in social circumstances deformed by persistent anti-black racisms, invisibility does not necessarily constitute a failure of recognition or acknowledgment by others. Rather, it comes forth as a protective shield, to resist reductive and objectifying forms of seeing that often result in violence. But such invisibility has its limits. In this paper, I read Incendiary Art (2017) by Patricia Smith, a collection of poems set in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement in the US, to interrogate both the limits of such protective invisibility, and the responsibility of the reader to acknowledge the potential violence of their own gaze. I examine the emancipatory political value of the poetic as showing a way towards a transformative engagement with others as 'who' they are, and subsequently towards a mutual co-constitution that is at the very heart of actualising a democratic political plurality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does Édouard Glissant have to contribute to theorizing decolonization and a philosophy of difference? And how is this contribution tied to rethinking place (from Caribbean to Caribbeanness) and world (comprised of creolized culture and identity)? This essay takes up Glissant's work in the context of questions of history and memory, with particular focus on how historical experience grounds philosophical work on place and world through articulations of identity, language, cultural production, and thinking after catastrophe. Drawing from a contrast with Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin, this essay shows how Glissant's critical concept "creolization" works as an expression of what I call "the afropostmodern," and also as an important contribution to decolonial theories of world, culture, memory, language, and subjectivity after the Middle Passage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Proposant différents niveaux du Discours antillais (« l'éclat du cri originel [...]. La patience du paysage reconnu [...]. L'imposition des rythmes vécus [...] », 1981, 198-201), Édouard Glissant ajoutait: « Le roman ni le poème ne sont s'il se trouve nos genres. Autre chose est peut-être à venir » (201, note 8). Chez Ferrier aussi, vivent de nombreux "paysages reconnus" et "rythmes vécus," inscrits en des pages qui, nommées "récit" ou "roman," ne sont en fait ni roman ni poème. Impressionnants, chez Ferrier, sont ces morceaux de prose poétique auxquels répondent ou qu'annoncent un ou plusieurs poèmes en prose dans la même œuvre. Pour étayer son propos, Cailler en appelle à Baudelaire, Jacob (Préface du Cornet à dés, 1916), et Meschonnic pour qui, dans la saisie d'un texte « [...] il s'agit de rien d'autre que de mieux entendre la chose littéraire » (Dessons, Meschonnic 1998, 106). Découvrant des marques de poéticité dans sept poèmes sélectionnés, cet article considère si et comment ces textes autonomes, extraits de Mémoires d'outre-mer, Sympathie pour le fantôme, et François, portrait d'un absent, s'intègrent à la totalité d'un livre, voire à l'œuvre dans son ensemble. L'auteure espère encourager une lecture à voix haute des textes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the writers writing in French outside of France, the cultural identity concept presented by the Caribbean Martinique writer, Edouard Glissant, is thought-provoking. It makes great sense to adopt a perspective of semiotics in probing into his perception of the Caribbean culture and even the entire world, especially his representation of the "cosmopolitan" cultural identity based on a range of ideas, such as "archipelago thought," "antillanity" and "creolisation," and "plural world." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A partir de uma fotografia que reúne Guattari e Glissant, e dos depoimentos sobre um livro que pretendiam escrever juntos, propomos pensar um possível pacto de cumplicidade poética que se tece entre o rastro de ambas as obras. Para isso, comparamos algumas categorias preferencialmente centradas na figura do rizoma; e destacamos a ideia de um abismo negro para dar conta de uma certa assimetria relativa às respectivas condições de enunciação. Nosso propósito é delinear, no encontro desses escritos, aquele livro não escrito que alimentaria as hipóteses sobre uma reciprocidade teórica e metodológica entre as respectivas propostas.

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.”

How do we offer critiques of social marginalization and the politics surrounding it without reducing people to mere victims or, at the least, “tokens of a type”? Phenomenology offers a useful way to address this problem. Focusing on the concept of stigma, this article proposes an errant phenomenology informed by Arendt's concern to “defrost” canonical moral and political concepts and Glissant's errant poetics of opacity. Centering upon an African American mother raising a child diagnosed with autism, it argues that an errant version of critical phenomenology can both illuminate the workings of stigma in this child's life and, at the same time, provide resistance to any simplistic classification of his social identity. But the article also makes a more radical claim by addressing the meta problem of concept reification in critical social theory. It offers an avenue for disturbing category thinking itself in generative ways, enriching how we envision social critique and deepening our critical capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

“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.

The question of cultural memory is particularly complex in the case of the Caribbean due to its fragmented history, which has led to great cultural diversity. Created within and outside the Caribbean during the last twenty years, structured online archives have taken up the issue of dispersed memories by taking an inventory of a multiplicity of objects which testify to the diverse past of Caribbean societies. Taking Glissant's concept of Relation as a starting point, I analyze in this article to what extent these archives contribute to the constitution of a cultural memory in terms of contents, structure as well as possibilities of participation, considering the complexity of historical and social threads woven together within and between the Caribbean territories. To address this question, I will draw on two online archives specializing in the Caribbean: The Caribbean Memory Project and the digital library MANIOC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the challenges contemporary societies faces is resistance to sharing the world. Investments in 'extremist' or 'identitarian' identity positions that desire purity and are intolerant of pluralism and difference undermine education. I explain why it is important to explore 'how ideas feel', understanding the affective investments in these positions and imaginaries, and the fear of loss of identity that can drive such closed positions. In the second part, I turn to the writings of Édouard Glissant in order to deepen this analysis, paying particular attention to unpacking the desire for purity and the fear of métissage or mixing that are commonplace in racism, xenophobia, and ultra-nationalism. Glissant offers another way of understanding identity-in-relation whereby sharing the world does not mean losing oneself. Finally, I draw on his poetic language of archipelagic pedagogies to suggest some ways in which education can invite students to deepen a sense of world-oriented particularity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In December 2013, the artists Katy Beinart and Mabelle Williams came together to make a work of art entitled 'Goute Sel' (Taste Salt). Performed on the opening day of the 3rd Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, the work focused on the vèvè – as aspect of ritual practice from Haitian Vodou – using salt collected from a saltworks on the Haitian coast. The artists created a pattern on the ground by which to call to Vodou gods and ancestors. At the end of the performance, the remaining salt was handed out to members of the audience who were invited to taste it. In this article, Beinart, a white UK-based woman artist (of South-African Jewish heritage), and Williams, a Black Haitian woman artist, report and reflect on their collaboration. Told through both artists' voices, the general narration is provided by Beinart (the 'I' is her voice and the 'we' is used where discussing joint work), while Williams's voice features in quotations from a series of conversations between the artists that took place in 2019–2020. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the complex relational landscape of international partnerships where local and transnational education objectives are entangled. We present a methodological practice for experimenting with diagrams and maps. Our emphasis on spatial rendering of local/global relationality is intended to invite discussion about the postcolonial context of international education work and the geopolitics of transnational curriculum. We pursue a diagrammatic and archipelagic form of creative abstraction, which we present as a posthuman cartographic practice. To illustrate this practice, we focus on a specific international curriculum development project funded by the World Universities Network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Au prisme de la « pensée du tremblement » d’Édouard Glissant, laquelle promeut une vision productive du chaos reposant sur un modèle relationnel, cet article se propose d’examiner l’esthétique du tremblement telle qu’elle se déploie dans Le jour du séisme de Nina Bouraoui. En s’appuyant sur l’évocation du séisme d’El Asnam de 1980, l’autrice franco-algérienne convoque d’autres lieux et temporalités tout aussi traumatiques. A la suite du cataclysme, l’identité de la narratrice, sa mémoire et son enracinement dans la terre natale apparaissent illusoires. Les ondes de choc se propagent au récit : l’écriture sismique fait alors table rase de la fixité et de l’homogénéité pour privilégier des agencements textuels instables et un mode de connaissance relationnel aux apparences désordonnées et incontrôlables. Nous examinerons en quoi la précarité ontologique qui découle de la catastrophe naturelle engendre, pour la narratrice, de nouvelles modalités d’habiter le monde et de se concevoir en tant que sujet, tout en offrant une vision éthique de l’écriture. La ‘sismopoétique’ bouraouienne ainsi définie se veut à la fois ekphrasis et stratégie conceptuelle pour repenser la fragilité de l’existence du sujet postcolonial et sa relation précaire à la nature, ainsi que pour échapper aux emmurements identitaires, qu’ils soient fondés sur des concepts nationaux, genrés, ou religieux.

No abstract available.

The forensics of environmental violence transposes habeas corpus from juridically individuated civil subjects to the forensic cartography of the conscripted, militarized and rapidly disappearing corpus of habitats. This forensics communicates with Peter Sloterdijk's classification of terrorism (including state terror) in 'Airquakes' (2009) as environmental war, irrespective of disparate ideological justifications. A forensics of the power and privation that is entangled with juridical positivism and cognate humanitarian agendas presupposes the right-to-look as the property of a sovereign subject. However, the possession character of this right raises the question of envisioning a nonsovereign gaze and an ethics of opacity. The thinking through of a will not to will a right-to-look confronts the atmospheric and habitat hegemonies of technologies and ideologies of omnivoyance, including mass incarceration, policing, and the racial capitalism of environmental extraction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

I examine Derek Walcott’s portrayal of the journey of the breadfruit in “The Bounty,” which intertwines the history of the species’ transplantation with an elegy for the poet’s own mother. In its depiction of the mutiny on the Bounty, Walcott’s poem opens up a moment of Glissantian détour in the plants’ path from Tahiti to Jamaica when they are cast asea. I center the jettisoned plants rather than the crew or captain of the ship to explore how the interpretation of the event might change if we imagine the florae themselves to be the real mutineers. Invoking Christina Sharpe’s notion of “wake work,” I argue that the bobbing breadfruit specimens perform a wake for those who have perished in the waters of the Atlantic and the plantations of the West Indies as the plants wake up to the process of their commodification and absorption into the plantation system. For Walcott, the trajectory of the breadfruit also reflects the journey of his own mother after her death, so that its appearance in Saint Lucia implies not only that the plant has been successfully imported, but also that she has arrived at her ultimate destination in the afterlife. Feeding on the nutrients of her body, the breadfruit tree reincarnates the forms of its perished human and nonhuman predecessors, becoming a vegetal afterlife to the histories of colonial importation and plantation slavery.

This essay focuses on Derek Walcott's depiction of the historical journey of the breadfruit across the Pacific. The British Empire collected breadfruit plants from Tahiti in the eighteenth century to provide a staple food for enslaved Caribbean laborers, and, by extension, to bolster the system of plantation slavery. Yet in Walcott's poem "The Bounty," the breadfruit plants engage in a Glissantian act of détour in the Pacific Ocean. They collaborate with the human mutineers aboard the ship to subvert the imperial transplantation project. While the poem dilates this moment of vegetal agency, it also references the breadfruit's ultimate arrival in Saint Lucia. Christina Sharpe's notion of "wake work" sheds light on the symbolic status of the breadfruit plants that eventually landed in the Caribbean, which continue to live in the wake of plantation slavery, the wake of the Bounty, and the wake of their own vegetal mutiny in the Pacific. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article approaches questions of race and imperialism in India Song through the film's strategies of sound. Departing from the notion that Duras's relegation to the soundtrack of certain aspects of the film's colonial context might be read as a means to avoid the totalising risks of the image, this article suggests that, in the film, sound is deployed not only as a means of survival for the non-white subject but also as a site of political agency and a space in which to forge tentative forms of community. As the film's use of language intersects with questions of power and resistance, India Song imagines models of political enunciation which avoid the semiotic privilege of the signifier and thus challenge the violence of hegemonic language in the colonial context. Thus, as the film uses sound to imagine new ways of being public without the risk of visual capture, noise emerges as an opaque site of connection and enunciation beyond the demand for recognition and legibility upon which logos is predicated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay demonstrates how petits pays, particularly small tropical islands assaulted by human-triggered climate change, are also at the forefront of an aesthetics and ethics of solidary vulnerability. Paradoxically, I argue, their smallness allows them to connect effectively with large planetary events, in a movement Édouard Glissant calls Mondialité, since they can function away from the stifling forces of globalization driven by continental powers. Virgin Islands writer Tiphanie Yanique declared the Caribbean as "Ground Zero for Climate Change." This essay will explore her claim through a series of poems, philosophical essays, and installation art from Martinique and Guadeloupe. Thus, Aimé Césaire's apparent prison-island is precisely what links Caribbean subjects to a world-geography of Negritude; Suzanne Roussi Césaire's Martinique connects, through the tail of a hurricane, with the rest of the Antilles and the world. Guadeloupean artist Guy Gabon's installation, Yué#sororité puts women climate refugees at the forefront of resistance to global warming. The hope put into play by these poets and artists can only be activated, the essay ultimately argues, if the demonstrated tendency of humans to devour their planet through colonization and over-consumption can make room to an ethics of ecological love. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this short piece I share some fragments on my experience of working with French Caribbean author Édouard Glissant's Poétique de la Relation (1990) in conversation with ethnographic research on urban commoning projects in London and Paris. I explore how processes of translating knowledges and language interweave when carrying out research in different linguistic contexts, practicing engaged and situated research and attempting respectful engagement with decolonial scholarship. Working with this collection of essays by Glissant in and through translation also offers provocations around questions of poetics and, tongues of, and what is lost in, translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reads the end of Wide Sargasso Sea as a spectral portrait of the artist. As she is said to spread colour/fire, Antoinette asserts herself in a gesture where the frame of the picture replaces the frame of a mirror that is either broken, absent, or luring her with a deadly reflection. The I/eye that faces the red backdrop of the sky has stepped through the looking-glass to compose a landscape where another logic is made to prevail. The moment that is created is both a moment of meaning and a moment when meaning is resisted through a handling of colour that displaces codes and challenges the black and white world of the master/colonizer system as much as the symbolism of the mother-text itself. Colour triumphs as an event that sets all lines into motion and allows us to draw a line between modernist aesthetics and a postcolonial poetics of resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers several utopian/dystopian thought experiments to explore the sheer dread in thinking otherwise than the contemporary unworld as it is. It attempts this through a consideration of the horror of a world without a sun. It demonstrates this incapacity of thought to think beyond the utopos of the unworld as it is with reference to the 2017 BBC drama Hard Sun. It contrasts this essentially failed science fiction with the satirical optimism of Gabriel Tarde's Underground Man, published in 1905, in which a postapocalypse sunless utopia is envisaged under the Earth. Shaping and guiding my analysis are the different philosophical senses of utopia found in Félix Guattari's and Édouard Glissant's work and the way they function to destabilize apocalyptic thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Little critical attention has concentrated on the rich botanical imagery of Aimé Césaire's poetry. Far from serving as the placid, bucolic backdrop of Martinique, Césaire's vegetal world is a space of tremendous and unpredictable flux and change. By performing several close readings of Césaire's flora-centric poems in the context of Édouard Glissant's poetics of Relation, this article articulates a notion of "vegetal writing", a kind of critical mode of composition and reading that produces distinct imaginings of creolization through the aesthetic lens of botanical imagery. In doing so, this article argues that Césaire's vegetal poetry posits a challenge to romanticized pastoral renderings of Antillean landscape and, secondly, dominant readings that place Césaire's work in the literary stronghold of Négritude. Instead, reading Césaire's poems alongside Glissant's notion of Relation, vegetal writing creatively obfuscates the lines dividing root/stem, verticality/horizontality, mobile/immobile, self/other — placing the self in an increasingly complex, creolized world of hybridity, transformation, and human possibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay tracks the movement in Édouard Glissant's work from thinking relationality as creolisation to Relation as such, to a globalised sense of cultural contact and transformation he calls tout-monde. This movement is informed by the critical meaning of the Caribbean as a historical and memorial experience, figured as the archipelago, and governed by chaotic mixture. Chaotic mixture, which is Glissant's preoccupation from his earliest work forward, is generated by the Caribbean as a crossroads of the world; the slave trade, then colonialism, brought irreconcilable yet fecund cultural dynamics to the archipelago and produced creolised forms of culture. What is the significance of these forms of culture? What theoretical lessons are borne by these forms? In the late work, Glissant extends his conception of creolisation, which is initially an internal characteristic of the Caribbean, into the thought of tout-monde. Tout-monde names an aggressive, future-oriented imperative to put global cultures in contact and to draw on the productive chaos that comes from that contact. A poetics of the whole world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]