Poetics of Relation by Edouard Glissant, Betsy Wing

Glissant, Edouard. Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of MIchigan Press, 1997. Pp. 226.

As a Martinican cultural theorist, Edouard Glissant has long argued for the exmplarity of the Caribbean situation. He emphasizes the Caribbean archipelago’s history as a point of contact between various, and often violently contradictory, cultural forces. He holds it up, moreover, as a model for all those who, in this current era of multicultural malaise, must cope with the destabilzing effects of conflicting cultural forces on individual and collective identity. Thus Glissant embraced first metissage and now “creolization” —the ongoing exchange and hybridization of different cultural strands—as positive responses to this malaise. He urges us to avoid the retreat into racial, ethnic or other “filial” essences and to abandon traditional concepts of national identity, founded on claims of rootedness in a distant, legitimizing past. And yet he alos urges us to accept the “opacity” (that is, the irreducible difference) of each given culture, while preserving the locally grounded elements of our own identities.