Poetics of relation
Édouard Glissant (Author), Betsy Wing (Translator)
In this book, French-Caribbean writer and philosopher Édouard Glissant turns the concrete particulars of Caribbean reality into a complex vision of a world in transformation. He sees the islands of the Antilles as enduring as "invalid" suffering imposed by history, yet also as a place whose unique interactions will one day produce an emerging global consensus. Arguing that the writer alone can tap the unconscious of a people and apprehend its multiform culture in order to provide forms of memory and intent capable of transcending "nonhistory," Glissant therefore 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. In this book 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. The issues raised about identity as built in relation and not in isolation are central to current discussions not only of Caribbean creolization but of U.S. multiculturalism as well
Print Book, English, 1997
The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor [Michigan], 1997
xxiii, 226 pages ; 22 cm
9780472096299, 9780472066292, 047209629X, 0472066293
36417844
The open boat
Errantry, exile
Poetics
A rooted errantry
Repetitions
Expanse and filiation
Closed place, open word
Concerning a Baroque abroad in the world
Concerning the poem's information
Creolizations
Dictate, decree
To build the tower
Transparency and opacity
The black beach
Relation
The relative and chaos
Distancing, determining
That that
Relinked, (relayed), related
Generalization
That those beings be not being
For opacity
Open circle, lived relation
The burning beach
Translation of: Poétique de la relation
Translated from the French