Édouard Glissant: a Poetics of Resistance

Édouard Glissant was a leading voice in contemporary debates centering on the postcolonial condition and on the present and future of globalisation respectively. Prolific as both a theorist and a literary author, Glissant started his career as a contemporary of Frantz Fanon in the early days of francophone postcolonial thought. In the latter part of his career, by contrast, Glissant’s vision pushed beyond the boundaries of postcolonialism to encompass the contemporary phenomenon of globalisation. In Édouard Glissant: A Poetics of Resistance, Sam Coombes offers a detailed analysis of Glissant’s thought, setting out the reasons why Glissant’s vision for a world of intercultural interaction both reflects but also seeks to provide a correction to some of the leading tendencies commonly associated with contemporary theory today.

Offering detailed analyses of key concepts such as ‘creolisation’, ‘Relation’, ‘errantry’, ‘opacity’ and the ‘detour’, Sam Coombes analyses the manifold ways in which Glissant’s oeuvre of the last twenty or so years, being both illuminating and critical of the world we live in, could prove vital to our collective futures. Glissant’s oeuvre paves the way for an alternative vision for the 21st century, one which makes full use of the opportunities for mass intercultural communication which globalisation and the information revolution have provided but which nevertheless guarantees full respect for minoritarian cultures and languages.