Poetics of Relation

One of the most important writers of the French Caribbean * Guardian *Poetics of Relation marks the high point of critical and cultural theory as articulated by Caribbean intellectuals. In the panoply of creative-theoretical intellectuals, Édouard Glissant occupies a place of high honor – Carole Boyce Davies, Cornell UniversityTo have the opportunity to encounter Glissant’s Poetics of Relation again is a gift. Betsy Wing’s translation captures the sensual flush of a prose that invents a new language as it remakes the world. A rare text, poetic and defiant. A revelation – Colin Dayan, Vanderbilt UniversityOne of the most important writers and philosophers of our time. Glissant called attention to means of global exchange that do not homogenize culture but produce a difference from which new things can emerge… I have a ritual of reading in Glissant’s books for fifteen minutes every morning… He is my most important theoretical influence – Hans Ulrich ObristA stunning reimagining of geography. Glissant radically reorders time-space, offering us future-pasts laced with thick ecosystems, black poetics, and painful, but necessary, interhuman relations. A Poetics of Relation continues to be a brilliant lesson in anti-colonial world-making – Katherine McKittrick, Queens UniversityGlissant’s Poetics of Relation is a deeply transformative work written with profound acuity, flair and vision. Whilst reflecting on the specific historical realities and potentialities of the Antilles, Glissant’s central concepts of “rhizomatic thought”, “opacity” and “identity as a system of relation” speak urgently and directly to our contemporary moment. Betsy Wing’s translation of Glissant’s poetics powerfully captures his determination to destabilise and interrogate the French language from within and bears out Glissant’s moving observation that “Relation…is spoken multilingually” – Mary Jean ChanLife – whether human or more-than-human – is a story of relations in a constant process of becoming. Yet many dominant philosophies, politics, and economics remain grounded in a totalizing and reductive individualism ill-suited to planetary co-existence. Glissant advances a dynamic, non-linear, relational perspective that can help us remake and reimagine relations at this moment of crisis and transformation – Merlin SheldrakeFaces the roaring totality of the world in all its horror, beauty, and commotion, and declares it unknowable. Glissant counters the imperialist notion of knowledge as acquisition with a radiating poetics that’s given freely. His work is crucial for anyone who wants to approach the whole wide world, to know it exhaustively, and is willing to concede failure from the start. This is why Glissant means so much to poets – to all of us committed to wandering – and this new edition promises to extend Relation’s wayward network – Nisha RamayyaPoetics of Relation is a work of profound political imagination grounded in the collective Antillean historical experience redirecting us to where the full promise of modernity might be anticipated and achieved – Rinaldo Walcott, University at BuffaloThis vibrant translation of Glissant demonstrates that there is no meaning without the language as form, no content without the textures of process. Grounded in the rupture of Black diaspora and the vantage point of the Caribbean, Poetics of Relation models how to apprehend the rich fractalization of the world without homogenizing it into abstract generalizations. Rather than acquiesce to totalitarian impulses, Glissant offers the beautiful, ongoing practice of Relation – Xine Yao, University College London

Édouard Glissant (1928-2011) was a poet, novelist, playwright, philosopher, and literary critic, and was a leading voice in postcolonial theory and Caribbean literature. Born in Martinique, he studied at the Lycée Schœlcher and the Sorbonne in Paris. He was the Distinguished Professor of French at City University of New York, Graduate Center, and was the recipient of the Prix Renaudot and the Prix Charles Veillon. His works include Poetics of Relation, Caribbean Discourse, Faulkner, Mississippi, and The Ripening.