Maps

1To read Glissant is to discover a new world, for when Glissant writes, he writes the world. If language is like cartography, a process of finding the right symbols with which to map the world, Glissantian maps don’t follow existing cartographic conventions, borders or lines. Much of the value of the maps Glissant provides us with lies in the way they disrupt stable coordinates of the world, for historically contingent ones. This is a world not of immutable fixity, but of endless blending and becoming, relation and difference. All of Glissant’s work as a poet, philosopher and theorist has been concerned with exploring the possibilities of this new cartography, a map which refuses and escapes a comfortable belonging within either the nation, elusive universals, academic silos, or identity politics. Whatever the genre employed, Glissantian thought always moves beyond oppositional discourses which partition the world into binary divisions and towards forms of relation and being where it becomes possible to become both, one and multiple, the same and the Other, here and there. Relationality provides the productive model for this inquiry into Glissant, a theoretical vocabulary that provides the exegetical and interpretative tools needed for understanding, conceptualising, and ultimately abolishing uneven global structures predicated on hierarchical, gendered, racialised, sexualized, and economised notions of social existence.

2Dissatisfied with Western Philosophy’s quest for absolute knowledge, where man, thought, and history come to a definitive closure (exemplified by Hegel’s Geist), each of Glissant’s works explodes taken-for-granted categories along with the ethical and emotional demands these categories insinuate. In the Glissantian lexicon, words (dis)assemble themselves (and ourselves) in a non-systemic manner, constantly unsettling the rhythms and certitudes of time- honoured practices that we imagine we comprehend. And yet this putative non-system of thought forms within the Glissantian worldview a philosophy or rather philosophies of relation. Glissant not only refuses the systemic structure that connects colonial violence with global linear thinking and divisions, but also names new ways of thinking and being in the world.

3Employing a hermeneutics which re-evaluates the very notion of the thinking subject, the cogito, ergo sum of Cartesian dualism, Glissant simultaneously dislocates and extricates Western fantasies of pure filiation, the sovereignty of self-consciousness, and the transparency of difference. As Michael Dash has argued, for Glissant, ‘too many others and elsewheres’ disturb and disrupt the monomania of the self-structuring self.1 Instead, Glissant decentres subjectivity to assemble new philosophies of language, history, time, community, space, memory, aesthetics, and in the process the very task of thinking itself. But how does philosophy (un)think itself? This, perhaps, is Glissant’s most challenging, important, and interesting question for us.

Concepts

4In the same vein that Glissant unsettles faith in a full, self-present, always-cohering subject- hood, he seeks to undermine assumptions that portray history as something that develops over time, as a coherent, progressive system. As a philosophical system History (with a capital H), has operated as a ‘functional fantasy of the West’, attempting to systemise the world through a spatial and temporal hierarchy.2 It is this hierarchical process grounded in a proper historical consciousness, as defined by the European enlightenment that Glissant denies. For Glissant, history leads to ‘neither a schematic chronology nor a nostalgic lament’.3 Instead the past is submitted to a ‘painful notion of time’ which moves towards its ‘full projection forward into the future’.4 The disaster or the pain was and is/continues to be transatlantic slavery. As Michael Dash observes, informed by the rupture which occurs with the Middle Passage and the imposition of slavery, Glissant follows Derek Walcott in understanding history as the sea ‘with its always changing surface, and capacity for infinite renewal’.5The sea not only tells a history but also gives a history.

5The discovery of the Americas through the colonizing voyages of Christopher Columbus across the Atlantic Ocean in 1492; the slave ships which traversed the Atlantic to turn African natives into commodities; the Africans (re)figured as cargo thrown, jumped, dumped overboard during the Middle Passage; the littoral, the border where the African landscape disappeared into the sea.

6This world that emerges, must be thought from the underside of this history, from the slave ship, the bodies buried under the ocean, and the flesh: the bodily surplus of those who toiled and worked on the plantations. No longer the comfortable symmetry of linear progression, history becomes a scream, an act of excessiveness, for as Glissant writes, ‘our land is excessive’.6 Like the silt of the sea, this history also sediments and entrenches itself, establishing a ‘measure of man and a ranking of life and worth’ that devalues life through ‘a racial calculus and political arithmetic’ yet to be undone.7 But silt is never purely a substance made of dead elements, blocking, filling, or clogging. Silt is also residue, the debris that speaks to processes that escape their naming. Silt is that which remains, depositing itself along the bank of rivers, the ocean depth, morphing with the corals of the sea, and dispersing itself throughout deserted and arid landscapes.8

7Glissant speaks of silt as both, the tragic traces of those who made, were (un)made, or (re)made during the journey through the Middle Passage, and as something fertile, something that despite being indistinct and unexplored, possesses an insistent presence that we are not incapable of experiencing. Silt then, more than detritus, also speaks to something else, the possibilities of retrieval and reversal in order to forge new forms of life, community, and language. Rather than acquiesce to the condition of social death that the Middle Passage and slavery impose, Glissant does not lose sight of the many excesses that were not encompassed within systems of domination, but as ongoing practices of freedom that this violence also gave rise to.9 It is these excesses that texture the ways Glissant reads the world, inform his ways of being in and of the world, and determine his relations to others in the world. Nonetheless, the genres of freedom that Glissant reads through these excesses should not be substituted by references to either agency or resistance. By assuming full, coherent, self-made subjects, these categories presume that subjects when exercising agency always work against something. This is not to say that these categories are always useless in this context, but as Alexander Weheliye has argued, that it is ‘just that we might come to a more layered and improvisatory understanding of extreme subjection if we do not decide in advance what forms its disfigurations should take on’.10

8Profoundly philosophical, Glissant’s work extends across the Caribbean. From engaging with the ethico-political need for unsettling the modernity/colonial matrix to offering sustained comments on the post-structuralist moment within the humanities, Glissant has been deeply and critically involved across both the global North and South, making him an important global intellectual figure.11 And yet, central for Glissant, and this what I want to argue across this paper, will always be the Caribbean, the rhizomatic space from which he experiences, imagines, and begins to speak the world. This is the ground that Glissant walks on, speaks from, and that lays out what it means to live in relation to a pained history while also determining the possibilities that might be opened up within it to question racial exclusion, ontological negation, and the other myriad dispossessions constitutive to the colonial constitution of the Human and the modern world. Sharing this at once perilous and productive ground with other theorists of Caribbean self-formation such as Césaire and Fanon, Glissant carries their work into new dimensions. Fuelled by the power of a rich imaginary and poetics derived from the openness of the Caribbean landscape, Glissant throughout his oeuvre reveals the fluidity of relation beyond closed systems of thought which treat difference as a threatening aberration from established norms of stability order, and safety.

9This is a venture which ultimately depends on the conceptual work that Glissant performs throughout his oeuvre. To list a few – the ‘imaginary’ is offered as the force that can counter colonial mentalities, ‘relation’ as that which determines the substantive contents of this process, and ‘poetics’ as a transformative and emancipatory medium to represent this new form of decoloniality.12 In Glissant’s work however, these concepts never exist in mutual exclusivity to each other, but perpetually intertwine and are continuously modified depending on the theoretical context within which Glissant’s thinking of difference emerges. Stability is not an intrinsic feature of Glissantian concepts. As Ann Laura Stoler writes, stability does not form an ‘a priori attribute of concepts’ but is construed as such through a grammar of comparison and commensurability.13 Glissant wards of any certainty that concepts might pose, offering a conceptual make-up that disrupts, questions and remakes what had previously been taken to be self-evident.

10Concepts form a web of relationalities that realise their meaning through boundless movement. A Glissantian concept acts in concert with other concepts, accumulating the force of its meaning by being in constant relation. Most importantly, this relationality does not act on concepts in a manner that makes them either reducible or separable, for within Glissant’s poetic world, replacing one concept with another ‘changes the elements composing it, and consequently, the resulting relationship’.14 Taking seriously the potential of critique to not only debunk and deconstruct, but also to affirm and invent, Glissant re-opens the starting point of thinking politically. By prolonging and privileging movement, Glissant forwards a technique of critique that de-territorialises itself by positioning itself within movement, and in turn sets the terrain for a radical politics of and for difference. This is a new mode of politics which by cultivating disparate modalities of relation crafts a poetic uprising against the very roots of conventional reason and its related order of rationality.

Translation

11To the extent that scholars have engaged with Glissant and his concepts, his work is often divided into different periods.15 Some, such as Peter Hallward and Nick Nesbitt, have lamented that Glissant’s early work on alienation which was predominantly characterised by a radical politics of self-determination, gives way in his later work to a somewhat aimless, apolitical and banal universality.16 Others, such as Neil Roberts and Robbie Shilliam, even while self-avowedly retrieving the productive aspects of his work, end up provincialising Glissant by primarily situating him as an Antillean and Caribbean thinker.17 Throughout this paper, I question both this division of Glissant’s work and the relegation of Glissant to the status of a theorist only of and for the Caribbean. Instead, I argue that while its mode of expression might change, Glissant’s work retains its politicality throughout, and that his insights reverberate across the Caribbean. But what fuels this politicality is not secure foundations and heroes, but a form of reflexivity which leads Glissant to constantly dwell on questions, reposing them, without ever fully solving them. The methodological challenge then is to clarify his work without isolating the unity, flux, and evolving relationalities defining his work. To this end, rather that treating the structure of Glissant’s work as steadily yielding to some kind of definitive conclusion, I read and analyse his texts within the socio-political framework of the Caribbean while simultaneously rending his work as meriting philosophical analysis beyond the Caribbean.

12In what follows, I want to treat the different philosophical concepts that Glissant works with as themes which resonate, conjoin and cross-link with each other. I want to propose further that these linkages constitute performative acts of counter-meaning that can be read generatively through the optic of translations. Importantly, I don’t approach translation here in its most common, intralingual sense, as the transfer of meaning between different languages, but as a vertiginous method of wandering, which emphasises the always negotiated, relational and transformative dimension of translating. More concretely, I follow Talal Asad’s suggestion that ‘a straight line isn’t always the most useful way to explore things because it assumes that the shortest way to it from the starting point is always the best’.18 In this paper, therefore, I neither intend to be comprehensive nor exhaustive, but instead move in an open and speculative manner, purposefully employing translations in a fragmentary, and at times suggestive tone. Importantly, I repeat things with the Glissantian belief that ‘it is through repeating things that one begins to glimpse the emergence of something new.’19

Errant Translations

13Throughout this paper, I employ different translation strategies for exploring the philosophies of Glissant. While the analysis that proceeds is primarily rooted in textual exposition, each act of translation frames Glissant with companion discourses. Thus, the reading I propose here does not conform to any form of exegetical loyalty, but instead proceeds through contrast, juxtaposition, and opposition in order to create new modalities of reading Glissant within the interstices of the text itself. Rather than frame this paper through conventional chapters with neatly ordered beginnings, middles and conclusions which to my imagination quite often ends up being too tidy, too restrictive, and too formalistic, I adopt a style of writing that is anarchic, open, and I hope a little unsettling. In the course of my writing, I often take detours which will appear complex, erratic and opaque. I will also revisit themes, modifying them as I work my way through the different expositions: this is my way of reading Glissant. The following four chapters are composed of and by a translation each, while the conclusion follows the style of a self-reflexive discussion written with Glissant. Adding another thread, the paintings, photographs and maps presented throughout are meant as guides, and are not meant to illustrate the text that precedes, proceeds, or accompanies them, but as provocations, presenting another story alongside the text.

14Foregrounding the recent discovery of unmarked graves in Canada, the first chapter works with Glissant’s figure of the Caribbean archipelago to offer new ways of thinking about the spatiality of thought. I propose reading Glissant’s archipelagic thinking as a spatiotemporal translation of an ongoing and ruinous existence which reorients processes of meaning-making by uprooted populations through geography and geopolitics of space. In particular, I argue that this mode of thinking in contradistinction to continental thought which is systemic is best characterised through a Caribbean vocabulary of ambiguity, proliferation and effervescence. With the ‘archipelago’ as my interpretative frame, I take up the ontological question of ‘being’ in the next chapter, probing into how the New World experience of slavery alters concepts of knowing, acting, thinking and creating. Reading Deleuze and Guattari’s category of the ‘rhizome’ against itself and through the Glissantian inspired notion of the ‘Creole’, I put forward a (mis)translation of being as an unpredictable process of becoming which renders any enunciation of ‘roots’ as ethically and epistemologically suspect. In the third chapter, tracing a lineage of intellectual critique from Aimé Césaire to Frantz Fanon, I turn my attention towards a contextual and intertextual translation of intellectual revolt as it manifests within a Martinican genealogy of decolonial critique. More specifically, anchoring Aimé Césaire’s Return to My Native Land as a crucial precursor to both Fanon and Glissant, I show the ways in which the ramifications of Fanon’s decolonial praxis are articulated more fully by Glissant through his Caribbean and Creole inspired notion of ‘relation’. While what ties the first three chapters together is translation, even though the sense of translation is not always the same (nor direct) in each instance, the fourth chapter explores the limits of translation. Exploring this impasse from my own disciplinary vantage point, I engage with a reading of scholarship within and beyond postcolonial global thought seeking to counter translations of difference. Working through the critical and postcolonial interventions of Dipesh Chakrabarty and Marisol de la Cadena, I articulate what it might mean to think of difference when it is not summarily translatable. Building on this discussion, and drawing on Glissant’s concept of ‘opacity’, I forward a poetics of difference, highlighting the always incomplete, partial, and inconclusive movement of difference. In lieu of a conclusion which recapitulates what is already an always errant argument, I stage an encounter between Glissant and myself, considering where Glissant might lead us. Conceptualised as a political-theoretical reflection, I recursively engage with Glissant to render his work consistent with our socio-political objectives in the present, while conjuring new Glissantian inspired futures to lay claim to.