Patrick Chamoiseau

Edouard Glissant

Manifestes

The collected manifestos of Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau: for a postcolonial response to planetary crisis. Manifestos brings together for the first time in English the manifestos written by Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau between 2000 and 2009. Composed in part in the aftermath of Barack Obama’s election in 2008, the texts resonate with the current context of divided identities and criticisms of multiculturalism. The individual texts grapple with concrete historical and political moments in France, the Caribbean, and North America. Across the manifestos, as well as two collectively signed op-eds, the authors engage with socio-political aspects of climate catastrophe, resource extraction, toxicity, and neocolonialism. Throughout the collection, Glissant and Chamoiseau engage with key themes articulated through their poetic vocabulary, including Relation, globalization, globality (mondialité), anti-universalism, métissage, the tout-monde (“whole-world”) and the tout-vivant (“all-living,” including the relationship of humans to each other and “nature”), créolité and the creolization of the world, and the liberation from community assignations in response to individualism and neoliberal societies. Translated as the first volume in the Planetarities series with Goldsmiths Press, the themes of Manifestos resonate with the planetary as they work in response to contemporary forms of (economic) globalization, western capitalism, identity politics, and urban, digital and cosmic ecosystems, as well as the role of the poet-writer. A distinguishing feature of this publication is its interventional aspect, which prioritizes engaged scholarship and practice while demonstrating the relevance of the poetic in response to the urgencies of planetary crisis.

Manifestos

Poetry International Festival (Rotterdam)

Edouard Glissant, Martinique

Hans Ulrich Obrist

This notebook is Hans Ulrich Obrist's homage to the French author, poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant (1928-2011). Glissant, one of the most influential figures of the French-speaking Caribbean and a pioneer of postcolonial thinking, called attention to "means of global exchange which do not homogenize culture but produce a difference from which new things can emerge." Obrist encountered Glissant at the beginning of his career, through the recommendation of Alighiero Boetti. In his introduction, Obrist creates a multilayered portrait of the intellectual, laying out some of his key concepts: the creolization of the world, "archipelic thought," and the museum as archipelago, as well as utopia. These ideas are explored by Glissant in a selection of title pages of his books with drawings, notations and poetic dedications that are reproduced here in facsimile.

Obrist

Betsy Wing

Poems by the noted Caribbean writer & philosopher that reflect the search for identity & the struggle between memory & forgetting. Poet, playwright, novelist & essayist Edouard Glissant, born in Martinique in 1928 is one of the most important contemporary writers in French. Black Salt collects two decades of Glissant's poetry & makes it available for the first time in English. It is a poetry that is aesthetically distinguished & historically significant, characterized by potent metaphors of local identity. Published in France as Le Sel Noir, the volume brings together in English translation three separate poetry collections from Glissant's early years, Le Sang Rive, Le Sel Noir, & Boises. Read together, these three works embody Glissant's project to develop a Caribbean literature no longer contained by European language. He incorporates conventions of orality & ties the poems concretely to a Martiniquan experience of history & geography/geology, expressing an ongoing search for identity in a struggle between memory & forgetting. From Riveted Blood through Black Salt to Yokes, Glissant can be seen to be developing a poetic instrument that is increasingly stark & increasingly particularized as it undergoes inflections that derive from oral & Creole sources & simultaneously opens to the local landscape, the traditional culture, & the history of Martinique.

Poems

Black Salt

This volume collects and translates--most for the first time--the nine volumes of poetry published by Édouard Glissant, one of the great writers of the twentieth century. The poems bring to life what Glissant calls "an archipela

The Collected Poems of Édouard Glissant

In 1989, the Caribbean writer Edouard Glissant visited Rowan Oak, William Faulkner's home in Oxford, Mississippi. His visit spurred him to write a revelatory book about the work of one of our greatest but still least-understood American writers. "A fascinating way to read Faulkner. . . .[Glissant's] case is nothing less than that, no matter how Faulkner's personal Furies twisted his public speech, Faulkner was a great, world-beating multiculturalist."—Jonathan Levi, Los Angeles Times Book Review "A sharp, challenging, and wholly unique tour of Yoknapatawpha County." —Kirkus Reviews "Passionate. . . . Glissant's prose sometimes vies with Faulkner's for intricacy and evocative nuance." —Scott McLemee, Newsday "Glissant tries to engage Faulkner on many fronts simultaneously, positioning himself as a critic, a fellow artist and as a descendant of slaves. . . He makes a convincing case that Faulkner is not just another 'dead white male author.'"—Scott Yarbrough, Raleigh News & Observer "[An] ambitious and, at times, rambunctious expedition into Yoknapatawpha County." —Christine Schwartz Hartley, New York Times Book Review

Edouard Glissant

Books

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