Edouard Glissant 1928 – 2011

Edouard Glissant was a Martinican philosopher, novelist, and poet, one of the founding figures of Caribbean philosophy, and the most original theorist of creolization in late-twentieth-century thought. The Poetics of Relation reframed the modern history of the Atlantic as the long emergence of a relational consciousness in which the singular and the multiple, the rooted and the errant, are no longer in opposition. Caribbean Discourse and Treatise on the Whole-World extended his analysis to the political and aesthetic implications of creole identity, and made him one of the most influential voices in contemporary postcolonial and decolonial thought.

Édouard Glissant was born at Sainte-Marie in Martinique in September 1928 and educated at the Lycée Schoelcher in Fort-de-France, where Aimé Césaire had recently taught. He studied philosophy and ethnology at the Sorbonne and the Musée de l'Homme in Paris and took his doctorate at the Sorbonne in 1953 under Jean Wahl. With Paul Niger he founded the Front Antillo-Guyanais in 1959; the movement was banned by de Gaulle in 1961 and Glissant placed under house arrest. From the mid-1960s he ran the Institut Martiniquais d'Études at Fort-de-France, edited the UNESCO Courier in Paris in the 1980s, and from 1995 until his death held the Distinguished Professorship of French at the City University of New York Graduate Center.

His novels include La Lézarde (1958, Prix Renaudot), Le Quatrième Siècle (1964), and Tout-monde (1993). His principal essays are Le Discours antillais (Caribbean Discourse, 1981), Poétique de la Relation (Poetics of Relation, 1990), Introduction à une poétique du divers (1996), Traité du Tout-Monde (1997), La Cohée du Lamentin (2005), and Philosophie de la Relation (2009).

Glissant proposed an 'antillanité' against both French metropolitan universalism and the Africa-centred négritude of Césaire, theorised créolisation as the open-ended encounter and unpredictable transformation of cultures, defended the 'right to opacity' of every irreducible singularity, and named the contemporary global condition Tout-Monde, an archipelago of relations rather than a hierarchical totality. He died in Paris in February 2011.