Édouard Glissant and the Poetics of Relation

Édouard Glissant (1928–2011), born in Sainte-Marie, Martinique, studied philosophy and ethnography at the Sorbonne in Paris in the late 1940s and early 1950s, where he was influenced by Senghor's and Césaire's négritude while also beginning to move beyond it. His early novel La Lézarde (1958), which won the Prix Renaudot, and his subsequent decades of poetry, fiction, drama, and essays, culminate philosophically in Poétique de la Relation (Poetics of Relation, 1990), the work most closely identified with his mature thought and translated into English by Betsy Wing in 1997. Glissant's central intervention is a critique of what he calls "root identity" (identité racine), the notion, inherited from European nationalist thought, that a people's identity is grounded in a single origin, a fixed territory, and a linear, filiative genealogy — a model Glissant associates with conquest, colonization, and the exclusionary violence of asserting one authentic root against all others.