The Planetary Cultural Politics of Édouard Glissant

Abstract

This article explores the lessons for antiracism provided by Édouard Glissant’s philosophy of language. The late Martinican scholar (1928–2011) writes extensively about language in correspondence to core concepts in his thought, in particular Relation, opacity and the Whole-World. Through a reading of his essays, poems and novels, I argue that Glissant’s writing poses an ontological question about language which allows us to rethink our relationships to each other and, as consequence, the dispositions necessary for collective struggle. The move towards the Whole-World, in his later work, speaks to wider debates on planetary interdependence and relies on a multilingual reimagination of the common places where we are all implicated in the task of resisting oppression.

Keywords

antiracism Édouard Glissant multilingualism opacity Relation the planetary Whole-World

Introduction: Knowing What We All Mean

Danny Graft:

You ever get that feeling

People just ain’t getting what you’re saying, like?

Just your words, like, your gestures and all that, like

They just don’t work you out, know what I mean?

Jonny Dutch:

Yeah I know what you mean, bruv

It’s at that point you gotta switch it up a little bit

May be give them a different language or something

What d’you reckon? Yeah? [conversation trails off and becomes indistinct]

(‘Know what I mean?’ by Noudelmann and The Manor ft Emma Benitah, 2016)

This intro to the track ‘Know what I mean?’, by The Manor, is an ode to the unruly and redemptive possibilities of belonging to a multicultural convivial culture.¹ The question of language, and needing new ways to communicate (to work each other out), underscores the shifting dynamics of power and interdependence that the track goes on to explore. This is emphasised, in part, by the hook (contributed by Benitah in French), but more broadly through the serious playfulness of the intersubjective and ethnically heterogeneous connections that the artists describe forging with each other.

I am borrowing this urgent idea of needing to know what we all mean as a way into this piece about the late Martinican intellectual and writer Édouard Glissant (1928–2011), and the particular commitment to language that invests his body of work. Over the course of his life’s work Glissant consistently sought to connect language – its use within an unequal power dynamic, its symbolic purpose, and transformations over time – to the legacy of colonialism and in anticolonial struggles for liberation.

This philosophical interest in the relationship between language, language users, their local context and the wider world connects with a number of postcolonial thinkers, including Bennett’s (1966) efforts to elevate Jamaican language and identity (Morris, 2014; Ramazani, 2009); Bhabha’s (2004: 121–31) concern with mimicry as both a strategy of colonial control and its own undoing; and Hall’s (2004, 2021b) reflections on articulation and hybridity as the transformative core of ideological systems and social relations.

However, Glissant’s philosophy of language has not yet come to the attention of sociolinguistics in relation to topics including colonialism (Ashcroft, 2001; Greenblatt, 1991; Rampton and Harris, 2003; Smitherman, 1985), nationhood/community (Pratt, 1987; Rampton, 1990), or ‘superdiversity’ (Arnaut et al., 2016; Rampton and Holmes, 2019; Rampton et al., 2018). Nor are Glissant’s ideas about language foregrounded within the analyses of racism and anticolonialism that draw inspiration from his work (Gilroy, 1993; Lowe and Manjapra, 2019; McKittrick, 2021; Simone, 2016; Vergès, 2001).

Language – and particularly multilingualism – is imbricated with the core concepts of ‘Relation’, ‘opacity’ and the ‘Whole-World’² that his work is known for in the black radical tradition. Relation speaks to ways of belonging in the world that emerge from a struggle over the meaning of human interdependence. Glissant describes Relation as planetary and multilingual, emerging chaotically within the creolised cultures that reconstituted themselves in the wake of colonialism. It works by remaining opaque and so protecting itself from oppressive scrutiny: the ‘penetrable opacity’ of Relation, he argues, is non-negotiable in ‘a world in which one exists, or agrees to exist, with and among others’ (Glissant, 1997 [1990]: 14).

Multilingualism, Relation and opacity are woven together in Glissant’s writing to offer ways of rethinking the nature of identity, relationships, and the possibilities of coalition at the local and planetary scale. Although Glissant writes extensively about language, the object of his enquiry is culture rather than language specifically; and, likewise, this is not an article about language for language’s sake. Rather, I pose an ontological question, focusing on Glissant’s philosophy of language to capture the ways of relating to each other (not ways of being) that Glissant contours.

This speaks to the need for antiracist formations that are about relationships: not so much the question of who we are, but of what we need to do for each other.³ In a context where coalitional politics – across different struggles and identities, at local, national and global scales – are required to undo oppression (Dabiri, 2021; Di Chiro, 2008; Olaloku-Teriba, 2018: 115–19), I argue that the interconnections of multilingual Relation offer vital insights into the dispositions of struggle through which we might come together and win.

Glissant’s early work, on national liberation in the Caribbean, shifts in focus later in his life to consider political action at the planetary scale through the development of the Whole-World concept. In this expanded context multilingual Relation offers a political response to oppressive power that is everyone’s responsibility. He sees this as the main arena for a cultural politics through which domination can be overturned (Britton, 2009; Nesbitt, 2013). This article proceeds by examining Glissant’s meditations on language and culture in his essays, poetry and novels, presenting them in three interrelated phases that map onto this change in focus: from the Caribbean, to an emphasis on diaspora, to finally open up to the implications of the planetary.

Creole, Languages of Compromise, and a Metalinguistic Caribbean Landscape

Caribbean Discourse, Glissant’s (1981) first major theoretical work, starts with a meditation on language ‘in situation’ (Dash, 1989: xxi) as a tool of both domination and resistance. The essay is not only about but, more specifically, speaks from, the Caribbean landscape and its history to outline a particular perspective on struggle. This problematic is outlined in the Introduction, where Glissant explains that the Middle Passage led to an, ‘intimidated word. For we are habituated to the detour where the thing that is said remains all coiled up inside itself’. And yet in the next paragraph he asserts that this is, nonetheless, a ‘necessary word. Inflexible and fractured. Emerging from the abyss, with its bones sticking out’ (Glissant, 1981: 28).⁴

Glissant is concerned with how language is connected to the recovery of a painful history in the Caribbean, and how that informs people’s capacity for action in the present. Under transatlantic slavery the deliberate separation of people who spoke the same language aimed to suppress the regular fomentation of insurrections (Hartman, 2007: 91–7; Smitherman, 1985: 5–8). In between these overtly revolutionary moments, disguised forms of rebellion were plotted, in coded communications, becoming a resistance tactic that Glissant (1981) refers to as ‘detour’ (pp. 48–9).

The ramifications of this imposed silencing and hidden resistance are a core theme in Glissant’s (2001 [1964]) novel The Fourth Century. The book opens with a lengthy discussion between its two main characters, Papa Longouè and Mathieu Béluse, struggling to find a language through which to articulate their relationship to the past and the current political situation in Martinique. They ‘defer the moment when one of them would have to “think aloud” some word, some sentence, a word that would mark a step along the way’ (Glissant, 2001 [1964]: 4).

An omniscient third person narrator then goes on to fluently recount the 18th-century arrival of the Rose Marie, the ship on which their ancestors were brought forcibly to the island, describing the process through which they were dominated through the loss of their language (Glissant, 2001 [1964]: 44–55). At one point the captain of the Rose Marie declares, ‘no, no they have forgotten their origins, this sign no longer has any power over them! I alone have power here, yes, I alone!’ (Glissant, 2001 [1964]: 44).

As the plot unfolds, and people gain rebellious agency against their captors, the hubris of such a statement becomes apparent: ‘All this time they were talking over our heads we put out the nets we made to catch their voices’ (Glissant, 2001 [1964]: 70). This has implications for Papa Longouè and Béluse in the present, suggesting that discourse can build up to other, not necessarily verbal, political action (Britton, 1994):

far into the distant future an unknown, underground world was developing, one that was still hesitant but that in the end, after the mute absence and clandestine blood, would suddenly emerge between the blades of earth and rise above the night of shivering. (Glissant, 2001 [1964]: 71)

In this earlier period, Glissant’s thinking about language is defined by a tension between the official, written, French of Martinican institutions and the unofficial, spoken Creole of the streets. Creole, Glissant (1981) argues in Caribbean Discourse, is, ‘the first geography of detour’ (pp. 48–9). He is proposing Creole usage as part of a political project that attempts to turn French inside out, creating opportunities for camouflage and evasion.

This reading of Creole usage reflects that of other scholars of language and subaltern resistance, who have written about forms of linguistic veiling and playfulness – pretending not to understand or know how to speak, word games like ‘the dozens’ – as ways of challenging power and creating sanctuaries for easing sorrow and rage (Scott, 1990; Smitherman, 1985). There are also parallels with Bennett’s (1966: 218–19) valorisation of Jamaican language as a consciousness-raising project (Morris, 2014).⁵ Bennett’s suggestion that scholars should be more interested in the ‘language of the “common man”’ (cited in Morris, 2014: 115) is reflected in the techniques of talking of poor, indigenous and black folk in the American South that Glissant (1996) focuses on in his analysis of Faulkner’s novels (p. 265). Faulkner’s meticulous attention to everyday talk represents, for Glissant (1996), an openness to the possibilities of a difficult but intercommunal Relation (pp. 304–5).

At the same time, Glissant thinks of the use of Creole detour as politically limiting. Martinique’s postcolonial assimilation into France as a Département d’outre mer denied the island autonomy over production and led to ongoing dependence on the former coloniser. This is emblematised by the island’s over-reliance on imported goods, and the loss of traditional forms of work which were replaced by the tourist industry (Glissant, 1981: 50–68; Nesbitt, 2013: 941–2).⁶ Under these postcolonial relations of force, labour does not lead to struggle but only to greater dependency.

The persistence of Creole as a street vernacular shows it to be both a vital force and, at the same time, inadequate for facing material concerns because it constantly recalls the ongoing imposition of the former coloniser’s culture, legal and political structures, and economic system (Dash, 1989: xx). Its use is ambivalent, or split, in the way Bhabha (2004) explains mimicry, enabling a disavowal of racist ideas through an obscured counter-appeal that remains embedded in forms of fetichisation of colonial culture (pp. 129–31). Hall (2021a), too, argues that Creole use in the Caribbean is an alternative process to cultural domination, but one that still indicates an ongoing power relation with white supremacy (pp. 147–8).

In a similar vein to his classmate Frantz Fanon, Glissant’s focus on Creole illustrates how productivity, creativity, labour and language are all connected to each other (Dash, 1989: xxii, xxiv). Fanon theorised that decolonisation would lead to a corresponding decolonisation of all languages, including the coloniser’s language (Mercier, 2023). However, in Caribbean Discourse Glissant does not delineate any clear way of translating changes in cultural production into political action (Nesbitt, 2013: 938–46).

Bongie (1998) and Hallward’s (2001) critiques of Glissant’s work take opposing views as to the political tenability of the position set out in Caribbean Discourse. Bongie sees Glissant’s belief in the struggle for national independence as an ideological error that is no longer valid in a culturally pluralistic and churning postmodernity. Hallward finds Glissant’s earlier engagement with the specifics of anticolonial struggle in Martinique to be politically concrete and unambiguous – unlike Glissant’s (2001 [1964]) later work, which he regards as depoliticised.

Britton points out that there is a great deal of ambiguity in Caribbean Discourse because Glissant believed the chances of Martinican independence to be virtually impossible at this time. He emphasises the value of detour, as a transitional modality for resistance, because it is the only option under severe constraint in this historical moment (Britton, 2009: 6–7). Caribbean Discourse charts a series of failed political events in Martinique, setting out a situation where the hegemony of the coloniser operates at every level, seemingly with no solution. Glissant’s writing is not prescriptive, unlike Fanon: he is seeking to describe the Antilles as they really are (Drabinski, 2019: 159). However, Caribbean Discourse is a profoundly anticolonial text, albeit one that is written as a lament that starts with the ambiguous heading ‘starting from a blocked situation’ (Glissant, 1981: 13; Nesbitt, 2013: 940).⁷

Later on in the book, Glissant resituates the problem as a conflict between monolingualism and multilingualism. In a chapter devoted specifically to language, Glissant (1981) defines monolingualism as the historic force through which nationalism imposes itself, proposing that nation-state practices, racism and western modernity are interlinked processes which rotate around the question of language (pp. 548–9). He argues for a multilingualism which frees people from linguistic subjection through a ‘language of compromise’ where both vernacular Creole and vehicular French can exist together, just as people can come together across multiple boundaries of difference (Glissant, 1981: 553–61, 794–6). In the face of nationalistic and Eurocentric concepts like ‘native speaker’ and ‘mother tongue’, this insists upon the messy reality of spoken languages that transcend borders and refuse assimilation and erasure (Pratt, 1987; Rampton, 1990).

Glissant’s language of compromise is already present in the experimental style and multiple neologisms of Caribbean Discourse. However, it manifests most particularly in his poetry, where we are presented with a postcolonial vision of the Caribbean through marginalised and nonverbal speech forms proliferating and relating to each other in a dizzying kaleidoscope of memory and landscape. As Dash (1989) argues (pp. xxxviii–xxxix), the landscape itself offers a ‘metalanguage’ through which ‘a new grammar of feeling and sensation is externalised’ (pp. xxv–xxvi). Glissant’s landscapes are not simply being described as a way of reformulating a relationship to the past but, rather, they are another character telling the history of the place.

See, for example, the following line from ‘November’, published in Riveted Blood, Glissant’s (2005) first collection of poems: ‘The final mission was to mislead the word through the rich deafness of scorched Tropics. Like a summation of memory-intoxicated fruits in the mute desire of the banana trees’ (p. 7). Here language and landscape are tangled together, unfurling into novel creations and relationships, showing us how words may fail a moment of crisis, or may perhaps forge some new path that brings us all somewhere better.

In later writing Glissant moves away from an exclusive focus on struggles for national liberation in the Caribbean to consider the ways of being, relating and struggling together that the Caribbean experience gifts to the world at large. Ideas about multilingualism, creolisation, and Glissant’s notions of Relation and opacity emerge from a conviction that the Caribbean sets the scene for migratory flows and a cultural synchrony that take precedence over borders and ethnocentric fixity. The implications of this shift will be explored in the coming sections.

From Creole to Multilingual Creolisation and Relation in the Caribbean and Beyond

All cultures are transformed as a result of postcolonial migration in the second half of the 20th century, and Relation is the way in which the resulting meaning-making struggles over belonging and entitlement are explained by Glissant. This concept develops into a philosophy, with ‘quasi-sacred status’, elevating it beyond any simplistic understanding of human intersubjectivity (Mercier and Taweel, 2022: 147–8). The multilingual forms of talk that erupt from such a conjuncture become a particular sort of political response to oppressive power, in a process that Glissant describes as a ‘counterpoetics’ and, later, as a ‘poetics-of-language-in-itself’.

Hall (2004) argues that ‘cultural identity’ within a diaspora should be theorised with attention to both past and future, as it is a matter of ‘being’ as well as ‘becoming’ (pp. 234–6). He proposes a ‘conception of “identity” which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity’ (Hall, 2004: 244). This notion of identity that lives ‘with and through’ hybridity elucidates Glissant’s uses of creolisation to develop the concept of Relation. Creolisation is presented in his later work as erupting from the postcolonial movement of, and encounters between, people in a diaspora. Rather than marking a political impasse in a postmodern reality (Bongie, 1998), Glissant’s ongoing attachment to cultural origin, in its manifold creolised mutations across time and space, forms the basis for an understanding of identities that are in non-hierarchical Relation to each other, without being limited to a particular national or geographical context (Vergès, 2001: 179).

Bennett’s poems about the Jamaican diaspora, in particular those relating to language use, reveal further insights about the vital connection between a valorisation of both origins and a diasporic sensibility in forming an overall politics (Ramazani, 2009: 55). Her humorous teasing about the privileging of Eurocentric language ideals – for example through an attempt at speaking French that causes someone to ‘Screw up me mout an roll me ‘eye/ An foreign up me tongue’ (Bennett, 1966: 209), as in the poem “Gay Paree”⁸ – is counterposed by her assertion that mass migration to the ‘Mother Country’ is a reverse colonisation that shows the bravery and tenacity of the Jamaican people (Bennett, 1966: 179–80).

In his second major essay, Poetics of Relation, Glissant (1997 [1990]) writes about there being two forms of historically-inflected identity: ‘root identity’ and ‘Relation identity’. The violent imposition of monolingualism, that was linked to the nation-building projects and imperialist endeavours of western modernity, has generated particular forms of ‘root identity’, founded on myth and ratified through the possession of land. On the other hand, a non-reductive and non-universalising relationship towards difference has also emerged at the same time. This, ‘Relation identity’ (as he calls it), is linked to the conscious and chaotic experience of everyday transcultural interaction that is not interested in a rooted legitimacy. He writes, instead, that it ‘gives-on-and-with’ (Glissant, 1997 [1990]: 143–4). As McKittrick (2021) suggests, in her engagement with Glissant’s work, this notion of giving ‘on-and-with’ (which Glissant formulated as a neologism, ‘donner-avec’) calls us to ‘work out how different types of voices relate to each other and open up unexpected and surprising ways to think about liberation, knowledge, history, race, gender, narrative, and blackness’ (pp. 50, 69–70, 117, 184).

Hall’s (2021b) use of articulation – as a metaphor to describe how separate elements with different identities and conditions of existence relate to each other, as much through their differences as their similarities (pp. 220–1) – shines further light on how Glissant’s Relation identity can be operationalised to analyse the ideological field around race and class in particular places and moments. This emerges from an Althusserian reading of the uneven, non-sequential relationship between base and superstructure in Marx: where each level is autonomous but determined by power dynamics, leading to the formation of social consciousness (Hall, 1977: 48–56, 69). Drawing on Gramsci, Hall explains that ideologies are ‘inter-discursive’, creating fractures through which new conceptions of the world are generated. Thus, culture is a ‘historically-shaped terrain’ achieved through the ‘articulation and dis-articulation of ideas’ (Hall, 1996: 434).

If everyday spoken language is the interactive totality of what makes up Relation, then multilingual Relation arises as a new social consciousness out of an articulated discursive process wrought through by power. The linguistic creations that spring from Relation generate innovative speaking practices, or innovative relationships to speaking, that tell us about processes of expansion, migration and change (Glissant, 1997 [1990]: 25, 94, 104). This Relation also does not happen smoothly or seamlessly but in conditions of immense turbulence and friction:

Creolization carries along then into the adventure of multilingualism and into the incredible explosion of cultures. But the explosion of cultures does not mean they are scattered or mutually diluted. It is the violent sign of their consensual, not imposed, sharing. (Glissant, 1997 [1990]: 34)

At the same time, Glissant (1997 [1990]) writes that Relation can only function through an acceptance of cultural difference as opaque (p. 90). The notion of opacity, which sits at the heart of his philosophy of language, asserts that reciprocal and coalitional transcultural encounters are not the result of translation or clarification, but emerge through an acceptance of the untranslatable, unresolvable and ever-changing differences between us (Noudelmann and Britton, 2013: 870–2). Sometimes, this means not speaking, and adjusting our bodily rhythms to the surrounding chaos (Simone, 2016: 184). Sometimes, this means that communication is partial, incomplete, arduous, and constantly shifting along a continuum of positive and negative (Dawes, 2020).

The notion of opacity poses a direct challenge to Eurocentric ideas about language and communication. The great temptation for colonial explorers, struggling with cross-cultural communication, was to claim that they fully understood and were understood by the other. This assumption was based on an idea of the other as a blank slate onto which the European imposed their own cultural understandings. Struggles to accept the reality of linguistic opacity in these first encounters – i.e. the inability to understand or fully understand – led to lethal violence (Greenblatt, 1991: 96–7).

Glissant’s notion of an opaque Relation has important implications for understanding the contemporary stakes of racism. In fact, he insists on opacity being a fundamental right that sits at the heart of Relation (Glissant, 1997 [1990]: 190). McKittrick describes this as, ‘a way of knowing and belonging capaciously and generously’ that dismantles racial classification through a process of ‘unwriting’. The experience of rupture caused by the Middle Passage produces a ‘nonworld’, which she explains as being a ‘system of knowledge that cannot be proved’. The opaque or ‘unknowing’ becomes a profound cultural bequeathment, a lesson about how we should seek to live with each other (McKittrick, 2021: 31–4).

The claim that opaque multilingual Relation is a ‘counterpoetics’, or a ‘poetics of language-in-itself’, returns us to the much-debated question of Glissant’s political commitment to anticolonialism (Bongie, 1998; Britton, 2009; Hallward, 2001; Nesbitt, 2013). Counterpoetics came out of Glissant’s experiences at the Congress of Black Writers and Artists at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1956. Glissant argued that the Congress only happened because black artists had first expressed their concerns in aesthetic discourse and poetics. These forms of poetic protest laid the groundwork for a major world meeting of politically active intellectuals to be organised. From this, Glissant developed a sense of poetics as a political ‘lever’ (Bojsen, 2013: 1000, 1007).

Similar to Creole as detour in Caribbean Discourse, counterpoetics is the predominantly oral and verbal strategy of communities whose means of expression have been constrained, partial and contradictory. Based on an understanding of a necessary engagement with the language of the oppressor, counterpoetics, like Bhabha’s (2004) notion of ‘mimicry’ (pp. 121–31), both refuses assimilation but, at the same time, abrogates and assimilates to produce something radically different (Britton, 1999: 30–4).

For Glissant, counterpoetics represents a ‘transitional stage’ on the path towards a more expansive planetary goal, illustrating a move from a focus on subjectivity, as constituted through language practices, to an understanding of creolisation as a point at which languages, at the global scale, will become so diverse that it will be no longer be possible to speak one language that is ‘clearly demarcated from all the others’. This will be ‘a poetics of language-in-itself’, where language is not interested in connecting with its own surroundings but wants only to expand, migrate, change (Britton, 1999: 48–52). It is to this idea about poetic languages and political futures at the planetary scale that I turn next.

Poetic Language, Common-Places, and Planetary Futures

From the early 1990s Glissant was writing about the idea of the ‘Whole-World’. The chaotic and unequal creolisation that took place in the context of the slave plantation has now, he urges, become the predominant force, whereas the obsession with purity represented by white supremacy has proved itself a fantasy. As explained in an interview about the concept with the author Patrick Chamoiseau, we end up with a ‘mosaic’ where ‘everybody has impacted everybody’. In each individual Glissant sees the totality of the world residing (Institut du Tout-Monde, 2014).

The Whole-World is not akin to globalisation, which Glissant regards as an inherently unequal force because the complexity posed by multinational economies, US imperialism, and nonlocalised corporations makes it increasingly difficult to plan effective political action against oppressive states (Britton, 2009: 7–9). Nor is it an apolitical ‘field of Related singularities [. . .] of pre-established harmonies’ that, in its ‘equivalences’ and endless circular focus on diversity, precludes the existence of political action by the world’s dispossessed, as argued by Hallward (2001: 123–5). Glissant repeatedly distances himself from both universalist and relativist understandings of the Whole-World, emphasising its chaotic and conflict-prone nature (Noudelmann and Britton, 2013: 870–2).

He writes at the beginning of his Treatise on the Whole-World that, ‘The Whole-World, which is totalizing, is not (for us) total’ (Glissant, 2020a [1997]: 13). It is presented as a paradoxical concept which asserts both totality and, at the same time, the impossibility of anything being total. The Whole-World exists only in fragments (Drabinski, 2019: 168) and projects into the future, undoing colonising forms of place-making and the ruptures caused by the Eurocentric, linear sense of time and space (McKittrick, 2021: 169–83). It can be read as an elaboration of ‘Marx’s “complex unity”’ which ‘operates, instead, on the terrain of articulation’ (Hall, 2021b: 220) through the ‘open, complex and unfinished game’ of identity: the language which speaks back against the homogenising effect of globalisation (Hall, 1991: 19).

In this sense the Whole-World is more similar to planetary conceptualisations of humanity, which emphasise the fraught, complex and interconnected topography upon which collective consciousness comes into being across great distances, and in unexpected chronologies (Arboleda, 2020: 15–16). It finds more ready companionship in the ‘planetary consciousness’ that Gilroy uncovers in his work in the solidarity, consciousness and subjectivity that were brought into being in resistance to the European racial and colonial project (Gilroy, 1993, 2004a: xii, 2004b: 57). Gilroy’s (2018, 2019) argument, in alignment with Glissant’s, is that it is a recognition of each other’s humanity, and a sense of convivial affinity that often prevails, despite – ‘against the odds’ of – the allure of racialised power and ethnic absolutism.

Again, language is the central force through which this ‘shimmering’ and nascent ‘world-wide Relation’ is expressed because multilingualism is the ‘common condition’ of the Whole-World. Glissant (2020a [1997]) writes that:

From now on I write in the presence of the world’s languages. . . . It is one of the modes of the imagination. In the language I use to express myself, and even if it is the only one I possess, I no longer write in a monolingual fashion. (p. 15)

The passionate intensity with which he extols the vitality of the Whole-World signals his conviction that ‘humanity is not yet, but will always have been . . . a conceptual space’ (McKittrick, 2021: 69–70): there are still multiple collectives and coalitions for us to form, and much to fight for. It is through the kind of imagination that we dream up in our ‘common places’ that we can conquer the material oppression that people face (Glissant, 2020a [1997]: 9). The idea of ‘common places’ is not intended as a cliché but as a literal place where ‘the world’s thoughts meet each other’ (Glissant, 2020b [1996]: 19). His attention on language now is not about information exchange, or clever acts of resistance and subterfuge, but on language as the sign of a mutual agreement to enter into Relation, and to act in solidarity with each other. He is not asking us to learn to speak and understand all the world’s languages, reminding us that ‘being-as-Relation’ requires both a radical opening and concurrent safeguarding through the right of opacity (Drabinski, 2019: 162–3; Glissant, 2020a [1997]: 69):

I do not have to ‘understand’ anyone, individual, community, people – i.e. to ‘take them with me’ at the cost of smothering them, of losing them in a boring totality that I would be in charge of – in order to agree to live with them, to build with them, to take risks with them. (Glissant, 2020a [1997]: 17)

Glissant’s writing in this period engages with history as poiesis – an act of combining and forming something that did not previously exist – to become a kind of prophetic work through which the possibility of futurity emerges. Glissant published a novel called Whole-World, at the same time as the Treatise. This novel starts in Italy, described as the ‘sort of country that you can really see and imagine the world’, with ‘all these languages that crash into each other like the crests of infuriated waves’ (Glissant, 1993: 18–19).

In the novel we meet a multiplicity of characters and places, many drawn from Glissant’s other works, who are all drifting towards the Whole-World in a cascade of languages. Mathieu is a Martinican who lives in Paris and finds himself summering with a group of Italians at Vernazza on the Ligurian coast. Despite an admission that his identity has been dominantly forged through his island upbringing, his chapter starts with a reminder that, ‘all the spaces in the world meet each other, right up to the astral plane’. This is followed up by an injunction to refuse to believe in our uniqueness, or any story of being and speaking better than anyone else (Glissant, 1993: 31–5); a statement then counterposed violently by the Italians in his group who seem untroubled by the weight of Italy’s recent history, and the atrocities committed through its colonial project (Glissant, 1993: 36–8).

In Vernazza, Mathieu meets a woman called Amina who appears to switch seamlessly between languages as if she has not grown up in the shadow of a dominant, national or regional language. Amina’s nomadic status, configured as something almost extra-terrestrial, enables her to diagnose and predict the outcome of Mathieu’s apparent malaise as emerging from a ‘problem of relation’, whilst reassuring him that, ‘nothing will happen to you, you are whole in the world’ (Glissant, 1993: 43–9).

In the end, the whole group reunites in Vernazza 30 years after the first holiday. They talk about language and the places they have been in the world over the previous decades. Mathieu gives an account of his experiences speaking different languages, and this builds into a playful debate about the kinds of shock and dissimulation that can be generated through communication – something that they immediately map onto the histories of people’s imbrication with each other in death camps, deserts and factories over the course of the 20th century (Glissant, 1993: 59–69). In this context of sea, sunlight and relaxation they are tracing the outline of all their common places, the painful and alienating ones too, and the way they are positioned in relation to these trajectories.

In Bongie’s (1998) critique, the shuffling between settled and unsettled cultural identities, as well as colonial past and incompletely achieved ‘post/colonial present’, in the novel Whole-World acts as an impediment to a postmodern utopian project of creolised, common ground (pp. 130–3, 159, 186). Hallward’s (2001) contention, instead, is that the novel is one of the most ‘fictional incantations of a borderless world ever written’ (p. 102), in abandonment of a project of national liberation which, in his view, is the ultimate political objective (p. 111). He describes Whole-World as a novel of ‘singular fragments’, where ‘the privileged residents of the Tout-monde are those whose substantial being – displaced, migrant, in-between, hybrid – most immediately, and sufficiently articulates the formal qualities of the singular Tout.’ The ‘prophets of Relation’ are those committed to ceaseless wandering and ‘constant change’ (Hallward, 2001: 111–12).

In my view it is both the novel’s tension between past and future and its ability to sit with the discomfort of wandering, rootlessness and radical openings that best connects it to contemporary global antiracism, most of all in its abolitionist iterations. See, for example, the status given to fictive future imaginaries in the border abolition project set out by Bradley and De Noronha (2022); or the alternative proposals for keeping communities just and accountable to each other in police and prison abolition work (Day and McBean, 2022; Gilmore, 2007; Purnell, 2021). These projects – which are explicitly inspired by the history of abolition – are devoted both to fantasy (to dream up a world that does not yet exist) and also to the material, localised interventions through which this fantasy might eventually, piece by piece, become a lived reality.

It is both a focus on finding a new poetic language for imagining the world as well as an insistence on ‘local action with a global consciousness of Relation’ that is at the heart of Glissant’s articulation of political action in his later writing (Britton, 2009: 9). Glissant’s way of accessing the whole-world’s common places is through a locally-situated poetics that searches for a new language, uncontaminated by past horrors (Dash, 1989: xx–xi). He seeks to create a transcendent ‘symbolic language’ and ‘authentic poetics’ – inspired in part by the visual ‘metalanguage’ of Haitian painting – that is politically generative. The writer ‘transcends spoken languages, written conventions, literary genres, traditional notions of time and space’, and, in so doing, becomes ‘one who forces a language into existence’’ (Dash, 1989: xxiv–xxvi). This transforms the everyday friction through which Relation is spoken into a new kind of epic literary voice fit for the current moment: ‘another word, that exploded, and that on exploding, made Relation, that in circular motion made the Totality, that on being endlessly diffracted finally made the archipelago – or at least the blueprint for how to – with many other locations across the planet’ (Glissant, 1996: 299).

This linguistic quest is key to understanding much of Glissant’s poetry, where words are used incorrectly, pushed to the point of extreme metaphor, and combined in ways that barely make sense. The end goal is not disorder for its own sake but to create a chaos that is natural and meaningful, evoking a unique geography and relationship with history (Humphries, 2005: xi–xxxiv). Glissant’s poetry refuses to fix or systematize meaning and, as such, lends itself to opacity and Relation. This anti-Saussurian, anti-systemic approach to language, where signifiers are not connected to signifieds but only to other signifiers, enables new connections to be made between our different experiences (Britton, 2013: 841–7).

For example, see this verse from ‘The Great Chaoses’ in the poetic collection of the same name:

Passerby, have only chaos

You disinhaled the flesh of words

Leaving no crumb but bone . . .

Like a sword sword. (Glissant, 2005: 234)

Here words become chunks of flailed flesh, leaving us naked, wounded and vulnerable, and where the ensuing chaos is a kind of weapon. This combative line draws us to a final assessment of the planetary cultural politics of Glissant’s approach to language, which I offer below.

Conclusion: What to Do with Babel

Glissant described his legacy as an ‘imaginary’, or ‘the perpetually changing representation of a world structured by unpredictable encounters’ (Noudelmann and Britton, 2013: 869–70). To commit to Glissant’s imaginary means also committing to chaos, creolisation, partiality: to accept the chance that you may not, in the end, understand or be understood; to have faith, and not certainty, that you will hold and be held by your Relation to everyone else.

What journey does this invite us to embark upon? In his poem ‘Relation’ (p. 97), Glissant (2005) informs us that: ‘No one can say with certainty; but everyone attempts the new crossing! The sea is eternal’. How can uncertainty and the eternal sea form the basis for a cultural politics of interpersonal solidarity? This points us back towards the unresolved tension between cultural practice and political action in Glissant’s work, explored across this essay (Bongie, 1998; Britton, 2009; Hallward, 2001; Nesbitt, 2013).

In 1959 Glissant co-founded the separatist group Front Antillo-Guyanais and participated in the writing of a radical anti-colonial text, examining the political, economic and cultural situation of the French Départment d’outre mer. It was immediately banned, and Glissant was also banned from leaving France between 1961 and 1965 (Nesbitt, 2013: 934). He writes, in later life, that he has come to view cultural politics as the main conflict through which domination can be overturned (Glissant, 2020a [1997]: 162). This apparent turn away from an earlier commitment to national liberation leads to accusations that he has withdrawn from active politics, and from the project of decolonisation (Hallward, 2001).

However, Glissant’s explanation of the International Writer’s Parliament, that he helped to set up in Strasbourg in 1993, suggests something else. This was a multilingual event that created a network for writers seeking refuge from persecution in their home countries. Here it became possible both to offer refuge whilst also listening to the writers’ ideas in parallel with ‘the huge entanglement’ of the world (Glissant, 2020a [1997]: 15). In such a project, the future becomes both a political and a poetic endeavour, where a local militancy operates in parallel with a drive to reimagine planetary humanity. There is a ‘dialectical relay’ between culture and politics in Glissant’s thinking which is determinedly not utopian but where the horizon of possibility is ‘analytic’ (Nesbitt, 2013: 937–9). In other words, using logical reasoning, the future realisation of a project of liberation can be held to be true, could be possible, cannot be denied.

I keep coming back to another of Glissant’s lines, this one placed at the beginning of Poetics of Relation, which uses the story about the Tower of Babel, the curse of linguistic confusion placed upon mankind by God in the biblical book of Genesis, to explain the creative and emancipatory potential of multilingual Relation at a planetary scale:

On the other side of the bitter struggles against domination and for the liberation of the imagination, there opens up a multiply-dispersed zone in which we are gripped by vertigo. But this is not the vertigo preceding apocalypse and Babel’s fall. It is the shiver of a beginning, confronted with extreme possibility. It is possible to build the Tower – in every language. (Glissant, 1997 [1990]: 9)

The idea of Babel acts to place communication at the centre of our understanding of racialised modernity, by telling a story about linguistic and cultural difference in the context of great injustice and suffering. Glissant takes a poetic approach to Babel, seeing the experience of being in the presence of all languages as an ongoing enrichment of meaning and collective transformation. The idea of ‘rebuilding the tower – in every language’ allows us to narrate – and join in with – the coming together of desperate, heterogeneous, intrepid and brave people who, faced with the spectre of disposability and death that pervades all around, have courage, because we must.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to greatly thank Professor Ben Rampton and Dr Malcolm James for encouraging me to write about Glissant’s philosophy of language.

ORCID iD

Antonia Lucia Dawes

Notes

Antonia Lucia Dawes is a lecturer and writer based at King’s College London. She works on racism, militarism and cultural theory. Her first book, Race Talk (2020), is about racism and resistance in Naples in southern Italy. Her most recent book, England’s Military Heartland (2025), co-authored with Vron Ware, Mitra Pariyar and Alice Cree, explores what it’s like to live next to a British army base in Wiltshire, England, in an age of perpetual war.

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