Tilling Topoi within the Creole Garden

ABSTRACT

This article reroutes the more radical tendrils of the commonplace by pursuing Christa J. Olson’s call for questioning the “terrain of rhetoric.” We ask: What if commonplaces and the commonality they entrench are not required for banding together in community? By thinking with Édouard Glissant’s Creole garden, we rework the commonplace as common place, which conceives a place that welcomes difference without requiring common ground. To articulate the possibilities of Glissant’s common place for rhetorical invention, we demonstrate its movement with examples of marronage in the southern Louisiana Territory of the United States. Marronage helps us to think how the Creole garden gathers the world’s thoughts to “illustrate the immeasurable diversity of the world,” thus founding a rhetoric that resists even as it relates to settler colonialisms and racial capitalisms (Treatise). This article demonstrates how the terrain of rhetoric may be limited by the pursuit of/for common ground.

KEYWORDS:

• Common place
• commonplace
• Glissant
• marronage
• opacity
• topoi

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Nathan Stormer for his conversation and encouragement, Jenny Rice for her editorial guidance, and the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback that helped to improve this essay.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).