SITES OF RELATION AND “TOUT-MONDE”

Abstract

This essay tracks the movement in Édouard Glissant’s work from thinking relationality as creolisation to Relation as such, to a globalised sense of cultural contact and transformation he calls tout-monde. This movement is informed by the critical meaning of the Caribbean as a historical and memorial experience, figured as the archipelago, and governed by chaotic mixture. Chaotic mixture, which is Glissant’s preoccupation from his earliest work forward, is generated by the Caribbean as a crossroads of the world; the slave trade, then colonialism, brought irreconcilable yet fecund cultural dynamics to the archipelago and produced creolised forms of culture. What is the significance of these forms of culture? What theoretical lessons are borne by these forms? In the late work, Glissant extends his conception of creolisation, which is initially an internal characteristic of the Caribbean, into the thought of tout-monde. Tout-monde names an aggressive, future-oriented imperative to put global cultures in contact and to draw on the productive chaos that comes from that contact. A poetics of the whole world.

Keywords:

• Glissant
• creolisation
• relation
• tout-monde
• chaos

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Hallward’s argument in Absolutely Postcolonial (and elsewhere) is as much an objection to Deleuzian thinking generally as it is a critique of Glissant’s work and appropriation of that thinking. What Hallward objects to in this Deleuzian turn, an objection echoed in Chris Bongie’s Friends and Enemies: The Scribal Politics of Post/Colonial Literature and Nick Nesbitt’s Caribbean Critique: Antillean Critical Theory from Toussaint to Glissant, is Glissant’s eschewal, in his later work, of dialectical thinking and the tension such thinking builds around negation. Dialectics draws out the antithetical work of anticolonial struggle – it is the sort of work found in Frantz Fanon’s political writings most emphatically but also that of Aimé Césaire and others in the mid-century anticolonial moment. Nesbitt juxtaposes Glissant’s later work, characterised as “Caribbean expressive corporealism,” with the “Caribbean materialist dialectics” of Toussaint, Césaire, and Fanon (232 ff.). Part of my argument in this essay is that the cultural politics of Relation disrupts what Nesbitt calls the “structuration of social reality” (245), but does so, pace Fanon (and Nesbitt, by way of critique), without reifying the notion of nation.

Lorna Burns’s documentation of Glissant’s account of the negative inside the totality of Relation in her Contemporary Caribbean Writing and Deleuze: Literature between Postcolonialism and Post-Continental Philosophy offers, to my mind, a convincing reply to this division of Glissant’s thinking into an early dialectical period and later non-dialectical exploration of tout-monde and Relation (see especially 123 ff.).

2 It is interesting and important to note that Caribbean Discourse appears within about a year of Deleuze and Guattari’s Milles Plateaux, Glissant’s source for theorising the Caribbean rhizome. And there is a longer story to be told here about how the notion of Caribbeanness in Caribbean Discourse draws on the same thought as does the language of rhizome, but Glissant’s emphatic engagement with Deleuze and Guattari to my mind really becomes a feature of his thought in Poetics of Relation and after, especially when one considers the coextensive notions of nomad and chaos, both of which figure so prominently in the cultural politics of the later work. For me, this turn toward the language of rhizome and nomad clarifies, rather than transforms, the earlier work on Antillanité and related concepts, while also signifying a shift toward the poetic as a site of political struggle.

3 I have in mind here the abject landscape that dominates descriptions in the opening of Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, the Afro-pessimism of Black Skin, White Masks that inheres in Fanon’s ontology of the racist colonial world, and of course Naipaul’s famous remark in The Middle Passage that “nothing was created” in the West Indies (27).

4 In this sense, I think Glissant’s oeuvre has an important thread of continuity that allows differing emphasis, from the sorts of things Hallward, Bongie, and similar critics identify with questions of nation (a preoccupation in the early work) to the cultural openness and rhizomatic model of relation (the later work), rather than decisive breaks and ruptures. Put another way, Les Indes tells a long story about how the colonial embeds within it the very terms of both the anticolonial (pain, exploitation, comparison, the inferiority complex) and the postcolonial (the open Plantation, the mixture of word and image, memory and history as creative space). Framing Glissant’s work in terms of the mid-century black Atlantic moment brings this embeddedness into clearer focus.

5 It is worth citing here the long meditation on the role of creolisation in Glissant’s work in Alain Ménil’s Les Voies de la créolisation: essai sur Édouard Glissant. While focused nearly exclusively on Glissant’s later work, Ménil’s political and biographical details demonstrate a deep connection between engagements with the cultural work (or threat, really) of departmentalisation and theorising Relation, creolisation, and the like.

6 Cited in Wiedorn, Think Like an Archipelago 13. I have used Wiedorn’s translation of the French in this quotation.