Glissant and diaspora studies

ABSTRACT

Although an increasingly influential figure in the field of postcolonial studies, Edouard Glissant is not commonly associated with discussions of diaspora-related issues. This article seeks to identify areas of overlap between Glissantian thought and the diaspora studies field. Modern-day Caribbean citizens may not be diasporans in the strict sense of the term, but the legacy of the forced diasporization of Africans via the slave trade is such that the diasporic as a prism lies at the heart of the social history of the Caribbean, and this focus underpinned the work of Glissant throughout his career. In this article, areas of reciprocity are also charted between later Glissantian concepts and a number of key concepts which have been elaborated by diaspora studies theorists since the 1990s.

KEYWORDS:

• Edouard Glissant
• diaspora
• minorities cultures
• language
• opacity
• globalization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Glissant’s account of and counternarrative to contemporary globalization is the focus of my recent monograph (Coombes 2018).

2. Even the Eloge de la créolité (In Praise of Creoleness) (Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant [1988] 1993), a manifesto text for the defence of Creole language and culture, was written in French. It subsequently appeared in a bilingual French-English edition but never in Creole.

3. Former World Bank vice president turned alter-globalization sympathizer Joseph Stiglitz ([2012] 2013) has offered one of the most convincing theoretical accounts of this problem.

4. In June 2019 Pope Francis offered the following acute observation on the subject of the poor today: “Often considered as parasitical of society, the poor are not even forgiven their poverty itself [...]. They are treated like filth.” (Cnews.fr 2019; English translation my own.)

5. Fukuyama (1992) has often been thought of as the theoretical expression of this attitude of mind in the USA in 1990s.

6. The Loi Taubira declaring that slavery had been a crime against humanity was passed in France in 2001, and three years earlier Glissant had signed a declaration alongside Wole Soyinka and Chamoiseau (Glissant, Soyinka, and Chamoiseau 1998) pushing for precisely this type of public acknowledgment. The declaration was entitled Déclaration sur la traite négrière et l'esclavage (Declaration about the Slave Trade and Slavery).

7. Perhaps paradoxically, for all that Bhabha’s (1994) The Location of Culture has been widely cited in the field of diaspora studies, Bhabha himself has only very rarely employed the term “diaspora” in his major publications, his explicit focus tending to be hybridity as opposed to diaspora(s) specifically. Neverthless, there can be little doubt about the acute relevance of his theoretical postulates for reflection about the diasporic condition.

8. Peter Hallward (2001), for example, took issue with what he saw to be the later Glissant’s complicitousness with this.

9. The later Glissant, who as a literary author was keen to avoid the pitfall of prosyletism, suggested that Relation was not an intrinsically ethical phenomenon as such. He states, for example, that Relation has no intrinsic moral content but that we can inscribe moral content into it (Glissant 2009b, 73), a point which is belied by statements elsewhere and indeed the whole orientation of his thought, all of which suggest strongly that Relation is by its very nature not just a concept with ethical implications, but also that it is only conceivable as part of a progressive political project.

10. To be precise, however, I should indicate that it is an implied subject because later Glissantian thought, strongly under the influence of the post-structuralist philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, presents only an evacuated individual subject.

11. Hallward (2001) makes this claim one of the central planks of his critique of the later Glissant.

12. See Glissant (2009a) in particular.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sam Coombes

Sam Coombes is senior lecturer in the Department of European Languages and Cultures at the University of Edinburgh. An initial specialism in Sartre and political thought, which led to The Early Sartre and Marxism (2008), took Coombes to postcolonial studies and subsequently diasporic studies. He is a founding member of the Diaspolinks research group and co-organizer of the Diasporic Trajectories seminar series held at the University of Edinburgh. He has authored numerous articles in the field of francophone-anglophone comparative postcolonial studies and his second monograph Edouard Glissant A Poetics of Resistance (2018) relates later Glissantian theory to alter-globalization theory and politics.