“O Carib Isle!” or “Scattered Moluccas”? Édouard Glissant’s Pacific relation

ABSTRACT

Édouard Glissant is well known for his theorization of the Caribbean’s key role in our understanding of the Atlantic world, but little attention has been paid to his interest in the Pacific. This essay considers how his remarks on the Federated States of Micronesia and its economic and political dependence on the USA in the 1970s contribute to twenty-first-century theories of transpacific studies. Glissant’s interpretation of the relation between the Caribbean and Pacific anticipates the oceanic comparatism of our contemporary moment.

KEYWORDS:

• Édouard Glissant
• oceanic comparatism
• Caribbeanness
• transpacific studies
• Martinique
• Federated States of Micronesia
• French colonialism
• Spanish colonialism
• German colonialism
• US colonialism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

John Carlos Rowe is USC Associates’ Professor of the Humanities and Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. He is the author of nine books, more than 150 essays and reviews, and editor or co-editor of 11 books, including: Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism: From the Revolution to World War II (2000), A Concise Companion to American Studies (2010), Afterlives of Modernism: Liberalism, Transnationalism, and Political Critique (2011), and The Cultural Politics of the New American Studies (2012). He is currently writing Sailing Lessons: Writing Across the Pacific.

Notes

1 See Lewis and Wigen, The Myth of Continents.

2 DeLoughrey, Routes and Roots, 270.

3 Carrigan, “Review of Routes and Roots,” 330.

4 DeLoughrey, Routes and Roots, 9, 30, 125, 143.

5 See Benítez-Rojo, The Repeating Island.

6 Roberts and Stephens, “Archipelagic American Studies,” 8.

7 See Hoskins and Nguyen, eds. Transpacific Studies, 1–38.

8 Dirlik, “Introduction: Pacific Contradictions,” 3–13; Christopher Connery, “Pacific Rim Discourse,” 30–56; see Wilson, Reimagining the American Pacific.

9 See Gilroy, The Black Atlantic.

10 This was an international trade for fertilizer and gunpowder ingredients, and the US played a major part, especially after Congress passed the Guano Islands Act of 1856, which allowed US citizens to claim any guano island in the world. Most US claims were made on islands in the Caribbean and the coastal islands of the Western Hemisphere. See Skaggs, The Great Guano Rush.

11 Chang, The Chinese in America, 17–19; see Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents.

12 Hau’ofa, “Pasts to Remember.”

13 Sharrad, Albert Wendt and Pacific Literature, vii.

14 Jackson, Creole Indigeneity, 1–3.

15 See DeLoughrey and Handley, eds., Postcolonial Ecologies.

16 See Gilroy, Against Race.

17 Glissant, Traité du tout monde, 1–8.

18 See Diawara, Édouard Glissant.

19 Ibid.

20 Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 139. Further references to the text will be cited parenthetically.

21 See Glissant, Poetics of Relation. Further references to the text will be cited parenthetically.

22 For Glissant’s biographical details see Britton, “Edouard Glissant.”

23 For example, see Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire; Pease and Wiegman, eds., The Futures of American Studies; Rowe, Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism.

24 Dumas, “La Micronésie,” 2012–2064. Dated “Saipan, Novembre 1976,” the essay acknowledges: “avec collaboration de Samuel McPhetre” (2064). The latter is probably a misprint for Samuel F. McPhetres, a Peace Corps volunteer who ended up in Saipan in the early 1970s and served as a UN liaison as the TTIP wound down in the late 1970s. See Zotomayor, “Samuel F. McPhetres.”

25 See Webb, Micronesia and U.S. Pacific Strategy.

26 See McHenry, Micronesia: Trust Betrayed.

27 Ibid., 223–228.

28 Glissant, Le Discours Antillais, 13–52. Information about the TTIP from “Pacific Islands, Trust Territory of the.”

29 See “Drops in the ocean”; see “Population.”

30 The four other DOM’s are: French Guiana (South America), Guadeloupe (Caribbean), Mayotte (Indian Ocean), and Réunion (Indian Ocean). St. Pierre and Miquelon (Atlantic) is a département collectivité (Collective Department), just south of Newfoundland off the coast of Canada.

31 See Rowe, “Shades of Paradise,” 223–245.

32 See Harvey, The New Imperialism. It is tempting to think that Glissant and Harvey, who were colleagues at the City University of New York, might have actually discussed some of these ideas. Glissant accepted a Distinguished Professor position at CUNY in 1995, and Harvey joined the faculty in 2001. But I have no evidence for any such intellectual collaboration on this topic.

33 Ibid., 146.

34 Ibid., 144.

35 Ibid., 149, 148.

36 Ibid., 143.

37 I am simply listing here the main ethnic groups in the FSM and doing so very reductively without details about their different traditions, spirituality, social and kinship relations, and economies that they deserve.

38 See in particular Bhabha, The Location of Culture.

39 Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs, 41; Mignolo has argued that hybridity is an ineluctably colonial concept.

40 Diawara, “An Introduction to Édouard Glissant.”

41 Ibid.

42 Glissant in Diawara, Édouard Glissant.

43 Unterecker, Voyager: A Life of Hart Crane, 34–35, 758.

44 Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, 221.

45 Ibid.

46 Ibid.