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Abstract
In 2009, Martinican writers Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau published a short address to President Obama, writing his rise and election victory into planetary histories of creolization. This short text appears outdated or even naïve today, since Glissant and Chamoiseau’s reading of Obama seeks to inaugurate new narratives of American historical and political time that seem entirely foreclosed by the arrival of Donald Trump on the world stage. And yet I argue that we can recuperate and reactivate utopian threads in Glissant and Chamoiseau’s text that provoke us to reread contemporary U.S. politics in the light of these imagined futures that never came about. What appears at first glance to be a fantastical reading of the Obama presidency actually opens up new ways of imagining utopian political strategies today.
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Notes
1 Scott, David. Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment. Duke UP, 2004.
2 Izzo, Justin. “‘A Question to Be Lived’: Creoleness and Ethnographic Fiction.” Small Axe, vol. 55, 2018, pp. 137–146.
3 Cole, Teju. “The Reprint.” Known and Strange Things: Essays. Random House, 2016, pp. 239–253.
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Notes on contributors
Justin Izzo
Justin Izzo is Assistant Professor of French Studies at Brown University. He is the author of Experiments with Empire: Anthropology and Fiction in the French Atlantic (Duke UP, 2019). He has also published articles in Research in African Literatures, Small Axe, and the African Studies Review.