Description

By (author) Glissant, Édouard; Translated by Wing Betsy

‘One of the most important writers of the French Caribbean’
Guardian

Édouard Glissant’s most celebrated, scintillating philosophical work – which sets out a new poetic vision for the world

‘We cry our cry of poetry. Our boats are open, and we sail them for everyone’

In Poetics of Relation, Édouard Glissant turns the Caribbean of his birth into an energetic, multi-layered vision of a world in transformation. We come to see that relation in all its senses – telling, listening, connecting, and the parallel consciousness of self and surroundings – is the key to revolutionising mentalities and societies. We are not rooted, but ever-changing; we have a right to difference, wherever we are. Blending dreamlike prose with philosophical brilliance, this unique exploration of language, colonialism, slavery and freedom narrates an Antillean identity, but also that of the whole world, where ‘the poetics of Relation senses, assumes, opens, gathers, scatters, continues, and transforms.’

Translated by Betsy Wing

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One of the most important writers of the French Caribbean

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Poetics of Relation marks the high point of critical and cultural theory as articulated by Caribbean intellectuals. In the panoply of creative-theoretical intellectuals, Édouard Glissant occupies a place of high honor

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To have the opportunity to encounter Glissant’s Poetics of Relation again is a gift. Betsy Wing’s translation captures the sensual flush of a prose that invents a new language as it remakes the world. A rare text, poetic and defiant. A revelation

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One of the most important writers and philosophers of our time. Glissant called attention to means of global exchange that do not homogenize culture but produce a difference from which new things can emerge… I have a ritual of reading in Glissant’s books for fifteen minutes every morning… He is my most important theoretical influence

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A stunning reimagining of geography. Glissant radically reorders time-space, offering us future-pasts laced with thick ecosystems, black poetics, and painful, but necessary, interhuman relations. A Poetics of Relation continues to be a brilliant lesson in anti-colonial world-making

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Glissant’s Poetics of Relation is a deeply transformative work written with profound acuity, flair and vision. Whilst reflecting on the specific historical realities and potentialities of the Antilles, Glissant’s central concepts of “rhizomatic thought”, “opacity” and “identity as a system of relation” speak urgently and directly to our contemporary moment. Betsy Wing’s translation of Glissant’s poetics powerfully captures his determination to destabilise and interrogate the French language from within and bears out Glissant’s moving observation that “Relation…is spoken multilingually”

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Life – whether human or more-than-human – is a story of relations in a constant process of becoming. Yet many dominant philosophies, politics, and economics remain grounded in a totalizing and reductive individualism ill-suited to planetary co-existence. Glissant advances a dynamic, non-linear, relational perspective that can help us remake and reimagine relations at this moment of crisis and transformation

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Faces the roaring totality of the world in all its horror, beauty, and commotion, and declares it unknowable. Glissant counters the imperialist notion of knowledge as acquisition with a radiating poetics that’s given freely. His work is crucial for anyone who wants to approach the whole wide world, to know it exhaustively, and is willing to concede failure from the start. This is why