This book reproduces the texts of four lectures, followed by discussions, and two interviews with Lise Gauvin published in Introduction à une poétique du divers (1996); and also four further interviews from L’Imaginaire des langues (Lise Gauvin, 2010). It covers a wide range of topics but key recurring themes are creolization, language and langage, culture and identity, ‘monolingualism’, the ‘Chaos-world’ and the role of the writer. Migration and the various different kinds of migrants are also discussed, as is the difference between ‘atavistic’ and ‘composite’ communities, the art of translation, identity as a ‘rhizome’ rather than a single root, the Chaos-World and chaos theory, ‘trace thought’ as opposed to ‘systematic thought’, the relation between ‘place’ and the Whole-World, exoticism, utopias, a new definition of beauty as the realized quantity of differences, the status of literary genres and the possibility that literature as a whole will disappear. Four of the interviews (Chapters 6, 7, 8 and 9) relate to particular works that Glissant has published: Tout-monde, Le monde incrée, La Cohée du Lamentin, Une nouvelle région du monde. Many of these themes have been explored in his previous works, but here, because in all the chapters we see Glissant interacting with the questions and views of other people, they are presented in a particularly accessible form.

This volume reproduces the texts of four lectures, followed by discussions, and two interviews with Lise Gauvin published in 'Introduction à une poétique du divers' (1996); and also four further interviews from 'L'Imaginaire des langues' (Lise Gauvin, 2010). It covers a wide range of topics but key recurring themes are creolisation, language and langage, culture and identity, 'monolingualism', the 'Chaos-world' and the role of the writer.

Creolizing Hannah Arendt is the first book to explore the implications of creolizing Hannah Arendt (1906-75) and thinking for: action, liberation, freedom, power, democracy, identity, racism, prejudice, totalitarianism, immigration, judgment, revolution, decolonial politics, the human, and the modern traditions of Caribbean political thought, Africana philosophy, and existential phenomenology. Contributors include: Cristina Beltrán, Roger Berkowitz, Angélica Maria Bernal, Robert Eaglestone, Stephen Nathan Haymes, Paget Henry, Thomas Meagher, Dana Francisco Miranda, Marilyn Nissim-Sabat, Niklas Plaetzer, Neil Roberts.

This book examines Clarice Lispector’s body of work, foregrounding its theoretical insights and exploring its philosophical questions, which are placed in conversation with a range of theoretical frameworks and approaches. Contributions to this volume engage with the philosophical dimension of one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. The book features essays by renowned and emerging philosophers and literary critics from multiple parts of the world, which examine Lispector’s different novels, chronicles, and short stories, acknowledging their inherent theoretical claims and placing them in contact with other relevant theoretical angles. They develop conversations between Lispector and well-known philosophers on questions of time, being, writing, and risk, and they also explore Lispector’s critiques of the human, the concept of woman, fertility, temporality, and the common binaries of life and death, and thought and feeling. This volume furthermore includes recent perspectives in psychoanalysis, ecofeminism, affect theory, theology, and black and decolonial studies, showing the generative effects of dialogue between these frameworks and Lispector’s writing. Philosophy with Clarice Lispector will interest humanities scholars and graduate students who seek philosophical approaches to literary studies and literary perspectives on gender and sexuality studies, theology, and criticism and theory. It will engage readers in pursuit of transdisciplinary methods and creative explorations of Clarice Lispector’s writing that disclose her contribution to the ideas of established philosophers. The book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.

One of the greatest writers of the late twentieth century, Édouard Glissant's body of work covers multiple genres and addresses many cogent contemporary problems, such as borders, multiculturalism, postcolonial and decolonial studies, and global humanities. Édouard Glissant, Philosopher is the first study that maps out this writer's entire work in relation to philosophy. Glissant is reputed to be a "difficult writer;" however, Alexandre Leupin demonstrates the clarity and coherence of his thinking. Glissant's rereading of Western philosophy entirely remaps its age-old questions and offers answers that have never been proposed. In doing so, Glissant offers a new way to think about questions that are at the forefront of Global Humanities today: identity, race, communities, diasporas, slavery, nation-states and nationalism, aesthetics, ethics, and the place and function of poetry and art in a globalized world. This book will elucidate Glissant's theoretical writings, not only in England and in America but also in the anglophone Caribbean, Africa, and India.

Derek Walcott's Encounter with Homer puts Derek Walcott's epic poem Omeros in conversation with Homer, especially the Odyssey, to show how reading them against each other changes our understanding of the poems of both poets. It explores Walcott's conscious use of the Odyssey and the Homeric persona of Omeros to explore his own deepening relationship with his craft and his identity as a Caribbean poet. Walcott's ability to serve as the vessel of history for his people and their landscapes rests on his transformation into (and self-perception as) Homer's contemporary and equal. Central to the project of Omeros is thus an account of his shift from a diachronic to synchronic relationship with Homer: over the course of the poem his poetic persona, the "Poet", and Homer come to occupy the same temporality and creative space. By locating the poems of Walcott and Homer in a zone of vibrant and unexpected encounter, Rachel Friedman demonstrates how they can be seen as mutually informing texts, each made richer in the presence of the other. The argument follows two intertwined thematic threads. The first focuses on the poems' landscapes and seascapes and the ways in which Omeros reworks the Odyssey's affective geography. While the Odyssey represents the sea as a dangerous space and valorizes life on land, Walcott reverses this trajectory from sea to land, bearing witness to the painful histories carried in the St Lucian soil and relocating homecoming to the space of the Caribbean Sea, a space which accommodates diasporic histories and the imagining of fluid forms of emplacement. The second thread focuses on Walcott's poetic persona: his journey in and out of the poem and his positioning of himself as a "tribal poet" like Homer. Central to the project of Omeros is the Poet's account of the processes by which he becomes the poet who can adequately give voice to the histories of his people and the archipelago they inhabit.

Much has been said about the relationship between globalization and culture and the political implications of that relationship. There has been little effort made, however, to investigate the effect of globalization on poetics or on the ethical moment of literature. World Writing is therefore concerned with studying the intersection of contemporary ethics, poetics, and globalization through historical and critical readings of writing from various parts of the world. Following an introductory chapter by Mary Gallagher, which maps this conceptual terrain, the contributors investigate how globalization inflects the necessary relationship between poetics, culture, ethics, and politics. Among the essays are Celia Britton's reading of Édouard Glissant on languages in the globalized world; Mary Gallagher's comparison of Glissant's poetics of cultural diversity with the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas; David Palumbo-Liu's exploration of the ethics of postcolonial fiction in J.M. Coetzee's work; Mary Louise Pratt's critique, based on recent Latin American writing, of the prematurely celebratory nature of globalization; and Julia Kristeva's argument for the value of poetics and the ethics of hospitality. What emerges is an intricate discussion of the elusive relationship between the realms of ethics, poetics, and politics as they intersect in our changing world.

This collection of interviews is a diamond, remarkable in the way that it assembles so many of the major strains of Glissant’s thought, and stunning in the expansive erudition at work in the composition of that thought. Two structuring experiences inform the writer’s reflections on language and poetic engagement. On the one hand, there is the acculturation of his French intellectual ancestry, begun in the Martinican colonial system and continued in his mature student years in Paris, with the achievement of a Doctorate at the Sorbonne in 1980. On the other, there is his genetic heritage as an Antillean, nurtured in the Creole language of a people whose nearly forgotten history he will take pains to redeem. A lifelong interrogation of these two vital experiences of language are crucial to Glissant’s concept of Relation, viewed as a transformative and vital process intrinsic to the project of poetics. Relation reverberates throughout Glissant’s consideration of the many topics broached in this volume: medieval Europe and the creation of nation-states, the evolution of the epic and its global iterations, decolonization, creolization, landscapes and cultures, political engagement vs. the task of the writer, globality, questions of identity and Being. Absolutely the best introduction to Glissant’s thought.

The idea of universalism inherited from the French Revolution has been strongly discredited by its colonial history; today, it is also the target of nationalist attacks. What remains of it? Now available in English, Markus Messling's critically acclaimed study shows how contemporary Francophone literatures seek, after European universalism, approaches to a new universality, without which knowledge and justice cannot be organised in world society. With a foreword by Souleymane Bachir Diagne

Examines the effect of prescribed multilingualism as expressed by women writers in colonial contexts What does it mean to be an heir, as a woman writer, to colonial and postcolonial cultures in which European language has become so thoroughly ingrained? Examining women writers from India (Toru Dutt), Egypt (Mayy Ziyadah), Algeria (Assia Djebar), and Mauritius (Ananda Devi), White Tongue, Brown Skin sheds light on the essential double nature of the colonial experience. Maya Boutaghou’s latest book—her first in English—treats colonialism as analogous to a disease, manifesting itself in symptoms of multilingualism and cultural pluralism. Boutaghou shows how violently imposed multilingualism engenders in the mind of the colonized subject a state of permanent self-translation between two or more languages with unequal political and emotional power. They must endure a plural perception of the self, defined by the restless movement of self-translation, which becomes reflected in a literary dynamic frequently overlooked or misunderstood by previous scholarship. Although the object is philosophical, this book is also deeply rooted in history. Understanding postcolonialism from below, as Boutaghou demonstrates, starts with an approach based on close readings in specific historical contexts.