The Cry of the World

Introduces some key concepts: hybridity, ‘Relation’, the relation between oral and written language, creolization, the chaos-world, multilingualism and ‘opacity’ (i.e., we do not need to understand the other in order to relate to him/her.) From now on, we can all hear the cry of the world, i.e. we are conscious of struggles in faraway places, and we live in ‘common places’ that we are learning to share. Glissant contrasts the ‘system’ with its positive alternative, the ‘trace’. Identity is recast as a relational ‘rhizome’ (cf Deleuze and Guattari), rather than a single self-sufficient ‘root’. (p.11). He stresses the importance of defending languages that are in danger of disappearing, but also discusses the virtues of translation. He describes the founding of the International Writers Parliament in Strasbourg.

The Time of the Other

Glissant introduces the concept of measure, seen as both a search for depth and the inspiration of the spatial expanse. This is followed by a long section on the European Middle Ages, where diversity gradually gives way to classicism. He discusses our anxiety about our contemporary loss of control over history; and then the rhetorics of orality, and whether the transcendence and the sacred connotations of writing is being challenged. Orality is seen as a form of Relation, characterized by multiplicity and circularity as opposed to the linearity of traditional rhetoric. Baroque art in the Americas is linked with orality.

Repetitions

Here Glissant distinguishes between ‘atavistic’ and ‘composite’ cultures. The former are based on the ideas of a sacred ‘Genesis’ and of ‘filiation’, i.e., an uninterrupted line of descent. ‘Composite’ cultures are creolized, based on a mixture of cultures and with a historical (i.e., formed by colonization) rather than mythical origin: what he terms a ‘digenesis’. But not all multi-ethnic societies are composite: the USA is an example of a culture in which the different groups remain separate.

Objections to this ‘Treatise’ by Mathieu Beluse, and Reply

Here Glissant returns to the importance of creolization in preserving diversity, and contrasts it with the notion of integration, which suppresses diversity and exerts pressure on individuals to conform to the dominant culture of the country they are living in, thus promoting an ideal of uniformity. In this context he then discusses the motives and experiences of immigration. The final section of the chapter is devoted to the popularization of science.

Writing

In this short chapter Glissant returns to the idea of orality, now from the point of view of how it has influenced the structure of contemporary writing. To write is to ‘say the world’; to connect our own place with the Whole-World. He claims that the traditional division into literary genres no longer operates, and narrative is no longer dominant. The poet is more important as a builder of langage, i.e., our subjective relation to the language we speak.

The Town, Refuge for the Voices of the World

This chapter is the text of a speech given at the inauguration of the Congrès du Réseau des Villes-refuges and of the International Parliament of Writers, given in Strasbourg in 1997. The Congress planned to set up a network of ‘refuge towns’ for writers who were persecuted in their own countries. Glissant discusses clashes between cultures, and the politicization of culture: culture, he claims, has become one of the most important sites of political struggle. Writers are pioneers is using imagination to create open identities (rhizomes), and this is one of their most important roles: they thus participate in a true ‘Poetics of Relation’.

Punctuations

As its title perhaps suggests, this chapter – even more than the others - covers a number of disparate themes. Glissant starts by contrasting continents with archipelagoes: continents are sites of intolerance and rigidity, whereas the archipelagoes of the Caribbean and Pacific Oceans promote diversity, mixing and passage. He goes on to praise the work of the Islamist scholar Jacques Berque, and then discusses Senghor, who together with Césaire founded the Negritude movement. The chapter then returns to familiar themes: land versus territory; creolization; atavistic versus composite cultures; identity as root and as rhizome; and Genesis and filiation. It concludes with a discussion of the writer Maurice Roche, whom he compares with Leiris.

Translator’s Introduction

Édouard Glissant was not only a thinker but also a novelist and poet, and the essays in Treatise on the Whole-World reflect this; not only do characters from the novels appear from time to time (and indeed the Treatise itself is presented as written by a fictional character), but much of the writing has a poetic quality that is quite different from the conventional style of the essay (as Glissant says: ‘the poetics that have appeared in the world are gaily reinventing the genres, unrestrainedly mixing them up’, p. 75). The book also contains two actual poems (pp. 138–9, p. 152). He invents new words whose meaning is not always clearly defined, and abstract discussion alternates with lyrical evocations of landscapes, cities or people (‘You ask why I am jumping about like this, going from polished sentences to all kinds of jumbles of words?’, p. 40). Repetition, also, has a positive rather than a negative value, because it is never exact: looking at the same idea from a slightly different angle can shed new light on it....

Measure, Immeasurability

This chapter starts with a poem entitled ‘Infinitive of time’ which evokes and promotes the process whereby filiation and legitimacy are giving way to the multiplicities of time. It ends with another, far more obscure poem: ‘Ode to Stone and to Carthage’. In between Glissant returns to the familiar themes of creolization, preserving minority languages, and the move from narrative to poetry. He expands on a distinction he has already used between essentialist ‘Being’ and non-essentialist ‘being’. One section consists of outlining a collective ecological project to make Martinique into an ’organic’ island.

Waves and Backwashes

Quoting the Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite: ‘Unity is submarine’, Glissant describes how relations between Caribbean countries are not only overt but also hidden and subliminal. There is a section on naming: the complexity of names and nicknames in Martinique. He then argues that filiation is giving way to multinational markets. Then, in a good example of the positive value of repetition, he returns to the themes of the system versus the trace, the landscapes of the Americas, the importance of preserving all the world’s languages; and the relation between language and langage.