Edouard Glissant : Texts and Contexts
Professor : J. Michael Dash
This seminar will map the critical thought of the Martiniquan writer and theorist Edouard Glissant by situating his work and ideas in contexts that are crucial to understanding the post–Negritude generation of writers in the French Caribbean as well as postcolonial emergence of francophone literature as a whole. Inter-cultural and inter-disciplinary in scope, Glissant's ideas will be traced diachronically from his early reading of the Surrealist ethnography of Andre Breton, Michel Leiris and Pierre Mabille which set him apart from the primitivist essentialism of Aime Cesaire and the Tropiques group, and synchronically through his practice of autobiography, ethnography, poetry and art criticism. From the 1950s he makes the case of a self-ethnography which promotes a new conception of identity in the Caribbean emphasizing the interplay of outside and inside, individual and collective that is markedly different from the previous generation's ideal of cultural authenticity and racial monoliths. Later a relational mode of conceptualizing opacity, plurality and heterogeneity related to Victor Segalen' rethinking of exoticism and Deleuzean deterritorialization produces a theory of global diversity and errancy that challenges the coercive universalism of the West. The effect of Glissant's emphasis on relational identity and the right to opacity will be finally examined in a newer generation of francophone writers.
Edouard Glissant, Soleil de la conscience (1956), La Lézarde (1958),
Le discours antillais (1981), La case du commandeur (1981),
Tout Monde (1993 ), Faulkner,Mississippi (1996).
Patrick Chamoiseau, L'esclave vieil homme et le molosse .(1997)
Dany Laferriere, Pays sans chapeau. (1996)
A Course pack of selections from essays published by Aime Cesaire, André Breton, Michel Leiris, Rene Ménil, Victor Segalen and Edouard Glissant.
J.M.Dash, Edouard Glissant
Celia Britton, Edouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory
Peter Hallward, Absolutely Postcolonial
Exercises
- un compte rendu ou exposé (2 pages) 40 points
- un mémoire (15 pages) 60 points
J.M.Dash