Caribbean Creolization

Edouard Glissant was born in 1928 in the commune of Sainte-Marie in Martinique. A poet, novelist, dramatist, and essayist, Glissant studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and ethnology at the Musée de l'homme. In the 1950s he co-founded the Front Antillo-Guyanais pour l'indépendence, and went on to found the Institut martiniquais d'etudes in 1970. In 1982, he went to work as editor of the UNESCO Courier, was named Distinguished University Professor at Louisiana State University in 1988, and left there for a position at the City University of New York's Graduate Center in the mid-1990s. He began publishing in the mid-1950s, and his novels, plays, essays, and volumes of poetry have won many outstanding prizes. Perhaps the premier contemporary French West Indian cultural theorist, his influential concepts of antillanité (Caribbeanness) and poétique de la relation (cross-cultural poetics) promulgated in Le Discours antillais (Caribbean Discourse) seek to creatively anchor the Caribbean experience of fragmentation and disjuncture in a framework that gives voice to its central tenets of diversity and hybridity. The interpenetration of languages and cultures that lies at the core of this process of creolization posits contact and chaos, cultural relativity, and exchange and transformation as key tools in a polyvalent system of thought that redefines traditional notions of identity.