Poetics of Relation
Poetics of Relation
/ Edouard Glissant, translated by Betsy Wing
- University of Michigan Press; 1997
- 226p; 22x14cm
In Poetics of Relation, French-Caribbean writer and philosopher Edouard Glissant turns the concrete particulars of Caribbean reality into a complex, energetic vision of a world in transformation. He sees the islands of the Antilles as enduring an "invalid" suffering imposed by history, yet also as a place whose unique interactions will one day produce an emerging global consensus. Arguing that the writer alone can tap the unconscious of a people and apprehend its multiform culture in order to provide forms of memory and intent capable of transcending "nonhistory", Glissant therefore defines his "poetics of relation" - both aesthetic and political - as a transformative mode of history, capable of enunciating and making concrete a French-Caribbean reality with a self-defined past and future. In Poetics of Relation, 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 transforming mentalities and reshaping societies. The issues raised about identity as built in relation and not in isolation are central to current discussions not only of Caribbean creolization but of U.S. multiculturalism as well.
English
9780472066292
97-6997
F2001-2151 History of the Americas- Latin America- West Indies- Lesser Antilles
F2081.8.G5513 1997
972.98'2-- / dc21
In Poetics of Relation, French-Caribbean writer and philosopher Edouard Glissant turns the concrete particulars of Caribbean reality into a complex, energetic vision of a world in transformation. He sees the islands of the Antilles as enduring an "invalid" suffering imposed by history, yet also as a place whose unique interactions will one day produce an emerging global consensus. Arguing that the writer alone can tap the unconscious of a people and apprehend its multiform culture in order to provide forms of memory and intent capable of transcending "nonhistory", Glissant therefore defines his "poetics of relation" - both aesthetic and political - as a transformative mode of history, capable of enunciating and making concrete a French-Caribbean reality with a self-defined past and future. In Poetics of Relation, 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 transforming mentalities and reshaping societies. The issues raised about identity as built in relation and not in isolation are central to current discussions not only of Caribbean creolization but of U.S. multiculturalism as well.
English
9780472066292
97-6997
F2001-2151 History of the Americas- Latin America- West Indies- Lesser Antilles
F2081.8.G5513 1997
972.98'2-- / dc21