ABSTRACT
Édouard Glissant's anthology of poetry La Terre, le feu, l’eau, et les vents: poésie ́ du tout-monde is a remarkable statement. Fragments from Averroes are set next to William Faulkner, set next to Muhammad Ali, Che Guevara, Shakespeare, Léopold ́ Senghor, Franketienne, ́ and the Bhagavad Gita. One volume, multiple places, no appeal to a commonplace except the event of the poetic. Globalised and globalising contact and transformation – the signature of Glissant’s later work. What does such a collection say about the fecundity of relationality across time and geography, between traditions and their dissimulation, and howdoesrelationality transform ourunderstanding of a cultural politics without rootedness in place? Glissant moves us into the liminal space of contact, exchange, and transformation – the centrepieces of what he first calls “Relation” (always with a capital R in his work) and then develops in the later work as a poetics of tout-monde. This is philosophical space, dedicated to new forms of being and knowing. And this space manifests a peculiar temporality, folding the past and present into new senses of the future: hybrid, mixed, creolised.
