ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to show how Édouard Glissant’s notion of creolization offers a renewed understanding of both normative cosmopolitanism and real or sociological cosmopolitanization, in that they share the rejection of a metatheory of identity. Apprehended as a grand narrative that describes creolity as a world phenomenon, creolization takes on a dimension beyond the territoriality of nations. With creolization as a “philosophy of relationship” and a “poetics of extension,” Glissant invites us to rethink the world from a new grammar of the political: the wandering, the archipelago, the trembling, the unpredictable, the trace, uncertainty; the political thus becomes the power of the poetics of relationship. Creolization names the actual “diversity of the world,” in all its forms (cultural, political, religious, artistic, etc.), but it is also an invitation to unite in a rhizomatic world where the relationships between the different peoples and cultures of the world are at the same time necessary, desirable, and achievable in the name of a shared ideal of coexistence. If Glissant’s thought is decolonial, it is not anti-Western; on the contrary, far from embodying a clear and definitive epistemic rupture, the epistemic hospitality of the “Tout-Monde” (“Whole-World”) provides means of updating modern Western thought.
