Theorizing Glissant highlights the philosophical anchor of Glissant’s work. The collection comprises essays on Glissant’s key concepts; essays that link his work to contemporary philosophical notions; and essays focusing on specific works. In the first category is a discussion of Glissant’s notion of opacité and the urge to reconceptualize identity as dictated by performance through resistance, discontinuities, and adaptations. In the second, Glissant’s work is methodically highlighted as linked to prominent philosophical ideas: Bergson’s duration; Deleuze and Guattari’s difference, being, and becoming; Luce Irigaray’s sexual difference and creolization with ‘the trace of sexual difference … marked in two absences.’ Among the essays on specific works is a reading of The Ripening through Husserl’s phenomenological principles leading to the implementation of conceived ideas, or contre-action aggissante. Identity has to be sought in the hic and nunc without disregard to all its negotiated, sedimentary elements. This allows him to be critical of Césaire and the negritude tenets of return. In sum, this important critique situates Glissant’s work within the framework of the ongoing modern debate on identity, the influx of various cultural trends, and creolization. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.

Choice Reviews

Theorizing Glissant: Sites and Citations makes an important contribution to the field of Caribbean studies through a nuanced and diverse examination of the keywords that lie at the core of Édouard Glissant’s vast oeuvre. The book reads as a sort of guide through the central tropes, poetic aims, political contexts, and philosophical questions that motivate the Martinican’s thought.... [T]his book should be of interest not only for Caribbean scholars but also for those involved in philosophy, critical theory, literature, and cultural studies, as well as scholars engaged with racial and ethnic matters.

Caribbean Studies

Edouard Glissant's writings constitute a monument of postcolonial and francophone theory. Theorizing Glissant unites a series of highly original essays to interrogate this theoretical legacy, spanning the breadth of Glissant's theoretical and literary works, to delineate a brilliant and revealing constellation of relational thought.

Nick Nesbitt, Princeton University

Edouard Glissant's apparently inexhaustible legacy for postcolonial poetics - and indeed for postcolonial thinking in general - is very well served by this volume. Not only does the book offer original, eye-opening angles of approach to the work and influence of a crucial author, but readers, specialists and non-specialists alike, will particularly appreciate the freshness, tautness and edginess of the comparative or relational essays.

Mary Gallagher, Professor of French and Francophone Studies, University College Dublin

Theorizing Glissant is the first book in English to consider Édouard Glissant not only as major postcolonial theorist, but also as a philosopher in the full sense of the term. This outstanding collection is a must read for scholars interested in Caribbean thought and also for philosophers eager to understand how Glissant makes us rethink epistemology, ontology, aesthetics, ethics, and political philosophy anew.

Valérie Loichot, Professor of French and English, Emroy University