The Planetary Cultural Politics of Édouard Glissant

This article explores the lessons for antiracism provided by Édouard Glissant’s philosophy of language. The late Martinican scholar (1928–2011) writes extensively about language in correspondence to core concepts in his thought, in particular Relation, opacity and the Whole-World. Through a reading of his essays, poems and novels, I argue that Glissant’s writing poses an ontological question about language which allows us to rethink our relationships to each other and, as consequence, the dispositions necessary for collective struggle. The move towards the Whole-World, in his later work, speaks to wider debates on planetary interdependence and relies on a multilingual reimagination of the common places where we are all implicated in the task of resisting oppression.