Time and the Middle Passage in Édouard Glissant's Thought

This paper elucidates Édouard Glissant's contribution to contemporary scholarship on the afterlives of slavery by examining his varied explorations of the enduring temporal significance of the Middle Passage. In theoretical writings such as Poétique de la Relation , Glissant extensively casts the Middle Passage as an abyss (gouffre) that radically disfigures all senses of time for those who–or whose ancestors–survived the trauma of forced transportation to the Americas. Moreover, in fictional works such as Le Quatrième siècle, La Case du commandeur and Mahagony , Glissant creatively reimagines the history of Martinique to explore how this abyssal experience continues to ambivalently shape the lived temporality of Caribbean peoples today. Addressing a tendency in recent Glissant scholarship to separate his theoretical from his fictional texts, this paper reads both in tandem to argue that they diffract one another to portray the Middle Passage as an ambivalent temporal beginning: as both the radical rupture in temporal coordinates imposed by the historical experience of slavery, and as a condition for potential shifts away from the oppressive, racializing, and colonizing structures of time that have emerged in the wake of that brutal historical legacy. Indeed, insofar as Glissant conceives the meaning of the Middle Passage as an abyssal double beginning, his work intimates vital poetic strategies of resistance and refusal that challenge the unjust configurations of time that continue to dominate our worlds today.