Abyssal Figurations of Refusal in Édouard Glissant's Poetics

In this article I consider the kind of temporality that radical practices of refusal can be said to open in resistance to the enduring afterlives of slavery. To do so, I study what I call two abyssal figurations of refusal in Édouard Glissant's work, namely, the ‘silent walker’ in his 1990 Poetics of Relation and the ‘nameless woman’ in his 1981 novel The Overseer's Cabin. In both cases, I argue, Glissant envisions refusal as an ambivalent performance that — bearing a constitutive relation to what he calls ‘the abyss’ of racial slavery — transversally exceeds both the Black optimist and Afro-pessimist readings of refusal that retain currency in contemporary Black studies. What is echoed in the two figurations I study is the ambivalent sense in which the refusing performances of blackness simultaneously divert and remain held by the temporal structures of anti-Black coloniality that they strain against or refuse.