800 Literatur und Rhetorik
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The political legacy of the Martinican poet, novelist and philosopher Édouard Glissant (1928–2011) is the subject of an ongoing debate among postcolonial literary scholars. Responding to an influential view shaping this debate, that Glissant’s work can be categorised into an early political and late apolitical phase, this dissertation claims that this division is based on a narrow conception of 'engaged political writing' that prevents a more comprehensive view of the changing political strategies Glissant pursued throughout his life from emerging. Proceeding from this conceptual basis, the dissertation is concerned with re-reading the dimensions of Glissant's work that have hitherto been relegated as apolitical, literary or poetic, with the aim of conceptualising the politics of relation as an integral part of his overall poetic project. In methodological terms, the dissertation therefore proposes a relational reading of Glissant’s life-work across literary genres, epochs, as well as the conventional divisions between political thought, writing and activism. This perspective is informed by Glissant's philosophy of relation, and draws on a conception of political practice that includes both explicit engagements with established political systems and institutions, as well as literary and cultural interventions geared towards their transformation and the creation of alternatives to them. Theoretically the work thus combines a poststructuralist lens on the conceptual difference between 'politics' and 'the political' with arguments for an inherent political quality of literature, and perspectives from the Afro-Caribbean radical tradition, in which writers and intellectuals have historically sought to combine discursive interventions with organisational actions. Applying this theoretical angle to the analysis of Glissant's politics of relation results in an interdisciplinary research framework designed to explore the synergies between postcolonial political and literary studies.
In order to comprehensively describe Glissant's politics of relation without recourse to evolutionary or digressive models, the concept of an intellectual marronage is proposed as a framework to map the strategies making up Glissant's political archive. Drawing on a variety of historic, political theoretical and literary sources, intellectual marronage is understood as a mode of radical resistance to the neocolonial subjugation for which the plantation system stands historically and metaphorically, as an inherently innovative political practice invested in the creation of communities marked by relational ontologies, and as a commitment to fostering an imagination of the world and the human that differs fundamentally from the Enlightenment paradigm. This specific conception of intellectual marronage forms the basis on which three key strategies that consistently shape Glissant's political practice are identified and mapped. They revolve around Glissant's engagement with history (chapter 2), his commitment to fostering an imagination of the Tout-Monde (whole-world) as a political point of reference (chapter 3), and the continuous exploration of alternative forms of community on the levels of the island, the archipelago and the Tout-Monde (chapter 4). Together these strategies constitute Glissant's personal politics of relation. Its abstract characteristics can be put in a productive conversation with related theoretical traditions invested in exploring the political potentials of fugitivity (chapters 5), as well as with the work of other postcolonial actors whose holistic practice warrants to be described as a politics of relation (chapter 6).
Think local sell global
(2010)
The commuting island
(2011)
Sound matters
(2016)
This essay proposes a reorientation in postcolonial studies that takes account of the transcultural realities of the viral twenty-first century. This reorientation entails close attention to actual performances, their specific medial embeddedness, and their entanglement in concrete formal or informal material conditions. It suggests that rather than a focus on print and writing favoured by theories in the wake of the linguistic turn, performed lyrics and sounds may be better suited to guide the conceptual work. Accordingly, the essay chooses a classic of early twentieth-century digital music – M.I.A.’s 2003/2005 single “Galang” – as its guiding example. It ultimately leads up to a reflection on what Ravi Sundaram coined as “pirate modernity,” which challenges us to rethink notions of artistic authorship and authority, hegemony and subversion, culture and theory in the postcolonial world of today.
This essay reads Sam Selvon’s novel The Lonely Londoners (1956) as a milestone in the decolonisation of British fiction. After an introduction to Selvon and the core composition of the novel, it discusses the ways in which the narrative takes on issues of race and racism, how it in the tradition of the Trinidadian carnival confronts audiences with sexual profanation and black masculine swagger, and not least how the novel, especially through its elaborate use of creole Englishes, reimagines London as a West Indian metropolis. The essay then turns more systematically to the ways in which Selvon translates Western literary models and their isolated subject positions into collective modes of narrative performance taken from Caribbean orature and the calypsonian tradition. The Lonely Londoners breathes entirely new life into the ossified conventions of the English novel, and imbues it with unforeseen aesthetic, ethical, political and epistemological possibilities.
Reflections of Lusáni Cissé
(2016)