COML 6368 - Reading Édouard Glissant

(crosslisted) ASRC 6368, FREN 6368

Spring. 4 credits. Student option grading.

Enrollment limited to: 15 students. Co-meets with ASRC 4368/COML 4368/FREN 4368.

N. Melas.

This seminar will focus on the writings of the polymorphous Martinican poet and thinker, Édouard Glissant (1928-2011). We will attend to the historical context of French colonialism, particularly in the Caribbean, that gives his writing part of its impetus and to the anticolonial intellectuals with whom he engages (chiefly Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon) as well as to his major self-professed influences (William Faulkner, Saint-John Perse, Hegel) and to an array of interlocutors and fellow-travelers as well as a few dissenters. The seminar will examine the main preoccupations of Glissant’s writing (world histories of dispossession and plantation slavery, creolization, Relation, opacity, flux, transversality, Caribbean landscapes as figures of thought, the All-World, etc.) but our focus will be on reading Glissant and attending carefully to the implications of his poetics and of his language for decolonial thought.