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  • Theorizing Glissant: Sites and Citations eds. by John Drabinski and Marisa Parham
  • César Augusto Colón-Montijo
John Drabinski and Marisa Parham, eds. 2015. Theorizing Glissant: Sites and Citations. London: Bowman & Littlefield. vii, 175 pp. ISBN-13: 978-1783484089, ISBN-10: 178348408x.

The collection Theorizing Glissant: Sites and Citations makes an important contribution to the field of Caribbean studies through a nuanced and diverse examination of the keywords that lie at the core of Édouard Glissant's vast oeuvre. The book reads as a sort of guide through the central tropes, poetic aims, political contexts, and philosophical questions that motivate the Martinican's thought. The authors gathered in this book approach these ideas from multiple disciplinary perspectives, situating his work in relation to key historical and political processes in Martinique and in the broader Caribbean. Several of these essays also locate Glissant's ideas in counterpoint to those of thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze and Henri Bergson who have been acknowledged as influential references in his work. Others put Glissant in conversation with contemporary theorists such as Luce Irigaray in order to critique the erasure of sexuality in his oeuvre, or to critique the sort of devotion that marks his relation to William Faulkner. Hence, this book should be of interest not only for Caribbean scholars but also for those involved in philosophy, critical theory, literature, and cultural studies, as well as scholars engaged with racial and ethnic matters. [End Page 236]

What I appreciate the most about Theorizing Glissant is its effort to examine the Martinican theoretician on his own terms. Even when situating him in relation to the philosophers or writers who haunt his oeuvre, the essays in this collection mostly theorize Glissant through the prism of his own nomenclature. The editors, John E. Drabinski and Marisa Parham, make the central aims of the collection clear in their short introduction entitled "Glissant, Creolizing Philosophy." Its task is to engage critically with Glissant's hybrid literary, philosophical, and political legacy as a means "to reconsider the meaning of philosophy itself, and thus also to reevaluate what it means to engage in philosophical reflection, to embrace creolizing rather than reifying" (Drabinski and Parham 2015, 2). This book therefore aims to unsettle philosophical inquiry through different analytic enactments of the type of rhizomatic thinking promoted by Glissant.

The essays featured in Theorizing Glissant are organized following a rhizomatic structure. The book starts and ends with essays that locate Glissant's thought in relation to larger political events that marked his life and work. The analyses zoom in and out of his oeuvre, moving from close readings of his key publications to broader Caribbean colonial and postcolonial histories, and back to in-depth reflections about Glissant's aesthetics. I read this structure as an attempt by the editors to emulate Glissant's own mode of inquiry and inscription. Throughout, one feels a sense of errantry in how each text navigates the central tropes and political implications of his work. The individual chapters that comprise this rhizomatic reading are so varied and dense—even though some of them are relatively short pieces—that it would be unfair to attempt to provide a comprehensive reading of each text in such a short review. Nonetheless, making a brief summary is key in order to further describe the collection's scope.

In "Glissant's Opacité and the Re-Conceptualization of Identity," H. Adlai Murdoch analyzes the concept of opacité in order to confront questions about the formation of identities amidst the pervasive patterns of neocolonialism brought by the law of departmentalization in the Francophone Caribbean. The author reads opacité as a conceptual means for the creation of relational identities—always in perpetual transformation—that arise out of "the creative resistance to colonial/metropolitan domination, and from complex contestatory relations with other nations and cultures in an ongoing cultural process" (Murdoch 2015, 21). The second chapter, by Seanna Sumalee Oakley, examines Glissant's modes of inscription as a praxis of philosophy and a politics: Glissant usually acknowledges by name the literary authors he references, but rarely makes direct citations of the Western philosophers who inform his poetics. Entitled "In Citation to the Chance: Glissant...

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