Think like an Archipelago: Paradox in the Work of Édouard Glissant by Michael Wiedorn (review)

Michael Wiedorn has produced a most compelling account of the way Édouard Glissant thinks, or at least of the kind of thinking enabled, even solicited or enacted, by the Martinican author’s writings. Wiedorn’s book lives up admirably to the promise of its title, comprising as this does two very different — almost cognitively dissonant — projects. The main title is an unmarked quotation from Glissant: in the imperative mood, this personification attributes the power of thought to geographical configurations, in this case archipelagos. The subtitle sets the book a more straightforward topic: the study of paradox in Glissant’s writings. In both parts of the title, the (figurative) work and reworking of thought are already to the fore. Wiedorn’s account of paradox in Glissant’s work is economical in the best sense. This is not, then, a survey of Glissant’s entire œuvre or of all the genres in (between) which Glissant wrote. Instead, Wiedorn concentrates very closely on three novels, published between 1964 and 1999: Le Quatrième Siècle, Tout-monde, and Sartorius, and he also privileges two essays: Faulkner-Mississippi, published in 1996, and Philosophie de la Relation (2009), the last single-author book published before Glissant’s death in 2011. Interrogating the author’s approach to totality, alterity, teleology, and philosophy, Wiedorn’s tracing of paradox in his reading of these works — and indeed of Glissant’s trajectory from one work and genre to another — is both lively and forensically, yet elegantly, incisive. No less valuable is his timely tackling of the more significant and less unseemly of the two big splits that have divided the critical reception of Glissant’s work since 2011, namely the schism in English-language Glissant criticism. On one side of this divide stand, for example, Celia Britton, J. Michael Dash, and Nick Nesbitt; on the other, Chris Bongie and Peter Hallward. To simplify, the former argue that all of Glissant’s work, not just his earlier Caribbean-focused poetics but also his later poetics of ‘globality’, carries both an ethical (philosophical) and a political charge. The latter, however, see most of Glissant’s (post-1980s) work as a post-political sell-out. Eschewing polemics, Wiedorn exposes implicitly, but no less incisively for that, the extraordinary poverty of any under-estimation of the creative and productive energy that allowed Glissant’s thinking to conjugate — paradoxically — the ethical and political imperatives of critique and philosophy with the creative and visionary charge of poetics. In identifying paradox, including this latter paradoxical accommodation, as the seminal impulse of Glissant’s thinking and as its constant and prophetic propagating pulse, his reading has done justice to the powerful legacy of this crucially and simultaneously Caribbean and world-scale, postcolonial and utopianist writer.