Chapter 3. Revolt
Caribbeanness
Texte intégral
‘We must return to the point from which we started. Diversion is not a useful ploy unless it is nourished by reversion: not a return to the longing for origins, to some immutable state of Being, but a return to the point of entanglement, from which we were forcefully turned away; that is where we must ultimately put to work the forces of creolization, or perish.’1
Loss
1In his monumental prose poem, Return to My Native Land, Aimé Césaire opens with a scene of aporetic loss.
‘At the end of the small hours delicately sprouting handles for the market: the West Indies, hungry, hail-marked with smallpox, blown to bits by alcohol, the West Indies shipwrecked in the mud of this bay, wickedly shipwrecked in the dust of this town.’2
2The opening passages go on to describe the island of Martinique as a place of desolation and geographic decadence, where human life has been debased by three centuries of colonial rule. Emphasising the structuring force of loss, community and landscape, Césaire with his Return to My Native Land was one of the earliest Caribbean writers to consciously examine and raise the question of colonialism and its effects. But unlike his later Discourse on Colonialism, Césaire in Return to My Native Land did so not conceptually but poetically. There are no people in these opening passages. Instead, Césaire paints a panoramic topography that decentres individual subjectivity, and in doing so articulates the impact of the long, painful shadow that French colonial history continues to cast on the island. Not concerned with detailing the suffering of the victim, throughout the first part of the poem, Césaire instead describes vividly the geography of colonial squalor and social immobility that the island has historically been subjected to. At once lyrical and visceral, Césaire renders open the wounds of the island’s suffering through a vocabulary of violence, degradation and loss. In this disowning island, the. ‘malarial blood of the heights’ are infested with ‘fumaroles of anguish.’ 116 Here, life remains ‘inert, breathless’ and ‘deaf to its own cry of hunger and misery, revolt, and hatred’. 3Crowds no longer gather, but disengage, ‘make off’, and ‘slip away’.4 Ultimately, for Césaire there is no easy solution to this situation and the only remedy available now is the violent destruction of the old colonial order.5
3The history of this island that Césaire describes so disdainfully in Return to My Native Land, was ‘discovered’—according to a Eurocentric narrative—by Cristopher Columbus in the fifteenth century before being claimed for France in 1635 by the conquistador Pierre Belain D’Esnambuc.6 Under the colonial system that quickly developed since the 1650s, the sole purpose of Martinique, along with the other French Caribbean colonies of Guadeloupe and Saint Domingue was to supply the metropolis with tropical produce, becoming in turn ‘full- fledged plantation economies based upon African slavery.’7 While the initial work of colonisation was undertaken by engagés or indentured labourers, by the mid-1650s, as Robin Blackburn notes, the French islands contained ‘some 13,000 whites and 10,000 black slaves’.8 Importantly, the slave economy that had developed in the islands was regulated by the notorious French Code Noir (Black Code), which made race central to the regulation of Caribbean plantation life. Drafted almost a century before France’s revolutionary Declaration of the Rights of Man, the Code Noir governed every aspect of the slave’s daily life, turning them into human commodities to market. Even as France formally abolished slavery in 1848, a series of decrees continued to indemnify slaves to an ‘authoritarian colonial administration that governed a racially organized society’.9
4It is under these conditions that Césaire went to Paris to further his education and subsequently wrote Return to My Native Land on his return to Martinique. As part of its colonial policy, as Mazisi Kunene writes, France did not establish a university in Martinique, ‘hoping to achieve full assimilation of the Martinican intellectuals who had to go to France for their higher education’.10 But contrary to French colonial expectation, Césaire in Paris, along with other Black intellectuals (most notable of which was Leopold Senghor), organised collectively to establish the ideology of Negritude. As Achille Mbembe notes, with these other poets Césaire responded to a ‘long history of subjugation and bio-political fracturing’ by making the exaltation of the Black race a rallying cry for reclaiming and asserting the cultural identity of a population hitherto denied and negated by a whole system of European values.11 Through this cry, Negritude expressed the will of the enslaved and colonised to escape centuries of resignation, and finally express themselves as a ‘free and sovereign community’ with their ‘own points of origin, their own certainty, and their own destination in the world’.12 Indeed, Césaire’s Return to My Native Land was a direct product of this transimperial cry that circulated across Africa. But for Césaire, in order to embrace this new subject-hood and this new freedom that accompanied this reclamation, the mutilated subject had to first overcome their initial expulsion by radically defining anew notions of time, space and beauty. Ending his Return to My Native Land with a triumphant vision, Césaire’s subject is ‘no longer miserably confided to a facial angle, to a type of hair’ or ‘to a pigmentation’ and is able to finally repossess their lost island.13 As Césaire writes towards the conclusion of his poem,
‘No race holds a monopoly of beauty, intelligence, and strength
there is room for all at the meeting-place of conquest we know now
that the sun revolves around our earth illuminating the plot
which we alone have selected
that every star falls at our command from the sky to the earth
without limit or cease.’14
5Shortly after the poem’s publication in 1939, Césaire was appointed to the post of modern languages at the Lycée Schoelcher in Fort de France, Martinique. It was at the Lycée that Frantz Fanon along with his contemporary Édouard Glissant (albeit three years apart) were introduced to Césaire. In many ways Césaire’s passionate denouncement of colonial racism and his ideas on Black consciousness stood as a crucial precursor to the strands of decolonial politics that the two were to subsequently develop through their own writings and political affiliations. As a theoretical horizon (and this was crucial for both Glissant and Fanon), Césaire’s account of Negritude opened up for the young Fanon and Glissant the question of the relation between the old and new, the past and future. And yet, both Fanon and Glissant went beyond Césaire in their own ways, developing a decolonial stance that readily agreed in their shared critique of Césaire’s cultural nationalism articulated through Negritude. Unlike his teacher who re oriented the loss cause by colonialism by drawing strength and inspiration from a pan-African movement, Fanon wholly reconceived his relation to the past, advocating a violent and revolutionary break from the colonial present as a way to create a new decolonial future. Like Fanon, Glissant also returned to the point Césaire started from. But, unlike Fanon and Césaire, rather than retrieving a traumatic past (Césaire) or effecting a break from it (Fanon), Glissant extended their insights, his advance on both lying in the complexity with which he engages with the space and place of the Caribbean.
6In the following discussion, I want to propose that Glissant with his notion of relation institutes a counter-project of decoloniality that takes part in an intellectual and political genealogy from Césaire’s founding Negritude poem to Fanon’s epistemological break effected in The Wretched of the Earth.15 Underlying my analysis is the question of how to understand the resemblances between these writers, while discerning the important differences in their response to the political dilemmas presented by colonialism. To this end, I treat Glissant’s Caribbean-inspired account of relation as providing a crucial contextual and inter-textual translation of freedom as it manifests within a historically specific problem space of decolonial praxis informed by the legacies of colonial conquest.16 More specifically, turning to Fanon’s project of decolonisation, I argue that Glissant’s creative and meticulous re-working of Fanon through the space of the Caribbean allows us to radically reimagine the meanings through which decolonial futures can be imagined. In doing so, I argue that Glissant’s ‘relation’ reopens layers of decoloniality that are hitherto foreclosed by Césaire and Fanon.
Violence
7One of the most widely studied works of colonial alienation is presented in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks.17 Writing from a locus that speaks to and for the colonised, Fanon brings to the fore the unbearable weight exerted by colonial imaginations on ways of being human. Confronting the question of epistemological location, Fanon explores what happens when the colonised refuses to be a subject of colonialism’s violent grasp. Making a foundational statement about language that effects this epistemological break, Fanon starts Black Skin by saying,
‘To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilisation.’18
8If to speak a language means to support the weight of a civilisation, Fanon’s work offers a deeply phenomenological account of the lived experience of race that attempts to reconstitute and resurrect the location of speaking by grasping a different morphology, using a different syntax and above all, by assuming a different culture. Conceptually, this epistemic difference that Fanon introduces at the beginning of the book emerges most viscerally in his chapter on ‘The Fact of Blackness’. On one level, this chapter recounts Fanon’s personal experience of inhabiting a Black body, but on another level, the text can be read as providing a template for understanding and analysing the spirals of negation the racialised body experiences. The chapter opens with Fanon recounting how he ‘came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things’, his ‘spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world’, only to find that he was nothing but ‘an object in the midst of other objects’.19 This experience of negation anchors the abstract existential experience of inhabiting a Black body for Fanon. Sealed into a crushing objecthood, Fanon turns ‘beseechingly to others’.20 But even as he turns, the dehumanising and determining experience of the racialising gaze denies him acceptance. As Fanon goes on to tell his reader, even as he tries to reach the other side, he stumbles, for the ‘movements, attitudes, and glances of the other’ immutably fix him.21
9This phenomenological experience places a certain ontological dissonance for Fanon, making every ontology ‘unattainable in a colonized and civilized society’.22 For Fanon, in the white world, the Black man’s body is surrounded by an ‘atmosphere of certain uncertainty’, at once threatening its existence and certifying its dismemberment.23 In Fanon’s vision, race is central to subjectivity, its framing so decisive that it fixes the lived experience of the Black man as always already formed by the gaze of the white. As Fanon’s sense of colonial crises unfolds, there is another intriguing development in the chapter, this time cast by the disorientation induced in Fanon by the gaze of a child. The gaze of the child represents how a white world fixes Fanon, turning his body into something that is already formed in and through the racial matrix of the colonial world. The child cries out to his mother,
‘Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened! Frightened! Frightened! Now they were beginning to be afraid of me. I made up my mind to laugh myself to tears, but laughter had become impossible.’24
10Even as Fanon attempts to meet the gaze of the child, trying to unweave the colonial elements that determine his self-understanding, he encounters ‘legends, stories, and histories’ that precede and exceed him.25 The impossibility of laughter that Fanon experiences soon discursively spirals into a sense of nausea. Fanon finds that he exists triply, responsible at the same time for his body, his race and his ancestors. Interpellated as a Negro by the child, Fanon’s colonised self is determined from the outside, contained by the language of the coloniser who tethers his existence to colonial stereotypes that Fanon can’t find a way out of. For Fanon, the question of identification for the Black man is never, as Homi Bhabha puts it, the ‘affirmation of a pre-given identity, a self-fulfilling prophecy’, but rather ‘entails the representation of the subject in the differentiating order of otherness.’26 In other words, the Black body is made Black before it encounters the white gaze. It is in this sense that to understand the experience of the Black man, as Fanon implies with this example, we have to grasp at what lies beyond the surface, beneath the bodily schema, for as Fanon goes on to write, below the ‘corporeal schema’ lies a ‘historico-racial schema’.27 By asking us to think what lies below, Fanon directs us to the racial and historical dimensions beneath the surface of the body that are shaped by the histories of colonialism.
11But unlike his predecessor and teacher Césaire who ultimately found possibilities for reconciliation beyond the impasse created by colonial racism in the Negritude movement, when Fanon tries to reclaim his Negritude, he finds that it was already snatched from him. As Gary Wilder argues, for Fanon, ‘Negritude’s failure was over-determined insofar as it could not overcome the refractory racism so deeply embedded in European colonial and social relations.’28 And yet, Fanon does not foreclose the possibility of an anti-racist position beyond coloniality. Ending his Black Skin more optimistically, Fanon concludes by arguing that it is only through an ‘effort to recapture the self and scrutinize the self’ that it will be possible to ‘create the ideal conditions of existence for a human world’.29 While Black Skin treats the pain of colonialism in a more introspective manner, in his more polemic The Wretched of the Earth (written around ten years after Black Skin), Fanon fully develops the conditions for the existence of this more humane world that Black Skin concludes with, outlining a theory of cultural nationalism and decolonization that calls for a radical break with the colonial past to forge a decolonial future.
12It is in The Wretched of the Earth that Fanon most defiantly brings out the historical violence that lies at the heart of colonialism. Where in Black Skin Fanon had analysed colonial alienation at a metaphysical and psychological scale, in The Wretched of the Earth, he focuses on the concrete material situation underpinning the relationship of the coloniser to the colonised. Famously describing the colonial world as a Manichean world, Fanon provocatively introduces his theory of decolonisation, arguing that ‘decolonization is always a violent event’.30 For Fanon, in this compartmentalised (or Manichean) colonial world, the colonial master and the colonised servant live and confront each other in mutually exclusive ways. Like the juxtaposition of white and Black bodies in Black Skin, Fanon opposes the ‘native sector’ to the European sector here. But Fanon places these opposing entities ‘not in the service of a higher unity’, for in the colonial world there can be no reconciliation.31 Fanon’s central insight here is that challenging the colonial world isn’t a ‘rational confrontation of viewpoints’, but requires above all that the colonised ‘blow the colonial world to smithereens’.32 For Fanon then, both colonialism and decolonisation are always violent processes. In Fanon’s account, violence becomes formative for ending and upturning the original violence that created the colonial world, and it is the force of this violence that subsequently liberates the subjugated. And yet Fanon goes on to submit this violence to question, for violence in Fanon is never simply something that is already pre-formed and thus imminently graspable. As the colonised effect a violent and revolutionary break, they soon realise that national independence brings to light multiple (and contradictory) realities.
‘The people who in the early days of the struggle had adopted the primitive Manichaeanism of the colonizer- Black versus White, Arab versus Infidel- realize en-route that some blacks can be whiter than the whites, and that the prospect of a national flag or independence does not automatically result in certain segments of the population giving up their privileges and their interests’33
13As Manichean dualities start to unravel, and it is realised that ‘some blacks can be whiter than the whites’, the colonised are confronted with the struggle of realising and clarifying how they are to imagine themselves. The moment of violence for Fanon is a rupture not only in a physical-material sense, but also represents a radical moment for the colonised to critically work through the complexities of national liberation. Fanon’s violence, more than a redemptive upheaval of colonial structures and institutions, also constitutes a particular historical juncture where constraints of identity, culture and language are questioned for a new, and always indeterminate form of politics. As Anna Agathangelou argues, in Fanon’s project, violence always involves ‘work’ to imagine the ‘potential for another world emerging out of colonialism’.34 The shape that this work needs to take is addressed by Fanon in his chapter ‘On National Culture’. Grappling with the new symbolic form and order of the postcolonial world, Fanon concedes that the ‘passionate quest for a national culture prior to the colonial era’ can be justified on account of it providing the colonised with a sense of ‘psycho affective equilibrium’.35 But even as Fanon recognises nativism as a reasonable response to colonial racism he simultaneously remains wary of the cultural implications of this turn to towards a nostalgic past. Taking issue with the concept of Negritude more directly here, for Fanon the unconditional affirmation of an African culture eventually leads to a dead end, its biggest limitation being that it ends up negating difference. By beginning with the idea of a unified diasporic culture, Negritude, as Kris Sealey in his reading of Fanon describes, ‘flattens the real and significant differences’ between heterogeneous African cultures.36 In other words, a diasporic notion of cultural identity cuts off the political and cultural struggle for decolonisation and independence from the pulse of the national struggle.
Relation
14Confronting the world-breaking capacities of colonial violence, Fanon highlights his project of decolonisation as a violent and revolutionary rupture which necessitates, in his words, ‘quite simply the substitution of one “species” of mankind for another.’37 But importantly, Fanon does this by stretching violence beyond the realm of physical-material violence. Violence is never sustained by ‘unmediated physical strength alone’.38 That is, the ‘substitution of one species of mankind for another’ isn’t just an act of physical violence alone, but requires above all that the colonised fundamentally alter and re-structure their ways of imagining the world.39Fanon’s decolonisation project then, requires not just the ontological disinvestment of the colonial subject from the colonial world, but also rests upon the colonised claiming a new symbolic and national form that takes its place. For Fanon, this claiming is realised by the development of a national consciousness that neither turns inwards towards a supposedly uncontaminated past, nor outward, by looking for fables of unity and homogeneity. It is in this regard that Fanon saw both efforts to reclaim a native past and the Pan-Africanist approach of the Negritude movement as inherently flawed. Instead, in Fanon’s project, it would be the ‘crystallization of the national consciousness’ that would radically open up new and unlimited horizons for the hitherto colonised subject.40 Teeming with life and perpetually in motion, it is the national consciousness alone for Fanon that ‘satisfies all those indispensable requirements for culture which alone can give it credibility, validity, dynamism, and creativity.’41 This movement beyond stable and homogenous categories then does not stand upon an essence but flows from a decolonial vision that envisages a complete and radical break with the colonial past.
15Setting up a conversation with Frantz Fanon, Anna Agathangelou has read Fanon’s account of colonial violence as providing a productive imaginary for a radical and revolutionary politics. Reading Fanon as effecting an ethical re-positioning, Agathangelou locates the critical import of Fanon’s project of violence in what it ‘allows us to imagine’.42 For Agathangelou, it is in the leap; the radical moment of violence that Fanon articulates, that it becomes possible to ‘overthrow the sources of violence to make political institutions more responsive to what will cultivate national growth.’43 However, and what Agathangelou does not consider here is that while Fanon is able to productively unknot the binds of colonial racism, by offering only a complete break from the colonial past he retreats from his own critique of colonial racism. In other words, by envisaging a violent break as the only solution to colonial racism, Fanon transcends the inexorable and fundamental link that he himself identifies between race, reason and freedom. My point here is not to criticise Fanon but to question his claim that if coloniality is fundamental to social existence then how can violence effect a clean break from the lived experiences of coloniality.44 The problem is not that Fanon is too abstract and doesn’t provide a solid grounding for theorising the political ramifications of his account of violence, but that Fanon is not abstract enough to fully grasp the intellectual and existential despair experienced by the dispossessed colonial imagination. It is also at this point however, that in contrast to Fanon’s project of violence, Glissant’s displacement of Fanon’s violence with his account of relation can be recognised. In many ways Fanon’s work provides the crucial subtext to Glissant’s development of ‘relation’. Glissant’s relation begins from a similar discussion of colonial alienation that Fanon (and Césaire) articulates. But contra Fanon, the postcolonial moment in Glissant demands not a violent rupture, but instead opens up a problem space that works from the very unequal premise that the legacy of colonial alienation imposed on the colonised.
16What I propose to do here is to extend Fanon’s decolonial praxis by considering the ways in which Fanon’s contributions to race and colonial discourse are translated by Glissant through his account of relation. Importantly, the sense of translation that Glissant pursues with relation is not a mere transfer of ideas, but rather entails a radical reworking and retrieval of colonial life that Fanon describes by reading Fanon from within the geographic specificity of the Caribbean. It is in this sense that I situate Glissant as responding to and building on an intellectual and political genealogy that links his notion of ‘relation’ to Fanon’s project of ‘violence’. As Andrew Daily has noted, for Glissant, Fanon’s work formed a ‘central theoretical and practical touchstone’, and in many ways Glissant sought to develop and carry forward Fanon’s project for the ‘total overthrow of colonization’.45 A student at Lycée Schoelcher, Glissant, like Fanon was also exposed early to Césaire’s work on Black consciousness. Although Glissant participated in the Negro Writers Conference in 1959, along with Fanon, as Michael Dash notes, he had already begun to look ‘beyond the simplifications of the Negritude movement’, albeit from different perspectives.46 Thus, while Glissant then ultimately deviates from both Césaire and Fanon, he shares with both an important Caribbean inheritance.
17As Robbie Shilliam has noted, Glissant grounds his inquiry within the dispossession forced upon the various people by the European colonisation of the Caribbean archipelago.47 For Glissant, the situation of the Caribbean is characterised foremost by a set of enduring colonial relations that consistently over-determine the ways in which dispossessed populations can meaningfully pursue self-determination outside the colonial order. According to Glissant, one of the most virulent legacies of this situation has been the ‘visible abandonment of a collective spirit, of the common will that alone allows a people to survive as a people’.48 This is a context in which dispossession is not caused by visible material domination alone, but by a form of suppression that completely absorbs Caribbean culture within the French colonial economy without any alternative. In his work, Glissant offers a historical perspective on this process of psychic disintegration, naming the final stage of this process the ‘mimetic trap’. A process of insidious violence, colonisation imposes an irresistible way of identification with the colonial order, aggravating in the colonised mind, an ‘impulse towards imitation’, such that the coloniser’s model of social existence appears as the ‘only guarantee of social status’ for the colonised.49
18With this diagnosis, Glissant moves to consider history as neurosis. Similar to Fanon who identified a profound phenomenological alienation that renders a pathological dissonance upon the colonised, Glissant does not think it ridiculous to characterise the lived experience of Caribbean dislocation as causing a ‘steadily advancing neurosis’.50 As Carine Mardorossian observes, like Fanon, Glissant thus believes that the disorientation of the world experienced by the colonised doesn’t pre-exist colonialism, but actually derives from it.51 Indeed, Glissant is explicit about these links with Fanon. In Caribbean Discourse for instance, Glissant lauds Fanon, arguing for the importance of his work in leading ‘somewhere’.52 And yet, Glissant quickly argues for a ‘return to the point where our problems lay in wait for us’, indicating the incompleteness of the project undertaken by his predecessor.53 As Glissant writes,
‘However, the works that followed negritude and the revolutionary theory of Wretched of The Earth are universal. They follow the historical curve of the decline of decolonization in the world. They illustrate and establish the landscape of a zone shared elsewhere. We must return to the point from which we started.’54
19It is in this return to the ‘point from which we started’ that Glissant’s break from Fanon can most clearly be discerned. Unlike Fanon who argued that it is only through a revolutionary rupture that leads elsewhere that a subjugated population could end their domination and claim their freedom, Glissant finds an alternative within the very workings of colonial domination that Fanon sought to transcend through violence. Ultimately, for Fanon, there could be no culture without the development of a national consciousness, leading him to disavow and displace his Creole and Caribbean identity, recreating and reinventing a new filiation in the spirit of a revolutionary Algeria.55 Indeed, as Paul Beckett has argued, while ‘Fanon’s work is frequently presented in the language of universals’, his most important work, The Wretched of the Earth, was ‘rooted in the circumstances of the Algerian war’.56 That is, Fanon sees his revolutionary project as connected to a sense of place. Violence, while revolutionary and rupturing a break with the colonial past ultimately begins by relocation, where a new national consciousness can subsequently take the place of an erstwhile oppressive colonial order.57
20In contrast to Fanon, who ended up going elsewhere to realise his project of decolonisation, Glissant follows Fanon’s historical curve, but instead locates within the regional context of the Caribbean (or what he also terms as the ‘Other America’) the resources for radically challenging and subverting the colonial order. It is from this rearticulation that Glissant translates the meaning of existential alienation, the very same alienation that Fanon transcends through a violent interruption and eruption of revolutionary violence. Glissant’s distance from Fanon then, begins from a retrieval of the meaning of dispossession. While Fanon treats the despair caused by the pain of dispossession as a pathology that requires an assertion that is only realised by a complete break from the land, Glissant finds within this despair not pessimism, ‘but the ultimate resource of whoever writes and wishes to fight on his own terrain.’58 The Caribbean is not only a place where its people were transplanted, but therein also lay the opportunity for different dispossessed communities to ‘assert a considerable set of possibilities’.59 Unlike Fanon’s national consciousness which locates its foci within the nation, Glissant’s Caribbean ‘embodies openness’, establishing a ‘dialectic between the inside and the outside’, which is reflected in the ‘relationship between the land and the sea’.60 While Fanon inevitably locates in a national identity the collective agency and economic autonomy needed to wrestle away from colonialism, the Caribbean for Glissant,
‘tears us free from the intolerable alternative of the need for nationalism and introduces us to the cross-cultural process that modifies but does not undermine the latter.’61
21An immediate consequence of the openness of the Caribbean is that it reveals a series of cross- cultural processes that are neither linear nor hierarchic. No longer embodying the prototypical experience of racialisation, for Glissant the Caribbean becomes ‘capable of carrying forward our people to self-renewal and of providing them with renewed ambition.’62 It should be noted at this point that Glissant is not advocating subsuming difference under the openness of the Caribbean here. Rather, by beginning with the Caribbean, Glissant effects an important reversion of the decolonial prerogatives of Césaire and Fanon that placed questions of difference and alterity at the heart of the political struggle. It is by attending to the specificity of the Caribbean context that Glissant is able to fundamentally translate the language of colonial alienation, reconceiving it around a Caribbean model of relation that places difference and becoming at the heart of politics. Replacing atavistic notions of Africanness (Césaire) without conceding to a radical break from a sense of place (Fanon), Glissant emphasises his notion of relation against the backdrop of the Caribbean region. In more specific terms, through relation, Glissant is able to present a new analysis of the Caribbean, reading its geography as leading to a very different politics of revolt. It is in this sense that in the Poetics of Relation, Glissant writes,
‘Whereas the Western nation is first of all an “opposite”, for colonized peoples identity will be primarily “opposed to”– that is, a limitation from the beginning. Decolonization will have done its real work when it goes beyond this limit.’63
22For Glissant, whereas the Western nation distinguishes itself by establishing protocols that define the European Self against a colonised Other, Glissant’s relation seeks to go ‘beyond this limit’, positing relation as that which develops through the flows of a heterogeneous constellation of emergent and unstable entities. As Jacob Kripp has argued, this does not mean that Glissant eschews the ‘antagonistic encounter with colonialism’, but rather that he explores the ‘immanent potentiality of this encounter’ to discover something else, or another way.64 Against the ‘conqueror’s voyaging act’ which exports to the colonies the mono-lingual root, ‘relation’ in contrast is always ‘spoken multi-lingually’.65 Never atavistic, nor claiming a primordial inheritance, relation proceeds from a renunciation regarding a supposedly stable situation of origin. Ultimately then, relation never strives to know the totality of the world, and instead embraces an unpredictable future, for while totality is subject to immobility, relation by definition is movement.66 Grounded in the logic of movement and unpredictability, in other words, the community produced in the flux of relation is always unstable, remaining open to an emergent set of relations that always produce something new and unprecedented. And yet, relation is never without sense. For Glissant, it is within the regional context of the Caribbean that relation finds its most vivid instantiation. The Caribbean for Glissant bears witness to the emergence of the unceasing and unforeseeable linguistic and social formations that Glissant’s concept of relation tries to capture.
‘The Caribbean, as far as I am concerned, may be held up as one of the places in the world where Relation presents itself most visibly, one of the explosive regions where it seems to be gathering strength.’67
23Compared to Césaire whose turn to Negritude exalted the unity and homogeneity of Black identity, or Fanon whose logic of revolutionary violence led him to fix his project within fixed and determinate boundaries, Glissant’s relation gathers its strength from being located in the explosive region of the Caribbean. Importantly, as Glissant goes on to convey, as a sea that never concentrates but instead ‘diffracts’, the Caribbean provides a natural illustration to what relation entails.68 It is also within the specificity of the Caribbean experience of colonisation that Glissant locates ‘creolisation’ in the Caribbean as the closest approximation to his idea of relation. While in its most general sense creolisation ‘refers to a history of contact and the subsequent processes of indigenisation or nativisation of European settlers’, Glissant employs creolisation not to describe a straightforward empirical reality where cultural and linguistic entanglements abound, but as a concept that is simultaneously descriptive and political.69 Indexing flexibility to the concept, Glissant treats creolisation as a mode of thinking that brings to the fore the politics of relation. As Glissant writes, the idea of creolisation demonstrates that ‘henceforth it is no longer valid to glorify unique origins.’70 Further, creolisation is not merely the meeting and synthesis of two differences, but is an endless becoming, its elements consistently diffracting and its consequences unforeseeable, underscoring the impossibility of ever establishing pure lineages or reifying cultural affiliations.
24Forming a complex mix, the idea of creolisation exceeds suffering, bringing forth the possibilities of a decolonial future through relation. Unlike Césaire’s Negritude or Fanon’s violence, relation promises a different future informed by the immanent openness of the Caribbean. And yet, while with creolisation Glissant is able to bring forth the imaginative strength of relation, he does not subsume relation within a regime of visibility, instead claiming ‘everyone’s right to opacity’.71 While both Césaire and Fanon’s work ultimately led somewhere, Glissant forcefully turns away from charting the path relation is to take. As Glissant sees it, relation does not make everything knowable by making itself immediately understandable or by putting itself at our immediate disposal. The task of progressive action for Glissant then is to be carried out within the ethico-political space afforded by a turn to ‘opacity’. Never exempt from critical examination, to see relation ultimately requires assuming a certain distance. It involves above all, to borrow from Sara Ahmed, ‘getting closer to others to occupy or inhabit the distance between us.’72 Indeed, the valorisation of opacity that Glissant pursues within relation by no means diminishes his concept’s critical import, but rather offers new layers of anti-coloniality that re-invigorate the practice of critical theory. By arguing for the ‘right to opacity’, Glissant stretches the decolonial implications of his work beyond the problem space afforded by the political and intellectual lineage of the Caribbean that he draws on and translates.
25What gives opacity its expression then, and what is its relation to ‘relation’?
Notes de bas de page
1 Glissant, 26.
2 Aimé Césaire, Return to My Native Land, trans. Anna Bostock and John Berger (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1969), 37.
3 Césaire, 39-40.
4 Césaire, 38-39.
5 Mazisi Kunene, “Introduction,” in Return to My Native Land, by Aimé Césaire, trans. Anna Bostock and John Berger (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1969), 28.
6 David Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Biography (London: Verso, 2012).
7 Tyler Stovall, “Race and the Making of the Nation: Blacks in Modern France,” in Diasporic Africa: A Reader, ed. Michael A. Gomez (New York: New York University, 2006), 204.
8 Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 (London: Verso, 1997), 282.
9 Gary Wilder, “Race, Reason, Impasse: Césaire, Fanon, and the Legacy of Emancipation,” Radical History Review 2004, no. 90 (October 1, 2004): 37.
10 Kunene, “Introduction”, 19.
11 Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 33.
12 Mbembe, 33-34.
13 Césaire, Return to My Native Land, 83.
14 Césaire, 85.
15 On this intellectual filiation see also , Sylvia Wynter, “Beyond the Word of Man: Glissant and the New Discourse of the Antilles,” World Literature Today 63, no. 4 (1989): 639.
16 I borrow the usage of ‘problem space’ from David Scott. As Scott explains, a ‘problem space’ forms an ‘ensemble of questions and answers around which a horizon of identifiable stakes (conceptual as well as ideological political stakes) hangs.’ David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 4.
17 See here for instance, Neetu Khanna, The Visceral Logics of Decolonization (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 1-13.; Ahmed, “A Phenomenology of Whiteness.”. 152-155.
18 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto Press, 2008), 8.
19 Fanon, 82.
20 Fanon.
21 Fanon.
22 Fanon.
23 Fanon, 83.
24 Fanon, 84.
25 Fanon.
26 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 2004), 64.
27 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 84.
28 Wilder, “Race, Reason, Impasse”, 49.
29 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 181.
30 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 1.
31 Fanon, 4.
32 Fanon, 6.
33 Fanon, 93.
34 Anna M. Agathangelou, “Fanon on Decolonization and Revolution: Bodies and Dialectics,” Globalizations 13, no. 1 (January 2, 2016): 121.
35 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 148.
36 Kris Sealey, “The Composite Community: Thinking Through Fanon’s Critique of a Narrow Nationalism,” Critical Philosophy of Race 6, no. 1 (January 1, 2018): 29.
37 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1.
38 Fanon, 88.
39 On the meniangs of violence in Fanon and its links in fundamentally restructuring the world, see Himadeep Muppidi, “Frantz Fanon,” in Critical Theorists and International Relations, ed. Jenny Edkins and Nick Vaughan WIliams (London: Routledge, 2009), 156-157.
40 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. 193.
41 Fanon, 177.
42 Agathangelou, “Fanon on Decolonization and Revolution”, 123.
43 Agathangelou, 125.
44 This retreat has also been observed by Gary Wilder. See here, Wilder, “Race, Reason, Impasse”, 51.
45 Andrew M. Daily, “‘It Is Too Soon… or Too Late:’ Frantz Fanon’s Legacy in the French Caribbean,” Karib – Nordic Journal for Caribbean Studies 2, no. 1 (November 2, 2015): 45.
46 Dash, “Introduction”, xv.
47 Shilliam, “Decolonising the Grounds of Ethical Inquiry”, 659.
48 Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 5.
49 Glissant, 45.
50 Glissant, 65.
51 Carine Mardorossian, “From Fanon to Glissant: A Martinican Genealogy,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 13, no. 3 (November 1, 2009): 21.
52 Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 25.
53 Glissant.
54 Glissant.
55 Also see here, Françoise Vergès, “Creole Skin, Black Mask: Fanon and Disavowal,” Critical Inquiry 23, no. 3 (April 1997): 578–595.
56 Paul A. Beckett, “Algeria vs. Fanon: The Theory of Revolutionary Decolonization, and the Algerian Experience,” Western Political Quarterly 26, no. 1 (March 1973): 5.
57 Also see here, Drabinski, Glissant and the Middle Passage: Philosophy, Beginning, Abyss, 200.
58 Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 104.
59 Glissant, 16.
60 Glissant, 139.
61 Glissant.
62 Glissant, 223.
63 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 17.
64 Kripp, “Arendt and Glissant on the Politics of Beginning”, 13.
65 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 19.
66 Also see here, Headley, “Glissant’s Existential Ontology of Difference”, 85.
67 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 33.
68 Glissant, 33-34.
69 Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, “The Creolization of Theory,” in The Creolization of Theory, ed. Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 22.
70 Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 140.
71 Glissant, Introduction to a Poetics of Diversity, 45.
72 Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (London: Routledge, 2000), 179.

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