Chapter 4. Poetics
Opacity
Texte intégral
‘We clamor for the right to opacity for everyone.’1
Difference
1Recent scholarship across the humanities and social sciences has creatively and rigorously acknowledged, confronted and explored the problem of difference as a way of unmaking the colonial violence constitutive to the making of the modern world. Revealing the ways in which a self-avowedly particular and Western experience disguises itself as the basis for formulating universal claims to knowledge, these critiques reveal the institutional and epistemic narcissism underpinning these claims. Claiming inspiration from different strands of postcolonial and decolonial critique, much of this push for thinking through/about/beyond difference comes from, as Adom Getachew and Karuna Mantena note, the challenge it poses to different disciplines to ‘attend to their implication in histories of imperial domination and racial hierarchy and to reckon with the continuing ideological imprint of this past.’2 From my own disciplinary vantage point within International Relations and Political Science (IRPS), which once contained intellectual inquiry around the theft of land, slavery, genocide and colonialism through a ‘wilful amnesia’, one of the most fascinating aspects of this turn has been the uptake of ‘decolonisation’ as a critical motto across the discipline.3
2Indeed, since Amitav Acharya’s call in 2014 for a more ‘Global IR’ as a way to transcend the discipline’s parochial epistemological and ontological foundations in view of a commitment towards a more ‘pluralistic universalism’, much has been done to better represent hitherto marginalised (and therefore different) voices and experiences.4 No longer wedded to a singular origin story, nor relegating the memories of slavery, race, sexuality and coloniality to the margins, the erstwhile parochial ‘House of IR’, if not yet transformed, most definitely finds itself now on rickety legs.5 Recent literature exploring these revisions has proceeded along two fronts (although not hermetically sealed from each other, and not exhaustible). On an institutional level, greater attention has been paid towards the disciplinary amnesia surrounding the formative role of white supremacy and race relations in the making of the discipline, or what Robert Vitalis calls overturning the ‘norm against noticing’.6 Empire and race have been shown to provide the guiding context not only for the development of the discipline, but in generating key theories of anarchy, sovereignty and property.7 A second line of reversion has proceeded by exploring and de-linking the (enduring) epistemic and ontological complicity between race, coloniality and political theory. A generation of IRPS scholars have delineated new forms of inter-subjectivity committed to ethically representing the Other through forms of inquiry that are affective, embodied and particular, rather than rational, disembodied and universal.8
3One dominant rubric that draws these different critiques together, other than their shared commitment to countering and overcoming eurocentrism, is the imperative role of translations in understanding difference across epistemic and ontological divides. In different ways, the critiques that flow from the intellectual pursuit of wrestling with the philosophical and political problems of difference, whether by way of genealogical critique, an interrogation of epistemic biases and occlusions, or through creative re-openings, all rely on their ability to provide the epistemic and ontological space for enabling the Other to be finally heard. While throughout human history, colonial and imperial projects of conquest and expropriation have sought to divide, alienate and classify, these works have attempted to ascend the voices and experiences of those erstwhile pathologised and dehumanised by colonial divisions of humanity. While these critiques have been compelling, prompting important conversations around narratives beyond the insular enclosure provided by a hyperreal Europe, I worry that an overriding concern with correcting the problems posed by difference leads them to prematurely reduce difference to that which is transparent. Joining these discussions, but in part departing from them, rather than framing the question of difference as a problem of representation and unequal power asymmetries, I want to uphold Glissant’s injunction regarding the right to opacity as a crucial ethico-political assertion whose critical force lies in naming and preserving what Michael Wiedorn has termed an ‘ethics of alterity’.9 In turning to Glissant’s concept of opacity, I take a cue from Gayatri Spivak, who in The Politics of Translation writes,
‘In other words, if you are interested in talking about the other, and/or in making a claim to be the other, it is crucial to learn other languages.’10
4Following Spivak, I want to ask if in the rush to understand each other we displace the importance of first learning the Other’s language. Extending Spivak, I also want to ask what forms of intellectual and ethical commitments are needed when the Other’s language is not ours to learn. To this end, here, I turn to my attention to some of the ways that critical theory has attempted to address the philosophical and political question of difference. In the spirit of the recent anti-colonial openings carved within the intellectual and disciplinary space afforded by the work of scholars working within and beyond IRPS, I draw on a transversal lineage that encounters the problem of difference beyond disciplinary confines. In this regard, and to illustrate the philosophical problem of difference, I compare and contrast two seminal contributions, namely Dipesh Chakrabarty’s model of scandalous translations and Marisol de la Cadena’s work on connection and conversation.
5I argue that while salutary, Chakrabarty ends up reducing difference by locating the Other within an ontologically singular framework of translation. In contrast, de la Cadena by upholding the polyvocality of difference is able to provide a productive opening for expressing the complexity and density of the Other. Building on this discussion by way of considering de la Cadena’s proposal for thinking difference ontologically, I outline the importance of thinking at the limits of that which exceeds translation and even at times stops it. However, rather than a politics of ontology as de la Cadena proposes, I make the case for developing a poetics of difference inspired by Glissant’s concept of opacity. I follow Audre Lorde here in understanding poetics not as a luxury, but as an illumination which gives ‘name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless – about to be birthed, but already felt.’11 Consequently, Glissant’s poetics of difference centred around his concept of opacity also has a wider socio-political meaning than through its poetics, and is able to give birth to a very different possibility for meaningful hermeneutic engagement with the lives and experiences of the Other. Offering an alternate imaginary to that proffered by the modern-colonial episteme, Glissant’s poetics neither co-opts difference nor surmounts it, but flourishes from a scrutiny of the possibilities and imaginations fuelled by the right to opacity. To further explicate this poetic dimension of Glissant’s opacity, I argue that it is the irreducible opacity of difference that Glissant develops through his poetics that keeps his theory of relation in a state of endless becoming and movement.12
Untranslatable
6In his influential book, Provincializing Europe, Dipesh Chakrabarty analyses the deep ties that bind purportedly universal concepts to a hyperreal Europe. Problematising the role and politics of what he identifies as historicism, a mode of thought which privileges grand narratives by assuming that any object under investigation retains ‘a unity of conception throughout its existence’, Chakrabarty works through the ways political modernity systematically marginalises and discounts subaltern experiences.13 Generating a set of everyday paradoxes for the subaltern, Chakrabarty questions what it is that allows the ‘modern European sages to develop with such clairvoyance with regard to societies of which they were empirically ignorant?’.14 Responding to this asymmetric ignorance that pervades the modern episteme, Chakrabarty argues for the necessity of ‘provincializing Europe’. However, for Chakrabarty this idea of ‘provincializing Europe’ cannot be a project of ‘cultural relativism’.15 As Chakrabarty notes, in unravelling the necessary entanglements between Europe and the grand narratives of citizenship, law, human rights, the state, and civil society amongst others, any analysis must work within a framework in which Europe is at once both ‘inadequate’ and ‘indispensable’.16 The task of ‘provincializing Europe’ then, requires not turning away but confronting a European heritage that is now global, and which must be renewed from and for the margins. In other words, for Chakrabarty, however much we develop an incredulity towards certain European metanarratives that disguise themselves as being secular and universal and that in turn neutralise and relegate difference to the margins, our lives remain inevitably embedded within their categories.
7To this end, a key dilemma confronting postcolonial scholarship in Chakrabarty’s account is the important role of translations in narrating non-Western histories. For Chakrabarty, translations across different cultural and semiotic systems afford an important analytical marker through which different subaltern narratives and rituals can be productively extricated. Contrary to Western and secular history, whose own time is godless, empty and homogenous, such that for any span of time, difference can be translated, named and subsumed within a universal language, Chakrabarty proposes his own model of translation predicated on a proposition of radical untranslatability. Chakrabarty questions the assumption running through modern political thought that the ‘human is ontologically singular, and that gods and spirits are in the end “social facts”, that the social somehow exists prior to them.’17 Instead, Chakrabarty starts his inquiry by taking the realm of gods and spirits (the non-modern) to be ‘coeval with the human’.18 Writing into the secular language of history, the presence of gods and spirits, Chakrabarty outlines the scandalous aspects of a translation. Taking the example of translating the universal category of ‘labour’ in South Asia, Chakrabarty elaborates on the issue,
‘An ambiguity must mark the translation of the tool-worshipping jute worker’s labor into the universal category “labor”: it must be enough like the secular category “labor” to make sense, yet the presence and plurality of gods and spirits in it must also make it “enough unlike to shock.” There remains something of a “scandal”—of the shocking—in every translation, and it is only through a relationship of intimacy to both languages that we are aware of the degree of this scandal.’19
8It is in this sense that ‘Europe’ presents itself as being both ‘indispensable’ and ‘inadequate’ for Chakrabarty. Europe remains indispensable so far that one has to translate the ‘tool worshipping jute worker’s labor into the universal category “labor”’, and inadequate in that the ‘presence and plurality of gods and spirits’ sets limits on the ways in which the category can be historically narrated. What comes in the way of the smooth translation of ‘labour’ in the subaltern context is the constant generation of narratives of incommensurable difference, or as Chakrabarty avers to in the above quote, the ‘presence and plurality of gods and spirits’. It is in this disjuncture, when a translation produces neither an equivalent nor a higher category to mediate what is different, that Chakrabarty locates the scandal. For Chakrabarty, it is by recognising the shocking aspect of the scandal as being constitutive to the making of sociological and historical categories that it becomes possible to become aware of horizons of human experiences and existences other than those encoded into European political thought. The scandal instituted in the translation pushes thought beyond the limits of the universal and the secular, in turn making it possible for Chakrabarty to reflect on the ontological heterogeneity of historical time. Gods and spirits are no longer relegated to the realm of the non-modern, or the ahistorical, but considered as being fundamentally and existentially coeval with the heterogeneity (and not homogeneity) of historical time. And yet, it is also here that the limits of Chakrabarty’s reflections on the problems of difference present themself.
9While Chakrabarty by attending to what is scandalous about translations is able to extend historical representation, he ends up reading subaltern experiences through the ontological structures provided by the institution of history, thereby legitimatising the regime of historicity that he takes as his initial point of critique. Indeed, Chakrabarty handles the agency claimed by gods, spirits and other supernatural forces by rendering their ‘enchanted world’ into the ‘disenchanted prose’ of historical narratives.20 The moment when Chakrabarty is able to de- secularise the domain of the Universal by discerning the coevalness of gods and spirits, is also the moment he has to set up an ontologically singular model of translation. In Chakrabarty’s account, this requires, above all subjecting different life-worlds to a singular reality, thereby reproducing the logics of colonial segregation and violence that efface alternate worlds. By grounding his model of translation within a framework which ultimately cannot do without a hyperreal Europe, Chakrabarty ends up reducing the irreducible difference and heterogeneity of the Other to that which can be translated.
10As Marisol de la Cadena, while lauding Chakrabarty’s postcolonial critique in extending history and historical representation to those peoples and worlds otherwise read as being primitive and non-modern, notes, the postcolonial revision ‘may still be contained within and even contribute to the coloniality of history.’21 While being able to attend to the heterogeneity of historical time, Chakrabarty, for de la Cadena, does so by reproducing the existence of an ontology where difference is ultimately contained within a singular reality, consequently endorsing the ‘requirement of history’s regime of reality’.22 Questioning the premise and promises of Chakrabarty’s model of translation, de la Cadena proceeds to rethink difference in ontological terms. While for Chakrabarty difference presents itself as something that can be translated across life-worlds, albeit only by retaining a sense of the scandal, de la Cadena, developing her critique through a co-constituted set of ethnographic narrations stresses not the scandal constituted in a translation, but commences by acknowledging the differences that emerge from a translation. Unlike Chakrabarty, de la Cadena doesn’t presume a geocultural affiliation to Europe. Composed through a series of conversations (or what she terms co- labouring practices) with Nazario Turpo (an Andean shaman) and his father Mariano, de la Cadena works at the moment when linguistic and ontological differences cannot be translated. Recollecting an event with Nazario wherein he refused to explain to de la Cadena the ways in which a word paired with the names and entities Nazario invoked before starting a conversation, de la Cadena observes,
‘Indeed, we could, insofar as I accepted that I was going to leave something behind, as with any translation—or even better, that our mutual understanding was also going to be full of gaps that would be different for each of us, and would constantly show up, interrupting but not preventing our communication.’23
11For de la Cadena, Nazario’s refusal to explain should not be read as a failure of translation but instead as something which highlights the ‘inevitable thick, and active mediation of translation’ in their relationship.24 Reading the refusal to explain as a moment which slows down her thoughts and reveals the limits of her understanding towards the Other, for de la Cadena, communication between her and Nazario did not depend on sharing a common life-world. Rather, it was at the very limits that translation between the two was interrupted, in the intermittencies, where neither Nazario nor de la Cadena were necessarily aware of where these intermittencies lay that de la Cadena locates the potential for creatively learning and communicating with Nazario. It is in the frontier between de la Cadena’s world and Nazario’s world that Nazario’s texts and de la Cadena’s texts were connected, albeit partially, the limits of what each could learn from the other already present in what the other revealed. Rather than locating the productive aspects of a translation in the scandal it produces (Chakrabarty), de la Cadena questions the very enterprise of sharing and translating difference across different ‘onto-epistemic formations’.25 For de la Cadena, it is the moment when difference becomes fundamentally untranslatable and multiple that it becomes possible to create a shared space with the Other.
12To a large extent, Glissant’s commitment to the right to opacity draws him into a common theoretical space of discussion with Chakrabarty and de la Cadena. More specifically, the notion of opacity that Glissant uses as an alternative to frameworks which reduce difference to that which is summarily translatable brings Glissant into dialogue with the problem of difference. Like de la Cadena, in place of Chakrabarty’s ontologically reductive and singular model of translation, Glissant with his notion of opacity acknowledges the irreducibility of difference. From this viewpoint, Glissant’s demand for the right to opacity coincides and resounds to a large extent with de la Cadena’s notion of the untranslatability and the multiplicity of difference. However, it is precisely within this common theoretical space that it also becomes possible to discern important sites of distinction, that consequently shape the frame from which Glissant conceptualises opacity. For Glissant, grappling with the problem of difference does not only mean confronting the untranslatability of difference or crafting a re-conception of politics among and between worlds, but instead requires transforming the experience of difference into a poetics. It is in this sense that I read Glissant’s notion of opacity as constituting a poetics of difference. Importantly, this poetics proceeds by upholding the untranslatability of difference, but it does so not by treating the moment of untranslatability as constituting a problem of difference (Chakrabarty) or demanding an ontologically sensitive response (de la Cadena) but as an ethico-political stance of detachment and poetic creation. What does it mean then, for Glissant, to demand the right to opacity?
Visualising Difference

Visual Made by Author
Diagram A represents a colonial/transparent/singular translation of difference where the world of the Other is subsumed within an exclusive and overarching Euro-American metanarrative.
Diagram B is Chakrabarty’s scandalous model of translation across different life-worlds but which nonetheless ends up setting an ontologically singular reality (thus the closed box). The dashed arrow represents how translating subaltern experiences is not as smooth as the colonial model (transparency of difference) presumes. The move to translate subaltern experiences and rituals encounters the constant generation of incommensurable differences (scandal) which can neither be mediated nor subsumed by a higher category.
Diagram C shows the opportunities and risks which inhere in translating the life-worlds de la Cadena allows us to see by considering translations beyond singular ontologies, and instead, across different onto-epistemic formations. The use of the dashed boxes along with the dashed line that points both ways is meant to indicate the imaginative forms of reciprocity and collaborative practice (albeit partial) that de la Cadena suggests might be made possible by thinking difference across ontological divides.
Diagram D is developed by thinking/imagining/seeing with Glissant. In this visualisation, difference never just ‘is’ but is envisioned through a poetic swerve of always incomplete and inconclusive movements. Difference is multiplicity, and multiplicity is becoming, to the point where there are no disparate things being related, but different elements continuously twisting into each other.
Movement
13In his Caribbean Discourse, Glissant starts by identifying the particular neo-colonial situation confronting the Caribbean. No longer needing the direct domination of its colonies, the contemporary colonisation of the Caribbean is undertaken by absorbing the economies of the colonies into the French economic system. The erstwhile barter economy of the plantation system is transformed into a system of exchange based on pseudo-production, reducing the economic system to the ‘non-dangerous, non-productive zone of the tertiary sector’.26 As Glissant writes, the tertiarisation of the economy means that public funds are less and less concerned with the production of finished goods and more with developing infrastructural and commercial equipment. This development produces a higher standard of living at the production level while consequently inflicting isolation on what remains of other sectors of productivity. Importantly, Glissant reveals how the development of this economic system results in a corresponding and inexorable degradation and impoverishment of cultural diversity in the colonies. On a collective level, this system leads to the development of an ‘artificial social strata’ (the elite), whose dynamic is neutralised and determined from the outside (France) and on an individual level, the ‘development of a dependent mentality’.27 On the latter point, Glissant goes on to write that this process of dislocation ‘aggravates the impulse towards imitation’ for the colonised, imposing identification with a singular model of existence (the French one).28 The end result is a form of cultural and economic displacement, making the ‘emergence of an individual impossible’, leading Glissant to argue that the question that needs to be asked from the outset in the Caribbean is not ‘Who am I?’, but rather ‘Who are we?’29
14This is the political moment Glissant begins his Caribbean Discourse from. Faced with the task of tracking down the (often invisible) forms of cultural and political domination that have historically ensnared the island and its people within a ‘web of nothingness’, Glissant argues that the attempt to approach this reality which is often hidden from view ‘cannot be organized in terms of a series of clarifications.’30 Against the ideal of a transparent universality that Glissant sees as being imposed by the West, Glissant demands for the Caribbean and its people the ‘right to obscurity’.31 This demand reverberates throughout his work and later becomes the demand that the Other be granted the right to opacity. For Glissant, opacity is ultimately that which emphasises the irreducible otherness of the Other, or that aspect of the Other, which remains fundamentally untranslatable. As Michael Wiedorn has noted, opacity in Glissant dictates that in the Other, ‘an unknowable remainder will always persist.’32 Situating his notion of opacity against a particularly Western experience of legibility and transparency, in his Poetics of Relation Glissant writes,
‘If we examine the process of “understanding” people and ideas from the perspective of Western thought, we discover that its basis is the requirement for transparency. In order to understand and thus accept you, I have to measure your solidity with the ideal scale providing me with grounds to make comparisons and, perhaps, judgements. I have to reduce.’33
15Transparency for Glissant is characterised by the way in which Western thought, in order to understand and thereby accept the Other, ended up reflecting the world in its own image. While the colonial project of conquest valued universal models and categories, and functioned through a process of assimilating the difference of the Other in its own image, opacity underlines difference as that which exceeds the doctrine of universal intelligibility. It is in this context that the critical sense of the phrase the ‘right to opacity’ emerges for Glissant, its distinctive contribution lying in its denial that it is possible to fully know the differences that make up the world. Opacity then, is best characterised as a withdrawal from assimilating the Other within a regime of visibility. In contrast to the illusion of transparency that required reducing the density of the difference that the Other presents, Glissant’s defends opacity as an ethico-political stance for and in favour of unknowability. Deriving its anti-colonial force through its resistance to being construed within colonial regimes of visibility, opacity exposes as Zach Blas writes the ‘limits of schemas of visibility, representation, and identity, that prevent sufficient understanding of multiple perspectives of the world and its people.’34
16However, Glissant does not posit the right to opacity simply as an alternative to regimes of visibility that have historically reduced difference to that which is transparent. Instead, and in line with Glissant’s overall project of ‘relation’, Glissant highlights the entanglement of opacity with the endless movement and becoming of the Caribbean.35 To this end, while opacity in many ways functions for Glissant as a forceful refusal to consent to a colonial enterprise that renders difference transparent in order to make the Other intelligible, opacity never contains the difference of the Other within either epistemic or ontological silos. To do so, for Glissant, would be to repeat reducing difference to an ontology of oneness and non- relation. For Glissant, although the theory of difference is invaluable, simply acknowledging differences is not enough, for as he writes, ‘difference can still contrive to reduce things to the transparent’.36 Instead Glissant calls for a politics that works through the different ways that the Other is already part of ‘relation’ without yielding to the Other an uncontaminated purity nor by reproducing colonial logics that base knowledge about the Other around a transparent knowability. As John Drabinski explains, rather than ‘closing off or setting limits, opacity opens horizons that are situated at one and the same time inside colonial experience, anti-colonial struggle, and post-colony cultural life.’37 As Glissant goes on to argue,
‘Accepting differences does, of course, upset the hierarchy of this scale. I understand your difference, or in other words, without creating a hierarchy, I relate it to my norm. I admit you to existence, within my system. I create you afresh. – But perhaps we need to bring an end to the very notion of a scale. Displace all reduction. Agree not merely to the right to difference but, carrying this further, agree also to the right to opacity that is not enclosure within an impenetrable autarchy but subsistence within an irreducible singularity.’38
17The idea that acknowledging differences requires not merely the ‘right to difference’ is also where Glissant’s demand for the ‘right to opacity’ takes on an important critical dimension. One of Glissant’s central claims is that opacity is never just a strategy of ontological self- defence, neither is it a vacuous celebration of cultural diversity. Instead, for Glissant, opacity, more than simply engendering an ethical mode of relation between the Self and the Other, sets the stage for an ethico-political stance of detachment that provides the revolutionary impetus for imagining another world. It is also here, that Glissant’s demand for opacity should also be read as constituting a poetics. This is a poetics that requires recognising the historic processes of differentiation through which the Other was named, formed, and thus constituted. And yet, this poetics not only names the dispossession through which the Other was formed, but also holds the potential in itself to craft ways to imagine otherwise. In Glissant, ‘poetics’ functions as a process which acquires its poetic force by articulating an imaginary that is always ‘latent, open, multilingual in intention, directly in contact with everything possible’, while never reducing subsistence within an irreducible singularity.39
18The thrust of this ‘poetics’ for Glissant lies in simultaneously explicating the entanglements of the structuring violence through which the Other is constituted, while illuminating the potentials for disentangling difference from this constitutive violence by carving a poetic vision of difference. Never one without the other, it is in this sense that Glissant initiates his poetics as a ‘presence that concludes (presumes) nothing’.40 With opacity then, Glissant is able to name both how the Other is constituted through a series of dispossessions that fixes their ways and modes of life within determinate boundaries to render them knowable and transparent (and hence colonisable), but also how these possibilities are exceeded through poetic movement and becoming. The importance for Glissant of this poetics centred around the concept of opacity is most clearly discerned when he affirms his theory of ‘relation’. As Glissant writes,
‘Against this reductive transparency, a force of opacity is at work. No longer the opacity that enveloped and reactivated the mystery of filiation but another, considerate of all the threatened and delicious things joining one another (with- out conjoining, that is, without merging) in the expanse of Relation.’41
19It is the imaginary fuelled by a ‘poetics of opacity’ that protects relation from reducing and enveloping the Other within the ‘mystery of filiation’. As outlined in the previous chapter, building on an intellectual and political lineage of intellectual critique specific to Martinique, Glissant retrieves the meaning of dispossession to present his theory of relation as a series of cross-cultural processes that places difference and becoming at the heart of a decolonial politics. For Glissant, relation never strives to know the totality of the world, but instead embraces ceaseless movement and becoming. Like opacity then, Glissant also predicates relation on the fundamental unknowability of the world. And yet, it is the right to opacity that ensures that relation remains open to an always unstable and emergent set of possibilities. It is ultimately the opaqueness of the Other when articulated through a poetics of difference that affirms the fluidity of relation. Imagining difference as opening a world of possible becomings, Glissant rejoins opacity with the philosophical motifs of the Caribbean and relation to chart a distinctive poetics of difference. This poetics, by not making the Other totally visible to the colonial gaze, names opacity as a site of resistance. But importantly, the incomprehension of the Other does not close off access to the Other, but orients opacity as opening an alternative and poetic space of meaning, while recognising the incompleteness of this creative act.
20I want to conclude by returning to the question of difference that I posed at the beginning of this chapter. Building on the critical and postcolonial interventions of Chakrabarty and de la Cadena, in this chapter I have sought to explore what it might mean to think of difference when it is not summarily translatable, and the forms of intellectual and ethical commitments this disjuncture might demand. Crucially, in bringing Glissant into dialogue with these contemporary interventions, I have deliberately read Glissant in an anachronistic and disloyal manner. I do so with the explicit aim of illuminating the need for thinking difference as something more than instituting a scandal (Chakrabarty) or providing an ontological opening for thinking difference differently (de la Cadena), but as instantiating a poetic movement of difference-without-resolution. However, I do not pretend to argue that Glissant offers a philosophical advance on these interpretations of difference, but rather that with opacity Glissant contributes to these contemporary discussions, offering an ethico-political orientation that through its poetics imagines difference not as that ‘which is’, but in and through its always incomplete, partial, and inconclusive movements.
Notes de bas de page
1 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 194.
2 Adom Getachew and Karuna Mantena, “Anticolonialism and the Decolonization of Political Theory,” Critical Times 4, no. 3 (December 1, 2021): 359.
3 See here, Sankaran Krishna, “Race, Amnesia, and the Education of International Relations,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 26, no. 4 (October 2001): 401–24.
4 Amitav Acharya, “Global International Relations (IR) and Regional Worlds: A New Agenda for International Studies,” International Studies Quarterly 58, no. 4 (December 2014): 647–59.
5 Anna M. Agathangelou and L. H. M. Ling, “The House of IR: From Family Power Politics to the Poisies of Worldism1,” International Studies Review 6, no. 4 (December 2004): 21–50.
6 Robert Vitalis, “The Graceful and Generous Liberal Gesture: Making Racism Invisible in American International Relations,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 29, no. 2 (June 2000): 333.; also see here, Vineet Thakur, Alexander E. Davis, and Peter Vale, “Imperial Mission, ‘Scientific’ Method: An Alternative Account of the Origins of IR,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 46, no. 1 (September 2017): 3–23.
7 See here, Errol A Henderson, “Hidden in Plain Sight: Racism in International Relations Theory,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 26, no. 1 (March 2013): 71–92.
8 For a fine recent intervention within these debates, see Shine Choi, Anna Selmeczi, and Erzsebet Strausz, eds., Critical Methods for the Study of World Politics: Creativity and Transformation (New York: Routledge, 2020).
9 Michael Wiedorn, Think Like an Archipelago: Paradox in the Work of Édouard Glissant (New York: State University of New York Press, 2018), xxvi.
10 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Politics of Translation,” in Translation, ed. Sophie J Williamson (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2019), 30.
11 Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” in The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House (Penguin Classics, 2018).
12 I have also benefited here from Odysseos’ work on the potential of poetic critique here, see here, Odysseos, “Stolen Life’s Poetic Revolt.”
13 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, xiv.
14 Chakrabarty, 29.
15 Chakrabarty, 201.
16 Chakrabarty, 16.
17 Chakrabarty.
18 Chakrabarty.
19 Chakrabarty, 89.
20 Chakrabarty, 77.
21 Marisol de la Cadena, Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 147.
22 de la Cadena, 148.
23 de la Cadena, xxv.
24 de la Cadena.
25 de la Cadena.
26 Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 40.
27 Glissant, 45.
28 Glissant.
29 Glissant, 86.
30 Glissant, 2.
31 Glissant.
32 Wiedorn, Think Like an Archipelago: Paradox in the Work of Édouard Glissant, 36.
33 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 189-190.
34 Zach Blas, “Opacities: An Introduction,” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 31, no. 2 (September 1, 2016): 149.
35 Also see here, Lorna Burns, “Becoming-Postcolonial, Becoming-Caribbean: Édouard Glissant and the Poetics of Creolization,” Textual Practice 23, no. 1 (February 2009): 114.
36 Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 189.
37 Drabinski, Glissant and the Middle Passage: Philosophy, Beginning, Abyss, 14.
38 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 190.
39 Glissant, 32.
40 Glissant, 183.
41 Glissant, 62.

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