Édouard Glissant

Édouard Glissant was born in Sainte-Marie, Martinique, on the twenty-first of September 1928, the son of a plantation manager. He took his secondary education at the Lycée Schoelcher in Fort-de-France — under Aimé Césaire (also placed in this archive), who was his teacher of French literature in the upper years.

He moved to Paris in 1946 and took his graduate studies in philosophy and history at the Sorbonne (1955) and his doctorate in ethnology in 1980 at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. He was a member, with Frantz Fanon (also placed in this archive), Jacques Stephen Alexis, and Albert Béville, of the French Caribbean anti-colonial intellectual circle of the 1950s and early 1960s.

He returned to Martinique in 1965 and founded the Institut Martiniquais d'Études in 1967 — the principal Martinican research institute of the period. He directed UNESCO's Courier journal from 1981 to 1988 and taught at Louisiana State University and the City University of New York in the post-UNESCO decades.

His sustained theoretical contribution was the framework he called the Poetics of Relation — the proposition that Caribbean identity is constituted not by descent from a single ancestral root (the African, the European, the Indian, the indigenous Caribbean) but by the intersection and accumulation of many roots, including the broken root of the Middle Passage. His major works — Le discours antillais (1981), Poétique de la Relation (1990), and Introduction à une poétique du divers (1996) — established the conceptual vocabulary of créolité that would shape Caribbean and broader post-colonial theory across the following four decades.

He produced eight novels (including La Lézarde, 1958, winner of the Prix Renaudot) and twelve poetry collections across his career. He was considered the principal European-language candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature each year of his late life; the prize was not awarded to him.

He died in Paris on the third of February 2011, age eighty-two.

He is honored here as the Martinican philosopher whose Poetics of Relation gave the Caribbean its principal post-colonial framework.