This collection of interviews is a diamond, remarkable in the way that it assembles so many of the major strains of Glissant’s thought, and stunning in the expansive erudition at work in the composition of that thought. Two structuring experiences inform the writer’s reflections on language and poetic engagement. On the one hand, there is the acculturation of his French intellectual ancestry, begun in the Martinican colonial system and continued in his mature student years in Paris, with the achievement of a Doctorate at the Sorbonne in 1980. On the other, there is his genetic heritage...

This exciting, challenging book covers a wide range of subject matter, but all linked together through the key ideas of diversity and ‘Relation’. It sees our modern world, shaped by immigration and the aftermath of colonization, as a multiplicity of different communities interacting and evolving together, and argues passionately against all political and philosophical attempts to impose uniformity, universal or absolute values. This is the ‘Whole-World’, which includes not only these objective phenomena but also our consciousness of them. Our personal identities are not fixed and...

We are all now entering into a new region of the world, which designates its sites on all the given and imaginable expanses, and of which only a few had been able to foresee in the distance its wanderings and obscurities. […] This region itself, we soon foresee, as difficult as it may seem to formulate its partition, is mixed in time as much as in space, a common site which hides another gap. Time has changed and space has changed. A steep separation of time and space, overwhelming one another. A new region that is an epoch, mixing all times and all durations, an epoch also which is an...