Edouard Glissant, long recognized in the French and francophone world as one of the greatest writers and thinkers of our times, is increasingly attracting attention from English-speaking readers. Born in Martinique in 1928, Glissant earned a doctorate from the Sorbonne. When he returned to his native land in the mid-sixties, his writing began to focus on the idea of a "relational poetics," which laid the groundwork for the "creolite" movement, fueled by the understanding that Caribbean culture and identity are the positive products of a complex and multiple set of local historical...

With Edouard Glissant's The Fourth Century, the Village Voice observed, "we get the full effect of his overarching project: a literary exorcism of Martinique's scarred psyche and past, a lingering cry against the 'black hole of time and forgetting.'" Glissant, "one of the most significant figures in Caribbean literature" (Washington Post), continues that project in The Overseer's Cabin, conjuring in one woman's story centuries knotted together by unknown blood, voiceless suffering, and death without echo.
Beginning with the birth in 1928 of Mycea, the last of...

The complete poems of the two-time finalist for the Nobel Prize in Literature, available in English for the first time This volume collects and translates-most for the first time-the nine volumes of poetry published by edouard Glissant, a poet, novelist, and critic increasingly recognized as one of the great writers of the twentieth century. The poems bring to life what Glissant calls "an archipelago-like reality,"partaking of the exchanges between Europe and its former colonies, between humans and their geographies, between the poet and the natural world. Reciting and re-creating histories...