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...