ABSTRACTS

Edouard Glissant: Littérature-monde and Tout-monde

Eric Prieto
(UC Santa Barbara)

The Littérature-monde manifesto shows a clear debt to the thought of one of its most prestigious signatories, Edouard Glissant, which is evident not least in the hyphenated " monde" formulation, which echoes Glissant's earlier coinages ("tout-monde," chaos-monde," etc.) as much as it does the English concept of "world literature." More importantly, the manifesto gives pride of place to two of Glissant's primary concerns. First, that the contributions to world culture that have been made by non-French practitioners of the French language should be understood as innovative appropriations of the culture and language of France, rather than as mere illustrations of the language, or testimony to the universality of French culture. Second, that it is essential to maintain the centrality of literature's referential function, its worldly, representational vocation, not by promoting a simplistic mirror-image or documentary theory of realism but by emphasizing literature's ongoing search for new modes of expression able to articulate heretofore unnamable aspects of the world around and inside of us.

Given the centrality of Glissant's thought to the littérature-monde project, it seems appropriate to ask how Glissant's thought can help to achieve the program sketched out in the manifesto and the volume derived from it. In my view, Glissant's thought is crucial to this project primarily for the way in which it stakes out a pragmatic strategy for competing successfully in the modern cultural marketplace, which has been irrevocably marked by the forces of globalization and the dual threats of homogenization and balkanization that have accompanied them. Glissant has devoted his career to developing a theory of cultural identity and evolution that reaffirms the need to promote the local particularities of national and regional cultures, but without falling back on the atavistic and exclusionary tendencies that have marred so many nationalist agendas and that continue to characterize many contemporary anti-globalization movements.

This paper, then, emphasizes Glissant's attempt to work out a general theory of cultural change that is universally applicable but framed in a way that is helpful to "minor" cultures (in Deleuze and Guattari's sense of the term) as they seek to carve out cultural niches for themselves that will enable them to thrive in the contemporary global cultural marketplace. I explore aspects of his core concepts--créolisation, relation, tout-monde, etc. that are often overlooked or condemned by his critics, often because they seem too beholden to the market logic of liberalism. I also emphasize the ways in which he works out his basic principles and their ramifications in his novels--especially La case du commandeur and Tout-monde--where the dialectic between theory and experience is played out in dramatic fashion.