The collected manifestos of Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau:
for a postcolonial response to planetary crisis.
Manifestos brings together for the first time in English the
manifestos written by Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau between
2000 and 2009. Composed in part in the aftermath of Barack Obama's
election in 2008, the texts resonate with the current context of divided
identities and criticisms of multiculturalism. The individual texts
grapple with concrete historical and political moments in France, the
Caribbean, and North America. Across the manifestos, as well as two
collectively signed op-eds, the authors engage with socio-political
aspects of climate catastrophe, resource extraction, toxicity, and
neocolonialism.
Throughout the collection, Glissant and Chamoiseau engage with key
themes articulated through their poetic vocabulary, including Relation,
globalization, globality (mondialité), anti-universalism, métissage,
the tout-monde ("whole-world") and the tout-vivant ("all-living,"
including the relationship of humans to each other and "nature"),
créolité and the creolization of the world, and the liberation from
community assignations in response to individualism and neoliberal
societies.
Translated as the first volume in the Planetarities series with
Goldsmiths Press, the themes of Manifestos resonate with the planetary
as they work in response to contemporary forms of (economic)
globalization, western capitalism, identity politics, and urban, digital
and cosmic ecosystems, as well as the role of the poet-writer. A
distinguishing feature of this publication is its interventional aspect,
which prioritizes engaged scholarship and practice while demonstrating
the relevance of the poetic in response to the urgencies of planetary
crisis.
