Édouard Glissant: a multicultural ideal in an era of resurgent nationalisms

Édouard Glissant (1928-2011) is arguably the most considerable non-hexagonal francophone thinker and writer of recent generations. He wrote a sizeable body of theoretical works, novels, poetry and plays over numerous decades, his publishing career beginning in the mid-1950s and stretching forwards until the final years of his life. A contemporary of fellow Martinican Frantz Fanon (1925-61) in his younger years, Glissant would go on to gain recognition amongst the mainland French intelligentsia as well as in US American intellectual circles and beyond. In recent decades he has emerged as a leading postcolonial voice internationally alongside figures such as Spivak and Bhabha who enjoyed wider recognition earlier.

In this talk, Sam Coombes will offer an overview of Glissant’s oeuvre and career prior to focusing on a central dimension of his oeuvre, namely his belief in hybridised, multicultural societies. We live in an era which has witnessed a resurgence of would-be traditionalist, commonly exclusionary nationalisms in many countries across Europe as well as in the United States and beyond over the course of the last fifteen to twenty years. Glissant’s thought not only runs counter to this trend but also, Coombes argues, offers a valuable correction to it and a workable basis on which to defend multiculturalism in a credible, non-identitarian, way.

This event is organized as part of the Mois de la Francophonie 2025