Patrick Crowley  (University College Cork Ireland)
Glissantian Opacité, Diagonal Readings and the Limits of Postcolonialism

Édouard Glissant's work, read as a critique of the 'fausse clarté de modèles universels' (Glissant 1997: 29), performs and advocates a transversal reading of Western culture and history: 'Alors, s'ouvrir à l'ardue complexité du monde. Non pas à un autre, mais au vou martyrisé de l'autre. Que la terre en chaos nous vienne, pour une lumière. Le service à te rendre, nautonier d'Ouest, est bien de lire en diagonale ton ouvre, de t'apposer d'autres mers, d'autres rives, d'autres obscurs' (Glissant 1969: 224. Glissant's italics). This reading en diagonale takes the form of literature: 'Et je dirai que les littératures qui se profilent devant nous et dont nous pouvons avoir la prescience seront belles de toutes les lumières et de toutes les opacités de notre totalité-monde' (Glissant 1996: 72). Such literatures are diagonal rather than affiliative, transversally relational rather than contextually inscribed. Potentially opaque, they respect the opacité of the other (as Faulkner did, as Segalen did) and allow for new combinations unforseen. In this way, the paper draws attention to the extent that postcolonal studies become the context for its content. The literatures that Glissant foresees could be claimed for global studies, transcultural studies, postmodernism or postcolonial studies. It depends upon the frame within which they are placed. And yet the simplest, and perhaps oldest, category for these literatures would be poetics. Glissant's poetics is, however, a category of poetics that resists Aristotelian categorisation and sponsors illuminating opacities that invite us to rethink what we take for granted, to seek new translations of old ideas and to forge new combinations beyond frontiers, territories and schools of thought. This is the starting point of a paper that will examine postcolonial studies through the prism of Glissant's essays asking whether postcolonialism is entirely adequate to Glissant's work and, if not, then what are the implications?