Valérie Loichot  (Emory University)
Teaching Glissant

Perhaps no other figure than Martinican thinker Édouard Glissant best conflates the fields of Francophone literature and postcolonial theory. With the notable exceptions of Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi, Glissant is the only francophone writer to have been anthologized as one of the main postcolonial theorists in Anglophone Academia.

Having studied under Glissant, having completed a book on Glissant and other writers of the plantation Americas, I most clearly see Glissant's relevance to transnational studies in my teaching of his works. In the classroom, Glissant emerged both as untranslatable within, and indispensable for, trans-American studies. This essay will reflect specifically on "The Plantation Americas," an interdisciplinary graduate seminar that I have taught twice. The seminar focused on the multilingual, multinational zone of the Caribbean and American Plantation, viewed through the lens of Glissantian theory. The doctoral students in the course specialized on various areas of transnational and postcolonial studies, with home departments as varied as French, English, Spanish, Comparative Literature, Women's Studies, History, and African American Studies.

Glissant's untranslatability functions on many levels. On a very literal one, the English Glissantian corpus --in spite of Dash and Wing's remarkable translations-- remains untranslated. The University Press of Virginia offered a 272-page version of the original 839-page Discours antillais. The collection left behind crucial elements of Glissantian thought such as valuable comments on Martinique deemed too parochial for an American readership, as well as important reflections on slavery and postslavery motherhood. The result, for readers who only have access to the skimmed Glissant, is interpretations of Glissant as a universalist writer who has no concern for the condition of women, for example. Moreover, translators have often clarified ambiguities in his language by using periphrastic formulas to translate ambiguous notions of "trace," "détour," "opacité," and "langage." Most importantly perhaps, Glissant remains untranslatable on an epistemological level. To take only one example, how can we transport his concept of Métissage to an interpretation of literature from the US South, since the "one-drop rule" prevents the very idea of an intermediate category? Seminar participants spent a significant amount of time translating terms and theories, and acknowledging their untranslability. Testing Glissantian concepts on the terrain of the US South allowed us to question and challenge the stability of sites of theoretical production, as Said's "traveling theory" urges us to do.

The class thrived on the tensions caused by the friction of words, languages, and concepts, which prevented a unified transnational discourse. A student of Cuba was shocked by the absence of nationalist drive in Martinique, an African American studies student questioned Glissant's submarine history detached from Africa. However, it is from these tensions, these breaches, that the most productive papers emerged. Like Glissant's phenomenon of creolization, the students produced "unpredictable and unheard of" dialogues between Glissant and Flannery O'Connor, Derek Walcott, Jacques Derrida, Cabrera Infante, and Toni Morrison, to name only a few. Teaching Glissant in a transnational context lies precisely in the realization that maintaining a tension, a distance, a leap, which Glissant calls "right to opacity," is necessary to avoid the pitfalls of practicing a bulldozing postcolonialism and global theory that flattens difference while claiming to celebrate it.