Celia M. Britton
Edouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory: Strategies of Language and Resistance
New World Studies Series
Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999. Pp. 224. $55.00 $19.50
Reviewed by Doris Kadish

The work of Edouard Glissant, arguably the most influential and most difficult of contemporary Caribbean Francophone writers, calls for the kind of complex but comprehensible explication that Celia Britton ably provides in this new study. Well grounded in both Francophone literature and literary theory, Britton manages to present a thorough survey of the main ideas in Glissant's six novels and seven collections of essays. (His poetry is not considered.) Britton's book succeeds in situating Glissant in relation to writers such as Homi Bhabha, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak, in hopes of remedying the frequent omission of Glissant from the predominantly Anglophone world of postcolonial theory. That omission, she observes, is all the more unjustified since the works of all of these theorists similarly derive from the writings of Frantz Fanon and of the French theorists Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan.

Britton's first chapter will prove especially useful to many readers. It provides a cogent explanation of the four principal concepts upon which the strategies of resistance rely in Glissant's work. Those concepts can be defined in short as relation ("respect for the Other as different from oneself,"11), opacity ("the irreducible density of the other," 19), detour ("an indirect mode of resistance," 25), and counter-poetics (a "subversive relationship to the langue, which the subject nevertheless has to use," 30). Chapters two through seven then elaborate on a range of topics that arise in Glissant's treatment of strategies of resistance in his novels: in chapter two, the experience in the Caribbean of language as lack, that is, as marginalized and silenced; in chapter three, the predicament of subalternity and the inability of the marginalized Caribbean subject to speak or know; in chapter four, the alienation that consists of the Caribbean subject's desire for identification with whites ("mimetic drive") which is combined ambivalently with hatred and the desire for revenge; in chapter five, the expression of that alienation through "verbal delirium" and madness; in chapter six, the use of language as ruse and the rhetoric of indirection (e.g., through the deferral of meaning, irrelevant digressions, and the figurative language of allegory); in chapter seven, the use of "relayed speech," in which language is "passed around a number of subjects" (164) and subjectivity derives from "a circulation of overlapping positions" (169). Chapter eight provides an overview of the book's main themes.

Although Britton's book foregrounds literary concerns and close textual readings of Glissant's novels, it also provides an assessment of how Glissant responds to the cultural and political issues facing the Caribbean at the close of the 1990s and how his concept of "creolization" compares with the concept of "créolité" advocated by the creolists Jean Bernabé, Raphaël Confiant, and Patrick Chamoiseau in their widely read Eloge de la Créolité. In contrast with their efforts to delineate a specifically Caribbean identity, Glissant aspires to a relational sense of self that would derive from a non-imperialist, non-hegemonic relationship between the Caribbean and the rest of the world: "there will be no more culture without all cultures" (8). Although he respects the particular qualities of the Caribbean community, his approach, in contrast with theirs, is outward looking and related to other cultures. Not surprisingly, then, in contrast with the promotion of Creole language that is a prominent characteristic of their "créolité," Glissant's "creolization" favors instead the increasing multilingualism of today's world.

In short, a thorough and enlightening treatment of a difficult and important modern writer, Edouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory will prove rewarding reading to scholars and students of contemporary literature and the modern novel.