Awakening to the World: Relation, Totality, and Writing from Below

Abstract

Turning and turning in wideninggyreThe falcon cannot hear falconer;Things fall apart; centre cannot hold.The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, andeverywhereThe ceremony of innocence is drowned;Surely some revelation is at hand.-William Butler Yeats, The Second ComingThis study commemorates work of scholar, poet, theorist, novelist and traveler Edouard Glissant, taking up invitation in his writing to think world anew. In pages that follow, we will focus on influence and implications of Glissant's reflections on poetic, theoretical, and geographic dimensions of African diaspora that have advanced through specific inscriptions of black thought in development of modern world. will examine a broad range of Glissant's work in order to highlight how his reflections on African heritage and expression unfold across various genres of his writing. Above all, we will seek to demonstrate how these reflections expand theory, pedagogy, and practice of what we will refer to here as black writing. Glissant's work highlights specificity and diversity of forms, contexts, and meanings of graphic performances that proliferate in Afrodiaspora, defining black writing not merely as a modality of alphabetic script but as ensemble of life practices. In context of Afrodiaspora, as within milieu of the black radical tradition,1 black writing thus emerges as a practice irreducible to particular context of its genesis.2 Our study stems from this critical point of intersection between writing and practice, tracing modes of diasporic communication and performance-ones connecting Africa to Brazil, Haiti, and United States-that are implicated in Glissant's notion of Relation.Recasting idea of Africa from dark continent to archipelago, Glissant writes in Caribbean Discourse that We realize that peoples who are 'manifesdy' composite have minimized idea of Genesis.3 Conceiving Africa not as a monolithic origin but as a birthplace of multiplicity, he views geographic layout of Caribbean as a generative ensemble of origins, a cradle of multiple diasporas that figures African past itself as a set of diasporic practices:4 There was African diaspora millions of years ago, which gave birth to various humanities, he claims, And there have been other diasporas-for example, forced diaspora brought about by slavery and [those] caused by poverty and destitution, emigrants and emigrations.5 In Glissant's reflections on idea of Africa and philosophy of its history, idea and meaning of blackness as disseminated by black people is opposed to ideas about race that underlie essentialist understandings of human attribute and origin. Caribbeanness is therefore an intellectual dream, lived at same time in unconscious way by our peoples [that] tears us free from intolerable alternative of need for nationalism and introduces us to crosscultural process that modifies but does not undermine latter.6 Through cross-cultural poetics of expressed in everyday life of Caribbean and in Glissantian thought, we come to glimpse contours of black writing as expression of life practices that take shape within complex totality that we call Afrodiaspora.As Glissant states in interview with Manthia Diawara, the truth that is increasingly coming to light about black reality in New World is truth of multiplicity, truth of step toward other. ... Relation is moment where we realize that there is a definite quantity of all differences in world.7 It is in spirit of elaborating a Glissantian reading of ongoing relational practice of diaspora itself that we turn our attention to divergent geographical expressions of reading and writing in order to conceptualize black writing as a graphic encounter with differences. …

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