History, stories and Caribbean rhizomes in Édouard Glissant

Resumo

This work articulates a dialogue between different moments in the theoretical, philosophical, and essayistic production of the Caribbean writer Édouard Glissant (1928-2011) that are relevant to Caribbean historiography. First, it discusses the scope of the figures of the Passage, the Abyss, and the Threshold in Glissant's theorization of digenèse, as a category that serves to investigate the subaltern role of Caribbean histories that comprise the modern-colonial world. Second, it investigates the movement of the Relation in various areas of Glissant's production, in order to approach its possible contributions to the production of a history that disarticulates the imperial codifications of Western History. Third, it problematizes the epistemological and cultural force of the Caribbean ecosystems recovered by Glissant, along with the figures of underwater unity and rhizome, in the diagramming of a historical Antillean subjectivity. The text concludes that Glissant not only constructs a critique of the cultural dichotomies of coloniality but also uses the Caribbean plant and marine world to interpret the unpredictable movements of nonlinear histories sublimated by Western modernity and its civilizing discourses.