0:11

Hello

0:12

and welcome to the History of Africana Philosophy

0:14

by G.K. Jeffers and Peter Adamson, brought

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to you with the support of the Keynes College London Philosophy

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Department and the LMU in Munich,

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online at historyofphilosophy.net.

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Today's episode will be an interview about Edouard

0:25

Glissant with John Drabinski, who

0:28

is Professor of African American Studies and English

0:30

at the University of Maryland.

0:32

Hey, John. Hi, how are you? I'm

0:35

great. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It's

0:37

really a pleasure. I really appreciate you making the time

0:40

to talk. Well, no, the pleasure

0:42

is ours because you are the author of

0:44

the important recent book on Glissant, which

0:46

is called Glissant and the Middle Passage. And

0:49

we

0:50

obviously encourage listeners to check it out.

0:52

Let's actually start by talking

0:54

about the title. So you aim in

0:56

that book to show us how philosophical

0:59

thinking differs when we, as it were,

1:01

begin from the middle passage. So

1:03

let's begin with that. So first of all,

1:05

how would you define the middle passage? And

1:08

second of all, how would you summarize its significance

1:10

to Glissant?

1:11

Well, I appreciate you saying recent book.

1:14

As you know, as academics, the book's a few

1:16

years old and it already feels like where's my

1:18

next book? So I'm going to hold on

1:20

to this idea that it's a recent book.

1:23

Well, let me just say this about the title.

1:25

Anyone who's published an academic book with

1:27

a university press knows, and

1:30

I assume other commercial presses too, you

1:32

go through title transformations. The

1:35

press doesn't always want the same title

1:37

as you. I've been talking

1:39

about this book for

1:41

a number of years with the title

1:43

Abyssal Beginning. I think

1:46

presses generally like to have, in

1:48

the case of this book,

1:50

it's a single author study. They like to have

1:52

the author's name in the title.

1:54

But Abyssal Beginning, and then the subtitle

1:57

was Glissant Philosophy in the Middle Passage.

1:59

And I like the Glissant and the Middle

2:01

Passage, I think that's a fine title. But

2:04

this idea of abyssal beginning was

2:06

really something that had

2:09

captivated by my theoretical

2:11

imagination for many years. And

2:14

it was a notion that I got from his Poetics

2:16

of Relation, thinking about the Middle Passage.

2:19

I've also always been interested in

2:22

thinking about questions of beginning, like

2:24

how does thought begin? What

2:26

sort of events in Heidegger's sense

2:28

of Eragness? Like how do events appropriate

2:31

thinking? Such that we think really

2:33

in the wake of some kind of event, right?

2:36

Whether it's for somebody like Heidegger, the event of technology,

2:39

or for, you know, post-World

2:42

War II Jewish thinkers, you know, how do we begin

2:44

after the Shoah? Or in the case of

2:46

Glissant, how do we think after the Middle

2:48

Passage? And so for

2:50

me, I started to think about how

2:52

both the age of technology, modernity,

2:55

and the Shoah in

2:57

sort of Atlantic philosophy. So I'm just

3:00

saying that to think widely about Europe

3:02

and the Americas and Africa. I

3:04

think that the Middle Passage hasn't been something

3:07

that we've talked about much, if

3:09

at all philosophically. I

3:11

think some of the most important thinkers

3:14

in the Black Atlantic tradition, you think of like

3:16

Du Bois or Fanon, really

3:18

the Middle Passage doesn't function

3:21

in their philosophical imaginations. And

3:23

that's fine. They have other kinds of projects. But

3:26

what I really loved about Glissant

3:28

was his movement across

3:30

time to think about

3:32

the Middle Passage, which is

3:34

that place between continental

3:37

Africa and arrival in

3:39

the plantation Americas. The

3:41

Middle Passage is that movement between two sides

3:43

of the Atlantic world, but also two

3:46

sides of experience. One side,

3:48

the experience of rootedness in a continent

3:51

for millennia. And on the

3:53

other side, this absolute new beginning

3:55

in the Americas. And

3:57

so that idea of there being this absolute. who

4:00

rifts or break with the past.

4:03

And Glissant really taking that to

4:05

its full conclusion and exploring it

4:07

in all of its complexity, she

4:09

just stands out for me as a particularly

4:12

rigorous thinker around this idea that

4:14

the Middle Passage functions in such

4:16

a dramatic fashion. I think he's right about

4:19

that. And so that's part of what

4:21

drew me to it. Also, as I said,

4:23

this question of beginning, I've just been interested

4:25

in the problem of beginning as a philosophical

4:28

question, since I was a graduate student

4:30

in the early 90s. But

4:32

also, I think, you know, this

4:34

may be something we come back to as we go

4:37

along. This way that for Glissant, it's

4:39

not simply that the Middle Passage is

4:41

important for the black Americas, but

4:44

for the very idea of the Americas itself,

4:46

that along with conquest, the

4:49

Middle Passage is what makes the Americas

4:51

the Americas. And so for

4:53

me, it's obviously the book is a single

4:56

authored study. What does Glissant largely

4:58

in his nonfiction or critical essay writing

5:00

say about the Middle Passage, say about

5:03

the problem of beginning and how does it impact

5:05

how we think philosophically? That's

5:07

the main focus. But along

5:09

with that is also, you know, how do

5:12

we even think about place in

5:14

a region like the Americas with

5:17

the Middle Passage as a centerpiece?

5:20

Not necessarily as the right conquest

5:22

would be for me, the other centerpiece, but that's

5:24

not an indigenous studies book. But

5:27

thinking about how the very formation of

5:29

a name like America's is

5:32

linked to this catastrophic event.

5:35

And so what would it mean to link the place

5:37

we are and how we think from this place

5:40

to this catastrophic event? I think

5:42

as a philosophical problem, this is massively

5:45

important. And Glissant's literary

5:48

works, poetry, and especially his

5:50

critical nonfiction really

5:53

just gets out of depth I haven't seen

5:55

in other thinkers. And for me, it

5:57

changed the way I think philosophically. like,

6:00

let me make a book out of this. That

6:02

idea of philosophizing in the wake

6:04

of a trauma, that parallel

6:06

you draw to the Holocaust or the Shogham, I think

6:09

that's very powerful. And of course,

6:11

also, there's a lot of philosophy about how

6:14

to come to grips with the

6:16

Holocaust. Is it even possible

6:18

to still write poetry

6:20

and make art philosophize in the wake of

6:22

an event like that? Can you say

6:24

a little bit more about that parallel, or

6:26

maybe just in general, the idea of philosophizing

6:29

in the wake of a trauma or a death, as

6:31

you put it? Yeah, so, you

6:33

know, the first two chapters of the book are

6:36

on trauma. The first chapter

6:38

is trauma and its relation to the past.

6:40

That deals with Glissant in a sort of

6:42

comparative and contrasting relationship

6:45

to thinkers around trauma and the Holocaust.

6:48

So I explore in that first chapter that

6:51

sense of trauma in the past, in a comparative

6:53

sense. And at bottom, like as a writer

6:55

and thinker, I'm a comparativist. So this

6:58

is my sort of go-to as an

7:00

analytic, right? But

7:02

then the second chapter, especially around Walter

7:04

Benjamin's notion of ruins, I

7:07

think about like that notion of ruins after

7:09

the Holocaust and trauma in

7:11

relation to Glissant's work on ruins

7:14

in the new world, and thinking about how

7:16

these things signify differently, whether

7:19

trauma is relation to the past or trauma

7:21

is relation to the future, or the interval of

7:23

the future. And for me,

7:25

this was important because I think there are huge

7:28

resources for thinking about

7:30

traumatic experience. And

7:32

I mean, it's a field, you know, trauma studies,

7:35

especially in the 80s and 90s around the

7:37

controversy in Germany around how to write

7:39

history of the Holocaust and

7:42

of German imperialism, that

7:44

then became philosophically so interesting

7:46

among non-historians, you

7:48

know, whether it's Derrida, Paul Celan,

7:51

Delly Socks, or most importantly, for me,

7:53

Claude Lonsman. And initially,

7:55

when I finished my first book, Sensibility and

7:58

Singularity, which was on a manual Levinas

8:00

and Phenomenology, I had formulated

8:03

a new research program to

8:05

talk about mostly Cloud Lonsman,

8:08

but also other filmmakers around

8:11

trauma and the Holocaust. But

8:13

then through other readings and

8:15

some really, I won't go into it, but very

8:17

particular conversations, I

8:19

started to think about the Americas as a synonym

8:22

for trauma, right, as I had said just,

8:24

you know, a few minutes ago. And

8:27

so that redirect

8:29

in my reading actually just gave up this, you

8:31

know, substantially written project, but beginning

8:34

project on thinking trauma

8:36

after the Shoah. How do you represent?

8:39

What does it mean to live after? What does it mean that

8:41

life goes on? To shift

8:43

that to thinking through glissant about

8:46

the Middle Passage. And

8:48

for me, why I think traumatic historical

8:51

experience is important for

8:53

how we think philosophically is

8:55

because I do think that philosophy and philosophical

8:58

thinking is linked to a sense of place,

9:01

to its history and what it means to stand

9:04

on the terrain you stand on. There

9:06

was a moment where I realized that

9:08

the way I was talking about trauma

9:11

and what it means to go on, what it means to

9:13

live and what it means to think after, I

9:15

was thinking about this in a European context,

9:18

which for me is absolutely

9:20

distant. Although my family's

9:22

heritage is largely European,

9:25

family is like multi-generational Los

9:27

Angeles, right, sort of where ethnicities

9:30

of Europe go to die, right? It's about as

9:32

un-European as it gets, Los Angeles.

9:35

Yes, deeply American. I

9:37

know Adorno loved and hated that

9:39

part of LA. You know, I just had

9:41

this realization in a conversation

9:44

with Salomon Larner and Lima

9:46

Peru at a conference, this random conversation

9:49

where she just asked me, she said,

9:51

you know, are you thinking about these questions of trauma

9:53

at a real arm's length because you're

9:56

talking about a whole other

9:57

part of the world. But don't you

9:59

just...

9:59

You know, he was the one who first said to me, don't you know that

10:02

these concepts and these ideas you're interested

10:04

in around trauma are just synonyms

10:06

for the Americas? And there was that

10:09

moment where I thought, you know, for all the ways

10:11

I had talked previously, the link between thinking

10:14

in place and the historical

10:16

experience of place, I hadn't

10:18

actually thought myself

10:20

as part of a place. And that's where,

10:23

you know, I started to think about, you know, what are

10:25

those traumas of the Americas, right?

10:28

And, you know, one can't do both conquest

10:30

and the Middle Passage responsibly in a short

10:33

window. But I was like, you know, the Middle

10:35

Passage has made the

10:37

Americas what it is. And

10:39

what does it mean to think from this place?

10:42

And think with thinkers who write from and

10:44

about the Americas without

10:47

coming to terms with or thinking about the impact

10:49

on this historical experience, on

10:52

the very conditions of thinking. In

10:55

this case, we thought in the Middle Passage by its

10:57

title is a book about Edouard Vissant.

10:59

It's not a book about John Drabinski thinking

11:01

about the Americas. But

11:03

it is a book that is so deeply embedded

11:05

in a sense of place, the Caribbean, or

11:08

what he also calls the plantation world. That,

11:11

you know, the way it unfolds from the traumatic

11:13

experience of the Middle Passage is absolute

11:15

break of any sense of roots, any sense

11:18

of identity through language,

11:20

any other kinds of cultural form and

11:23

political form. It's an absolute break

11:25

with that and what it means to

11:27

both register the melancholy and

11:29

pain of that. I thought that's him as a poet

11:32

in many ways. But also the humanity

11:34

of what it means to have lived after that

11:37

for so many generations, for so many centuries.

11:40

So I think what intrigues me about Vissant's

11:43

engagement with trauma is how it's different

11:45

than the Holocaust notion of traumatic experience

11:47

of living after. But also the way that

11:49

at the center of that is the humanity

11:52

of those who lived after, right,

11:55

in the plantation, under colonialism,

11:57

and in the post-colonial moments. by

12:00

what it means to have lived after. It's just

12:02

the sustained treatment he has of that, for

12:04

me, gives this window into what it means

12:06

to think in the Americas that I think

12:09

is not singular, but it has a

12:11

depth that

12:12

stands out really a lot for me. That

12:14

idea that the Middle Passage frame

12:17

is a kind of radical rupture

12:19

seems

12:20

to give us a contrast

12:22

between Nissan and the

12:24

thinkers of the Negritude movement,

12:27

not obviously that they deny that there was

12:29

something that traumatic that happened there and that

12:31

there was a rupture, but they believe

12:33

that they could tap into some kind of authentic

12:36

spirit of Africanness

12:38

or indeed Negritude, right? And

12:41

I'm wondering whether, and so obviously, if Nissan actually

12:43

talks about this, he talks about Negritude, would

12:46

it be too simplistic to just think

12:48

of him as the other side of that coin,

12:51

just rejecting that whole project or is it

12:53

more nuanced than that, the way he's responding

12:56

to them?

12:57

As with most theoretical movements

12:59

or intellectual movements, they're

13:02

often better, I think, put in the plural, right?

13:04

That there are Negritudes. And

13:06

there are some versions of Negritudes that I

13:08

think are just so massively different than

13:11

Glissant. I think Gleopold Sanger, he

13:13

just said his vision of Negritude is so

13:15

deeply rooted in the vernacular

13:17

life of Africa. I think

13:20

that is an absolute contrast.

13:23

But I think his real interlocutor in this

13:25

is, of course, M.A. Cizer, who

13:28

with Sanger was the most important

13:30

figure in the Negritude movement. I

13:33

think there are some interesting points of breakage

13:36

there between Glissant and Cizer.

13:39

In particular, I always go back

13:41

to, and it's in the book as well, Cizer's

13:44

essay, Culture and Colonization from

13:46

the 1956 Paris Congress. I

13:49

teach that essay all the time, so if any former

13:51

student of mine is listening to this, oh, here he goes, can't

13:53

talk to the 56th Congress. To me,

13:56

the most important cultural event of the mid-century.

13:59

But in that essay, say is that

14:01

distinction Césaire makes that central to

14:04

a vision of Negritude from the Caribbean

14:06

perspective, which is that distinction

14:09

between culture and civilization.

14:12

And civilization is really where Césaire

14:15

picks up Sengor's big idea

14:17

about this big animating spirit

14:19

or force or vital energy

14:22

called Africa. But there's

14:24

also cultural difference. That doesn't

14:27

mean that Martinique and Senegal

14:29

are the same. It means that they're animated by

14:31

the same spirit. And

14:33

I think that moment that Césaire says

14:36

something about cultural difference is

14:38

where Glissant steps

14:40

in and pulls in a very different

14:42

direction, right? And he pulls

14:45

that notion of cultural difference

14:48

in the South Atlantic world, so

14:50

we call it the African Diaspora, that

14:52

he pulls it back to the archipelago

14:55

and not back to Africa as Césaire

14:57

does. And I think this is for

14:59

a couple of reasons. I think one

15:01

is existential and one is

15:03

maybe a systemological.

15:06

I think the existential for him is just

15:08

that Caribbean's are not

15:11

Africans. That Caribbean's

15:13

have to be thought on their own terms, right?

15:16

That he as a Caribbean wants to think

15:18

the Caribbean as a region,

15:21

as a ethno-racial category

15:23

or identity on its own terms and

15:25

not look to a second

15:28

or supervening explanation

15:31

of identity and experience, right, to lay

15:33

over that. That's very much Césaire's move

15:36

in that Caribbean version of Negritude. But

15:38

I think epistemologically, and this for me is,

15:40

and I'll try to be brief on this, but brevity

15:43

is not my strong suit, sorry. And

15:46

so, the difference between Césaire and

15:49

Glissant on this comes down to the

15:51

question of what does it mean to work with traces.

15:54

Traces for Césaire literally

15:57

lead the Diaspora back

15:59

to its

15:59

origin,

16:01

that traces are literally

16:03

a trail that one can cross

16:05

back across the Atlantic. We can figure it on

16:07

a map.

16:08

Like undo the middle passage as it

16:10

were,

16:11

do the middle passage in reverse. To

16:14

reverse the middle passage. And in that

16:16

way, I think, Sizzare,

16:18

certainly it's true in Notebook, that

16:21

he sees the Caribbean as a fundamentally abject

16:23

space that needs some form of

16:26

salvation, that needs some form

16:28

of metaphysical and ontological intervention

16:31

in order to save it. And

16:33

that's what that undoing the middle passage,

16:35

that moving back, versus

16:38

there it has a redemptive power. I

16:40

think it's very Christological that way. It's

16:42

like this moment of really

16:45

messianic force. But

16:48

for Glissant, traces don't

16:50

lead back to a place. They

16:52

are rather reassembled

16:55

on their own terms in the Caribbean. And that

16:57

that's the creative work of cultural

16:59

production in the Caribbean context, is

17:02

to take these traces, which for him could

17:04

never be reduced to quote unquote Africa.

17:07

Because when he talks about the plantation, one of the

17:09

things he emphasizes is

17:11

that no one on the plantation,

17:13

none of the enslaved people, spoke

17:16

the same language. So they are already

17:19

incompatible traces. But

17:22

yet out of those incompatible traces

17:24

comes the formation of

17:26

Caribbean culture, of Caribbean

17:28

languages, everything from cuisine

17:31

to religion to marriage rights

17:34

to expressive culture. Add

17:37

to that the way the Caribbean is also

17:39

the crossroads of the world generally, that

17:42

these islands, multiple languages

17:44

flow from them. In Trinidad,

17:47

the sort of everyday official

17:50

language is English. But of course

17:52

Trinidad is the Spanish name because

17:55

it's gone through multiple colonial powers

17:58

which infused that place,

18:01

like all of the islands, with all of these

18:03

other kinds of languages that come

18:05

in and they do

18:08

real work on who and what it means

18:10

to be a person. Then you add in

18:12

South Asia, the multiple parts

18:14

of Europe, as I said, the Middle East, and

18:17

at some point, we felt like, look, we've made

18:19

a world out of these traces. We've

18:21

reassembled them in the way that we've

18:23

reassembled them, and we have never reassembled

18:26

them in order to represent where we

18:28

came from centuries ago. In

18:31

that way, I think it's epistemological, because it's

18:33

like just to know what the Creole language

18:35

is or what a patois is, is to know

18:38

that it's assembled of these

18:39

fragments. Is that what

18:41

he means by creolization, that kind of assemblage

18:43

of the traces that have been left over?

18:47

There's this other thing going on, which is these

18:49

other people who write this work in praise

18:51

of creolness, creolite.

18:53

As you point out in the book, he

18:55

distinguishes between creolization

18:58

and creolite.

18:59

I guess that that has something to do with the idea

19:01

that creolization is an ongoing process

19:04

that never

19:05

reaches an end point. Is that right? Exactly,

19:08

yeah. That process

19:10

of creolization is that play

19:12

of fragments. When

19:15

I say play, I think that's really important

19:17

and part of what Glissant is trying to acknowledge

19:20

as the really profound humanity of

19:23

everyone after the Middle Passage. That

19:27

there's this play with these fragments, that they're

19:29

not just signs of melancholy. The

19:31

actual world's being made out of

19:33

these fragments. There's a famous thing in Derek

19:35

Walcott's Nobel lecture,

19:38

the Antilles' Fragments of Epic Memory,

19:41

where he says, we are just these shards

19:43

of a vase that have been reassembled.

19:47

But the vase reassembled is more

19:49

beautiful than the original. I

19:51

think that captures what Glissant is thinking

19:53

about with traces. But

19:56

that vase, that image, which

19:59

Walcott moves through. on from pretty quickly, but I

20:01

think we thought we wouldn't want the vase as

20:04

the representation or figure of that. I think

20:06

he likes that idea of assembly, but

20:08

he would want it to be broken again and reassembled

20:10

in the sense of that's what cultural

20:13

vitality in the Caribbean

20:15

has always been, this ability to

20:17

take in the other, right? And

20:21

that other interrupts and reignites

20:23

this process of mixture that creolization

20:26

is about. So in

20:28

an interview, he talked about one of the things that's

20:30

hard about spending so much time away

20:32

from Martinique and then going back is

20:35

that the everyday creole language and

20:37

everyday creole communication changes

20:39

over years. So he would have to

20:42

go back there and he would have this really old fashioned,

20:45

it's just like whatever age

20:47

you are and you go back like 30, 40 years

20:49

and you use your slang today and it's

20:51

like weirdly out of date. And

20:54

that sense of creole then as a whole

20:56

life form is in that constant sense

20:59

of movement. But the manifesto

21:02

that Jean Bernabe, Raphael Confion,

21:04

and Patrick Chamosot, the In Praise of Creolness

21:07

Manifesto, very much

21:09

articulates that creole as

21:11

an identity. And

21:13

I think they do that for political reasons.

21:16

They're like Chamosot's school days

21:18

novel is about the alienating

21:21

force of like speaking creole at home

21:23

and in your community, but then you go to school

21:25

and your school isn't French. And

21:28

so I think that In Praise of Creolness kind of is this

21:30

argument of like if we assert

21:32

creole as an identity, we are creoles,

21:35

we speak creole, our world needs to reflect

21:37

that. Schools and institutions need

21:40

to be in creole. I

21:42

think they have to have a, for political reasons, have

21:44

a very static idea of that notion

21:46

of creolization. Whereas for Glissant,

21:48

you know, he's interested in the way the Caribbean is

21:50

a model for where we are in the 21st

21:53

century in terms of constant

21:55

transcultural contact. And

21:58

I think for him, creolization is... It's like that's

22:00

what's happening everywhere, but the Caribbean

22:03

has been doing this for centuries and

22:05

is ongoing doing it. That Caribbean

22:07

music is constantly taking

22:09

in different musical forms and becoming different

22:12

because of that. And so that

22:14

sense of it being dynamic and open-ended

22:16

and chaotic really showing

22:18

in the sense is the influence of

22:20

Felix Guattari and notion of chaos

22:23

and chassephites because that sense

22:25

of open-endedness and non-closure

22:27

is essential for Gliffant, but I think for

22:29

the Creoleists a more

22:32

static idea is more politically powerful,

22:34

and so they had really emphasized that side of

22:36

this argument. It reminds me of some of the stuff

22:38

we've covered recently, so definitely the stuff

22:40

we did on cultural studies about postmodern

22:43

combination of

22:45

different influences, but also

22:47

the conversations we had with Ngoghi Watsiongo

22:50

recently. He actually mentions this phenomenon

22:53

of being made to speak the colonial

22:55

language when you go to school and not your

22:57

native language. And then if you lay

23:00

on top of that the fact that the

23:02

native language is Creole, which a

23:04

lot of people would tell you isn't even a real language,

23:07

right? So I often see very dismissively nothing

23:09

other than the kind of detritus of several languages

23:12

mashed up together. That's amazing

23:14

that Glissant turns that all around and

23:16

he values what has been disvalued.

23:20

Can I ask you about another concept and

23:22

how it relates to what we were just talking about?

23:25

This is opacity, so as in

23:27

being opaque, right? He says

23:29

something kind of amazing,

23:32

but also elusive to me in what it

23:34

means, which is that someone

23:36

might have the right to opacity.

23:39

So it sounds like you have the right to not be seen

23:41

or not seen through, the right to not be

23:43

understood maybe. What exactly

23:46

is going on there? Well,

23:47

if we think about Creolization as this

23:50

moment of transcultural

23:52

contact in which

23:54

something new is produced out of that contact,

23:57

in his later work he calls it this notion

23:59

of two bones, or like the whole world.

24:02

And so thinking about creolization as

24:04

this formation of the entire globe,

24:07

the whole world is in this process of

24:09

creolization. And there's been

24:12

criticism that I think is not unfair,

24:14

that the utopian and apolitical.

24:19

I think his notion of opacity

24:21

and the right to opacity, because right

24:24

there is a political term.

24:26

It's juridical. It's a thing you can't take

24:28

from me. And so when you think

24:31

about that transcultural contact

24:33

in a flattened space, that's

24:36

just simply creatives, musicians,

24:39

artists, poets, exchanging

24:42

forms of inspiration and words

24:45

and figures. But of course, that's

24:47

not the way the world is structured, right?

24:49

There's a sense of vulnerability and

24:52

asymmetry built into that, say

24:54

the French and the Martinican. That

24:57

sense of exchange is so deeply informed

25:00

by historical power, but also

25:02

economic and political and cultural power today.

25:05

That I think one of the things Glissant wants to hold

25:08

on to is this idea that in

25:10

those moments of contact, we,

25:13

meaning Caribbean, some speaking in his voice, we

25:16

have the right to withhold. Maybe

25:18

even better, part of what we have rights to

25:21

is that part of us that can't be seen. That

25:24

part of us that Caribbean's

25:26

know, but non-Caribbeans know. And

25:29

I think there's a very deep kind of ethic

25:31

to that, right? Part of it's politics,

25:33

I just said. But also at one point

25:36

he talks about the danger

25:38

of contact and creolization is

25:40

comprehension or understanding,

25:43

depending on how it's translated. And the

25:45

French there is comprendre. And he emphasizes

25:47

that prom to grasp, the

25:50

idea of being grasped. He says

25:52

for black people in the Americas,

25:55

this is an image of terror, right,

25:58

to be grabbed and snapped. and

26:00

pulled away and taken somewhere else. That's

26:02

what comprend means, right?

26:05

It means to literally seize upon it, to

26:07

be seized upon. And he's like,

26:10

we have to find ways of articulating

26:12

both why one would

26:15

resist total transparency

26:17

and understanding when we talk about realization

26:20

or cross-cultural contact, both

26:22

why one would assert a

26:25

sense of opacity and protectiveness, and

26:28

transparency, but also the

26:30

way it already functions that way. That way

26:33

that there is across real

26:35

differences, however we configure differences,

26:37

part of what the word difference means is, there's

26:40

a part that you just don't understand. I

26:42

mean, even just two individuals, you and I,

26:44

I can explain myself for days.

26:47

And there'll be parts of me that you don't understand. And

26:50

so the question I think for Vlissant is when

26:52

you're talking about identities and regions and

26:54

global exchanges of insight

26:57

and culture, how do we

26:59

actually assert that right, that

27:02

the right to our language is, then the right to

27:04

not be understood in a transparent sense,

27:07

but the right to be seen, heard, and engaged.

27:10

He also makes this contrast between the

27:12

thinking that is characteristic of

27:14

the archipelago and

27:17

the kind of thinking that's characteristic of the continental.

27:19

Is that a related point? So is the idea that

27:22

if

27:23

you're a continental person, there's

27:25

something you'll never quite get about what it is to

27:27

be an archipelagic, the

27:29

sword person, and vice

27:31

versa, I suppose? I think so.

27:34

But I think that the way he would tweak

27:37

that is to say that those

27:39

of the archipelago who understand

27:42

themselves as archipelagic, which is already

27:44

a serious qualification, you know, Cisaritan

27:47

was a continental thinker. But that's the

27:49

whole point of Negritude. Because he wants to identify

27:51

with Africa, which is a continent, and not, precisely

27:54

not with a Caribbean, which he thinks is debased

27:56

and needs to get back to its roots.

27:58

Yeah. And so that... root of Africa,

28:01

what he called civilization in the 56th

28:03

essay, that notion of civilization

28:05

is the root from which everything grows, right?

28:08

You know, so Glissant would say, I think, that the

28:10

archipelagically attuned thinker

28:13

of which he is the innovator,

28:16

the theoretical level, they

28:18

don't have the delusions of people

28:21

who work on a continental

28:23

model. Because I think that he

28:25

actually is committed to this idea,

28:27

especially the later in his work

28:29

we get, that there is

28:31

no such thing as actual continental thinking.

28:34

That this idea of a single root actually

28:38

is not testimony to the kinds of histories

28:40

of these places that think on a continental

28:43

model, right? That it ends up being

28:45

a fantasy. Whereas in

28:47

the Caribbean, the archipelagic is this big

28:49

traumatic event, right? In history,

28:51

the birth of the Caribbean, the genocide of indigenous

28:54

people and the repopulation of the islands

28:56

with enslaved Africans. So

28:59

that's this big historical event. One

29:02

of his interlocutors and the person

29:04

who I could, you know, have written the same book about

29:06

is Antonio Benitez Rojo, his book,

29:09

The Repeating Islands. I love

29:11

that book. I think he's a really

29:13

underappreciated thinker, really brilliant

29:15

writer, novelist and theorist. But

29:17

he has this aside that I think Glissant

29:20

picks up on in places where Benitez

29:23

Rojo says, we in the Caribbean

29:25

aren't Benitez Rojo's Cuban. In

29:27

the Caribbean are archipelagic, not continental.

29:30

We don't have roots in an ancient civilization

29:32

like Europe and ancient has with

29:35

ancient Greece. And then he sort of says that's a parenthetical.

29:38

But of course, ancient Greece itself was archipelagic,

29:41

wandering across the Middle East and Northern Africa

29:43

for their ideas. I think

29:45

that at that moment when Benitez Rojo says that,

29:48

it's like, well, everybody's archipelagic. It's

29:51

just the fantasy of the continental,

29:54

which for Glissant is a really

29:56

dangerous political move as a source of

29:58

authoritarianism. of the

30:00

most destructive forms of identity

30:03

and racial purity. In the

30:05

end, like Europe doesn't have, and Africa

30:07

doesn't have an actual continental

30:10

sense of a single root. Again,

30:12

because one of his big influences,

30:15

in addition to Benitez Rojo, is Deleuze

30:17

and Guattari. You know, this is the

30:19

origins of fascism as the single root,

30:23

right? And it's the rhizome that

30:25

actually both phenomenologically describes

30:27

the being of people, but also the being of

30:30

our historical experience. I

30:32

think Goulissant very much picks up on that,

30:34

but it's just gonna resonate differently because he's writing

30:36

that from the Caribbean as a direct description

30:39

of the archipelago, rather than Deleuze and

30:41

Guattari trying to undermine sort of May 68

30:44

style, all of these

30:46

post-war fantasies of French identity.

30:49

One thing, just stepping back from all the kind

30:51

of details of this theory, one thing that I

30:53

wanted to ask you about in closing is

30:56

I guess the way Goulissant thinks and writes,

30:58

because it seems very characteristic

31:00

of him that it's full of these images,

31:03

like archipelago, that's the one we've just been talking about,

31:05

but there's a lot of them, like the shoreline,

31:08

the mangrove, the sea,

31:10

the ship, right? The slave ship, obviously. And

31:13

on the one hand, these read kind of literally, I

31:15

mean, the middle passage is literally about slave

31:17

ships coming across the sea, but on the

31:19

other hand, they always have this additional

31:22

meaning, and I'm sort of tempted

31:24

to call them metaphors, but that might not

31:26

be right. And there's only images, right? He's

31:28

very imagistic, of course, he also writes

31:31

poetry. Is this somehow

31:34

an expression of an underlying aesthetic

31:36

theory, or is it just because he's a poet who's writing

31:38

philosophy?

31:39

That's a tough question. You know, I think

31:41

that Goulissant, not unlike a lot of Caribbean

31:44

writers, his thinking is so

31:46

intimately intertwined

31:49

with landscape that

31:53

it's always going to be

31:55

part of his writing, right? Just because

31:57

of his sensibilities, I guess.

31:59

trying to say. But also because

32:02

I think that for him the Caribbean

32:04

landscape is its own kind of epistemology,

32:07

right? That the mangrove which is

32:10

a rhizome, it has multiple roots

32:12

and it lives at the shoreline. It's not killed

32:15

by the sea. It's not killed by

32:17

salt water, right? It lives in

32:19

the brackish. It lives in the salt water.

32:21

It lives in the sand. And so

32:24

I think he just looks at that. I mean, you can call it a

32:26

poet. You can call it just a reckoning

32:28

with the way identity and landscape

32:31

are so entwined. It's like there's

32:33

a whole theory of the person right there sitting

32:37

on the beach and seeing this tree thrive,

32:40

right? Just in ways that you think it shouldn't be

32:42

able to in the way

32:44

that, so maybe it is a metaphor, in

32:47

the way that enslaved Africans never should have

32:49

been able to survive this level of trauma.

32:52

But they never should have been able to

32:54

emerge as a

32:57

cultural force in world

32:59

history, right? So

33:02

it's like the beauty of

33:04

the mangrove, the beauty of the shoreline, which

33:07

is also unforgivingly hot and

33:10

inhospitable, right? It's the paradox.

33:13

It's the paradox of being Caribbean, right?

33:15

That you should never have made it and yet

33:17

you did. Not

33:18

only made it, but thrived

33:20

and became something really beautiful. That's

33:23

great. So actually, those are all the questions we had about

33:25

Tucson. But there's one other thing I

33:27

thought we could discuss. And

33:29

actually, it goes back to identity. This

33:31

is what you were just talking about. So you're not from

33:33

the Caribbean, neither am I. In fact, we're both

33:36

white American men. I mean,

33:38

you're someone who's been working in African American

33:40

studies for a better part of two

33:42

decades. I can't say that, but I mean, I've been

33:44

doing this podcast on Africana philosophy

33:46

together with TK for years now. How

33:49

do you feel about the

33:51

position of being a white man

33:54

who's working on this kind of material?

33:56

It depends for me on how

33:58

you mean that question. Because there

34:00

are lots of ways to think about the

34:02

question. You know, it's like, you

34:04

know, you may ask it in the way of why is

34:07

John a white man talking

34:09

about Glissant when there are Afro-Caribbean

34:12

writers writing on Glissant as well. That's

34:15

the thing you asked me, and so I came to talk. So

34:18

I mean, that's one level of question. I think

34:20

you talk to everybody, hopefully, at

34:23

some point. It's such an extensive

34:25

podcast. I have to say I have a lot

34:27

of numbers then, do you, when it comes to your own story? It's starting

34:29

to feel like I've talked to absolutely everybody

34:31

I have to say. We haven't.

34:35

Then there's the question of who has the right to speak.

34:39

For me, that question of who has the

34:41

right to speak, when

34:43

people ask me about that, I

34:46

usually ask, well, what is the

34:48

kind of speaking that worries you around

34:51

racial identity, right? That me

34:53

as a white person who works with

34:55

black materials as a teacher and

34:57

scholar, what kind of speaking

34:59

would be worrisome? And usually

35:02

what people mean by that, maybe

35:05

you have something particular in mind or other people

35:07

have other things in mind, but is speaking

35:09

for other people, right? Trying to articulate

35:12

what the black experience is. And

35:14

that's not an interest to mine as

35:16

a writer. It's not within my

35:18

purview, my capacity, or

35:20

even my ethical horizon

35:23

to do such work. However,

35:26

working with texts, I think there's

35:28

a standard. How well do

35:31

I work with the text? Do I do

35:33

good intertextual work?

35:36

Do I do good comparative work? Is

35:38

the scholarship solid? Do

35:40

I do close readings? Do I take him seriously

35:43

as an intellectual by the black writer?

35:46

Maybe he's on, so I have a book I'm finishing

35:48

up on James Baldwin, same question. So

35:51

I think that's part of it, you know, that if I've

35:53

been a responsible scholar, I would

35:55

also say that, and

35:57

I'm not sure how this fits into the question, but...

36:01

Well, two things, I'd said this a little bit at the beginning.

36:03

The Middle Passage, and the way Glissant

36:06

talks about it, the Middle Passage made the Americas,

36:08

and I'm of the Americas,

36:11

and I'm not of anywhere else. And

36:13

so for me, this is something that I think we all

36:15

need to take very seriously and

36:18

think very hard about, whether we're

36:20

intellectuals or just casual people

36:22

in conversation. And

36:24

so in that way, I think

36:27

that both there's an imperative to think about

36:29

it, and that I don't know

36:31

what it would mean to say that I don't have anything

36:34

to learn from Glissant or

36:36

from a black writer about anti-black

36:38

racism in the case of Baldwin, the

36:41

Middle Passage, and the plantation in Glissant.

36:44

Obviously, Glissant's one of the great intellectuals of

36:46

the 20th century, he has everything to teach us, right?

36:50

And I think us has to be thought expansively.

36:52

I think anybody in the world, but I think especially

36:55

somebody in the Americas, it's all but the required

36:57

reading, certainly required thinking. So

37:00

I don't know if that's exactly what you had in mind. I'm curious

37:03

how you think about this, because

37:05

I don't feel defensive about it at all,

37:07

but I also feel like the precision

37:09

of the question and the particular ways

37:12

that it resonates are so different. Yeah,

37:14

that's a good point.

37:16

I mean, I think that one reason it seems

37:19

relevant here is, well, actually, we haven't

37:21

had that many interviews where I was on this

37:23

series, at least when I was talking to another

37:25

white American man, right? So

37:28

it just kind of seemed like a point to bring

37:30

it up. But I think also it is relevant to

37:32

Glissant. It goes back to this thing about opacity.

37:34

So if you think that part

37:37

of what Glissant is saying is, well, look, I

37:39

have the right to not be fully

37:42

understood, often we think

37:44

that the academic's job is to fully

37:46

understand and maybe then

37:48

convey what they fully understood to an audience

37:51

which hasn't read all the books and at

37:53

the time, we looked for in privilege of doing what

37:55

we do, you could say, well,

37:58

are we

37:59

somehow diversified?

37:59

it really provocatively are violating

38:02

the right to opacity in

38:04

the sense that we're claiming

38:06

for ourselves the ability

38:09

and the right to

38:12

do exactly what he's saying that we can't actually

38:14

do.

38:15

One thing I would say is that the way Glissant

38:17

himself understands opacity is

38:20

that opacity would be built into the text

38:22

itself. And so there

38:24

are obvious opacities. I mention

38:27

landscape. That's an abstraction

38:29

when I talk about it. When I read

38:31

other interlocutors with Glissant,

38:33

in particular the Creole,

38:36

or the little bit that Raphael Confiant

38:39

talks about, the

38:41

level of intimacy about place that goes on in that conversation is for me this

38:43

reveal of what

38:52

I already know is there, but it's an explicit

38:54

reveal of the limits of my own

38:56

reach as a scholar. Like

38:59

what I can talk about is

39:01

my relationship to the text. But

39:04

the text has a relationship to itself and

39:06

its own place in the Caribbean that

39:09

is not the same as my own approach

39:11

to it. Truth and method, I take Godamer's

39:14

articulation of the hermeneutic situation really

39:17

seriously, that the text speaks

39:19

to us, but we also speak to the text. And

39:22

that when we write and read

39:24

and understand and reflect that understanding

39:26

in our writing, it's about that event

39:29

of how we meet the text, how my voice and

39:31

the text voice meet. But

39:34

if you think about the way a voice goes

39:36

out from my body and out from the text,

39:39

that also means something lies behind it.

39:42

And so I think where this kind of thing

39:44

would get really sketchy and

39:46

really questionable is in those moments of exceeding

39:49

that limit that the text already inscribes

39:52

and that limit of the hermeneutic situation,

39:55

which for me is built into the very

39:58

event of reading.

39:59

but also reflected in the way different kinds

40:02

of scholars engage something like landscape,

40:05

something like Creole language. I'm not a Creole

40:07

speaker. I have some of the

40:09

Creole translations of Glissant's poetry,

40:11

and it's interesting to read and see what I

40:14

can and can't read. It's these experiences

40:16

of opacity and revealing.

40:19

And so for me, that play is

40:22

part of the multi-vocal

40:24

scholarship that some scholars say

40:26

different things, and that for me is a good.

40:29

But I guess in the end, what I'm most concerned about

40:32

is, am I my best scholarly self

40:34

in relation to Glissant's text, which

40:37

he has made available for us to read and think

40:39

about?

40:40

And being at my best is not at all

40:42

the imperative to understand anything and everything

40:44

in the text, but to also understand

40:47

my own limitations. I think when I

40:49

talked before about staging it in terms of the Holocaust

40:52

and the Middle Passage, that for me functions

40:54

as almost like a hermeneutical confession. It's

40:57

like, this is how I got to the project.

41:00

This is how I think and frame. This is not how

41:02

you have to think about Glissant or

41:04

how Glissant thinks about the Caribbean. This is

41:06

how I got into these texts. And so

41:08

as a text worker, I think that sense of

41:10

transparency as a writer is absolutely

41:14

essential and always being mindful

41:16

of the limits of the kinds of things that

41:18

you can and can't know, precisely

41:20

as you said, because of questions of opacity.

41:23

Okay. Well, we could probably keep talking about this at

41:25

great lengths, but it's already gone on for

41:27

a while. So I'm just going to thank

41:29

you for giving us those thoughts on this very

41:32

interesting topic, both Glissant and what we're just talking

41:34

about. John Travinsky, thanks so much for coming

41:36

on the podcast. Thank you, Peter. I

41:38

really appreciate the time. Please join me and Tike

41:41

next time as we move on in our

41:43

coverage. We're coming towards the end now, but we've still got

41:45

some interesting talks to cover here on the

41:48

history of African philosophy. Thank

41:54

you.