Sun of Consciousness

Édouard Glissant (1928-2011) , long recognized in the French and francophone world as one of the greatest writers and thinkers of the twentieth century, is increasingly attracting attention from English-speaking readers. Born in Martinique in 1928, influenced by poet/politician Aimé Césaire, and educated at the Sorbonne in Paris, Édouard Glissant emerged as one of the most influential postcolonial theorists, novelists, playwrights, and poets not only in the Caribbean but also in contemporary French literature. He was twice a finalist for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He authored many novels, books of poems, and a sequence of books on poetics, including developing the concept of a “relational poetics,” which laid the groundwork for the “créolité” movement, fueled by the understanding that Caribbean culture and identity are the positive products of a complex and multiple set of local historical circumstances. An exhibition based on his philosophical writings was presented at the Perez Art Museum in Miami in 2015. At his death, he was a Distinguished Professor of French at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and lived in New York City, Paris, and Martinique.Nathanaël, author of 16 books, translates between French and English.

“As a writer of the African Diaspora, of the Carribean, and of the world, Glissant offers such braiding and breaking as a method that shows places of slippage, kinks that retrace the love, displacement, renewal, and violence inherent in the act of writing”—Rachel Ellis Neyra, Obsidian“Betsy Wing has made a fine job of rendering the specificities of Glissant's poetic vocabulary. For this poet's prose, and French poet's prose, written in an idiom which is felt as so foreign to English that it can evoke reactions of exasperation and impatience. . . . Glissant's influence on the next, third, generation of francophone writers, and not just Martinican writers, can hardly be overstated."—Times Literary Supplement"How rewarding to read a text in the last moments of this century that has absorbed quantum physics, jazz, modernist poetics, mathematics, and all for the sake of adding to the discourse of our planetary reality. "—Zoe Anglesey, Multicultural Review"Glissant’s assertions about poetry and language anticipate today’s most urgent and penetrating verse, such that Sun of Consciousness makes for a most timely text for study."—Ron Slate, On the Seawall