Manifestos

The collected manifestos of Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau: for a postcolonial humanism embodying a "unity-diversity."

Manifestos, written in part in the aftermath of Barack Obama’s election in 2008, resonates with the current context of divided identities and criticisms of multiculturalism in the US, Europe, and beyond. The individual texts engage with concrete historical and political moments with respect to French, Caribbean, and North American recent history. These manifestos engage with the sociopolitical aspects of climate catastrophe, resource extraction, and toxicity, especially in the specificity of the Caribbean region and French neocolonialism in its overseas territories.

Across the collection, Glissant and Chamoiseau engage with key themes articulated through their poetic vocabulary, including Relation, globalization, globality (mondialité), anti-universalism, métissage, the tout-monde ("whole-world") and the tout-vivant ("all-living," including the relationship of humans to each other and "nature"), créolité and the creolization of the world, and the liberation from community assignations in response to individualism and neoliberal societies. These themes resonate with the planetary, as they work in response to contemporary forms of (economic) globalization, western capitalism, identity-politics, and urban, digital, and cosmic ecosystems, as well as the role of the poet-writer.

A distinguishing feature of this publication is its interventional aspect, one that prioritizes engaged scholarship and practice in response to the urgencies of planetary crisis. Despite being penned between 2000 and 2009, none of these manifestos have lost their urgency or topicality, each demonstrating the efficacy of the poetic in the face of political subject matter and purpose.