The Cérisy International Cultural Center [Centre culturel internationale de Cérisy] presents a nine-day colloquium entitled « Édouard Glissant, La Relation Mondiale » from August 2 to 11, 2022. This colloquium is organized by Sam COOMBES, Tiphaine SAMOYAULT, and Christian UWE with the help of Sylvie and Mathieu GLISSANT.

Description/Topic: Faithful to the idea that places create us, Édouard Glissant made the Caribbean the site of an experience allowing us to think simultaneously about the specificity of Antillean history and the subterranean links that connect it to the world. With the concepts of creolization, trace, or archipelagic thought, the Caribbean experience and imagination thwart the trap of a thought “blind to the game of the world” to precisely inscribe the possibility of a world-history [histoire-monde]. Poetic, romantic, theatrical, critical, but also philosophical, political, and very transversal in the spaces and the questions it addresses, the work finds itself called upon, beyond the literary space, in a plurality of fields. While this has been of interest to the humanities for several years, many echoes are heard outside the academic field: in the arts, ecology, minority rights…from Japan to Mexico, as evidenced by recent translations, a planetary extension of his ideas has developed. It is that the work of Édouard Glissant does its best to think about the world, or rather what he calls, since 1981 and Le Discours antillais, “world relation” [la Relation mondiale].

Wishing to establish a place of critical debate open to all disciplines, this symposium devoted to the poet and thinker of the Relation intends to offer, ten years after his death, the opportunity to carefully read his work and to question with a new eye the principles and horizons of his poetics to trace the perspectives that this imaginary opens up in an unknown world. For a long time (almost a decade), this colloquium, open to those who are interested in these questions, extends this invitation to an adventure of thought which will undoubtedly be memorable, insofar as Glissant can help us to understand contemporary issues and to dealing with challenges posed to the community, its connections, ecology, and new ways of telling history. Alongside conferences and round tables followed by debates, there will also be translation workshops, performances, or readings of texts (by Glissant, and also by other writers present).

See Complete program here. To sign up, visit https://cerisy-colloques.fr/edouardglissant2022/