A Prophetic Vision of the Past: Glissant's Poetic of Nonhistory | DEMOS21

The Center for Critical Democracy Studies at The American University of Paris and Professor Miranda Spieler invite you to the sixth symposium of a 7-part series on "Race, Law and Justice."

A Prophetic Vision of the Past: Glissant's Poetic of Nonhistory (Gary Wilder)

This chapter of my book manuscript, entitled “Untimely History, Unhomely Times: On the Politics of Temporality and Solidarity,” analyzes Édouard Glissant’s innovative understandings of history and critique of contemporary historiography. He developed both from the standpoint of Antillean historical experience which, in his view, anticipated a globalized future that we now inhabit. Specifically, I propose ways of understanding Glissant’s conceptions of nonhistory, tormented chronology, a painful sense of time, and a prophetic vision of the past. These temporal concepts are as important for Glissant’s thinking as his more familiar spatial concepts (e.g., creolization, wandering, detour). They are integral to his poetic politics of worldwide Relation. Glissant’s attempt to employ an Antillean optic to think history otherwise also helps us to grasp untimely temporal objects, processes, and practices that shape social life (especially in post-slavery societies), but for which conventional disciplinary history cannot easily account, or even recognize.

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