Description
Book SynopsisSoleil de la Conscience (Sun of Consciousness) was Martinican philosopher Édouard Glissant’s first published work, and opened the Poétique (Poetics) strain of his oeuvre. This book-length essay, which is characterized by its exploratory, intimate character, announces Glissants concerns with créolisation (creolization), mondialité (worldliness, as against globalization), or opacité (opacity) and inscribes in this work a refusal of colonialism and of inverted exoticism. The sense of estrangement experienced by the author who arrives as a “foreigner” in a country to which he is bound by “the first page of his passport” is the author’s principal preoccupation. By positioning himself as both different and same, Glissant opens a space for the writing of a(nother) history: that of the Caribbean.
Trade Review“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
