The Place of Empire: Spatial Thinking in Edouard Glissant

Following World War II, a new emphasis emerged in European philosophy on the question of space and place. Developing out of both the phenomenological and Marxist tradition, philosophers and theorists such as Gaston Bachelard, Henri Lefebvre, Guy Debord, and Martin Heidegger sought to understand both abstract space and concrete place. Critical studies have suggested that this emergence of spatial thinking reflected anxieties about hyper-modernization and the triumph of urbanism in 20^thcentury Europe. My paper suggests that decolonization constituted an important context behind the proliferation of spatial thinking, and incorporates the work of the French Caribbean novelist and critic Edouard Glissant to “provincialize” and decolonize European notions of space and place.

In his early novels, poetry, and criticism, Glissant is particularly attentive to how thinking, consciousness, and poetics are shaped by place. Influenced by both Aimé Césaire’s négritude poetics and Heidegger’s theories of being and language, Glissant traced the impact of place and landscape on subjectivity, language, consciousness, and political action in early works, including his novel La lézarde and in criticism like Soleil de la conscience and L’intention poétique. Reflecting on histories of slavery and colonialism, Glissant posed the concept of the “planetary” against the “false universalism” of both European philosophy and empire, articulating a theory of space and place that revised both Heidegger’s organic approach and Lefebvre’s abstract theories. My paper argues that it was precisely Glissant’s thinking through the colonial context that equipped him to develop a spatial philosophy that looked beyond Europe and European history to think the whole world.