Edouard Glissant: a Poetics of resistance, Sam Coombes
'A single word captures that project's implication: freedom' - Neil Roberts, president of the Caribbean Philosophical Association
Édouard Glissant, a French philosopher, poet and author from Martinique, was a leading voice in debates centering on the postcolonial condition and on the present and future of globalisation. Prolific as both a theorist and a literary author, Glissant started his career as a contemporary of Frantz Fanon (The Wretched of the earth, 1961) in the early days of francophone postcolonial thought. In the latter part of his career Glissant's vision pushed beyond the boundaries of postcolonialism to encompass the contemporary phenomenon of globalisation. Sam Coombes offers a detailed analysis of Glissant's thought in A Poetics of resistance, setting out the reasons why Glissant's vision for a world of intercultural interaction both reflects but also seeks to provide a correction to some of the leading tendencies commonly associated with contemporary theory today.
Published in July 2018, this book aims to explore Glissant's thoughts on globalisation and postcolonialism. To do so, Sam Coombes included his own translated citations of Glissant's works. As a number of Glissant's theoretical works from the last twenty years have not been yet translated into English, Coombes also acted as a translator during the writing process of this book.
Edouard Glissant, a Poetics of resistance, is published by Bloomsbury.
Sam Coombes is Senior Lecturer and member of the Department of European Languages and Cultures at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Sam Coombes's educational and research background lies in political, philosophical, sociological and literary studies. Since the publication of his monograph The Early Sartre and Marxism (Lang, 2008, pp.330) his research focus has been in the fields of comparative anglophone-francophone postcolonial studies, British and French cultural studies, and Globalisation studies. He is a founding member of the international research network devoted to diasporic studies.
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