Edouard Glissant

Edouard Glissant is a writer, Poète and Essayiste French, born the September 21st 1928 with Sainte-Marie, in Martinique.

Biography

Holder of a arts Doctorate , it publishes his first works after studies in Ethnographie with the Musée of the Man, history and Philosophie to the Sorbonne. With the departure adhering to the theses Négritude, it works out thereafter the concept of Antillanité and Créolisation or sometimes even of Créolitude. Then near to the theses of Frantz Fanon, It founds, accompanied by Paul Niger, in 1961 the antillo-Guianese Front of independence obedience, then separatist, which is worth to him a prohibition of stay of 1959 with 1965 on its native island for separatism. He is signatory of the Manifeste of the 121 in 1960. Some of its works, the such West-Indian Discours remain very marked by its engagement anticolonialist. He returns in Martinique in 1965 and founds there the Institut inhabitant of Martinique of studies, like Acoma , a periodical in social sciences. Noticed for its work, it becomes of 1982 to 1988, the director of the mail of UNESCO. He currently lives with New York where, since 1995, he is “Distinguished Professor” in French literature, with the City University off New York.

Its reflections on the West-Indian identity inspired a generation of young West-Indian writers around the concepts of Créolisation and antillanity, of which Patrick Chamoiseau, Ernest Pépin or Raphaël Confiant. This antillanity would be founded on the concept of identity multiple, or identity rhizome, open on the world and the comparison of the cultures. Vis-a-vis the binary mode of the speeches of the négritude (deployed by Aime Césaire in Martinique, by Leon Gontran Damas in Guyana, by Guy Tirolien in Guadeloupe) and of the assimilation, it defines gladly badly liking a third way. Writer militant, it seeks to define a poetic and identity approach for the survival of the people within universalization through the concept of mondiality. Its influence on the policy inhabitant of Martinique remains certain in particular in the independence mediums or ecologists.

In January 2006, Edouard Glissant saw himself entrusting by the president Jacques Chirac the presidency of a mission for the creation of a National center devoted to the draft and slavery.

In 2007, it creates the institute of the all-world.

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