The West Indian speech by Édouard Glissant

This essay analyzes, based on the Martinique case, the forces at work in West Indian cultures.

Plantation system; pyramidal settlement: Africans and Hindus at the base, Europeans at the top; cultural phenomenon of creolization; languages ​​of compromise: in the French-speaking Antilles, Creole; syncretism of civilizations; insularity.
The West Indian discourse bears the mark of these cultural traits. It strives towards their elucidation. It perhaps leads to a new language. In any case, in its Creole-speaking part, it confronts the dangers of the passage from oral to written.
These dangers are exacerbated in a country like Martinique, where the powers of assimilation politics are at work. What is at stake here is, in the modern framework of "contacts of civilization", the possibility for a community to build a "composite" culture, far removed from both easy renunciations and sterilizing withdrawals.

We then arrive at a Poetics of World Relation of which, beyond the terrifying avatars of contemporary history, the Antilles would carry within them the promise, one of the promises among others. This book is therefore of literature, and of politics: of human sciences